My host for my ChinaJapan.org site had a crash and had no functional backups. They handled the whole thing with complete incompetence which I will be describing at major hosting forums to warn future customers. I’m going to be moving the site to another host where I am hosting Muninn and FrogInAWell along with numerous other projects. I have fairly recent backups so I think I can get everything back up.

Che and Sponheim

By the time I post this to the internet, the Norwegian Storting elections will be over. However, one amusing thing about the last days of the election campaign. The Left party, or Venstre, was campaigning in downtown Stavanger on Friday, my last day at the library. The Left party is actually one of the non-socialists (Norwegian parties are traditionally but somewhat misleadingly divided into socialist and non-socialist camps) and are in the current (relatively) conservative coalition. However, they had some interesting campaign posters which were appealing to young voters. They depicted that famous image of Che Guevera (sp?), the Communist revolutionary leader on a red background. However, instead of Che’s face, they put Lars Sponheim, the leader of the Venstre party.

This was cute but somewhat surprising given the Høyre (Right party, their coalition ally) party’s recent ineffective attack on the Socialistic Left or SV party by associating them closely with Communist regimes and their atrocities. However, I suspect the irony of the poster escapes the notice of most.

And yet imagine if you will, the same campaign poster, approved by the party in the United States. While the Left party in Norway is a very moderate centrist party in comparison to the Republicans, imagine if you will some moderate republican putting their face on a Che poster in a effort to appeal to young voters. It just wouldn’t happen, right?

Norwegian Television Debate

VG, one of the major Norwegian newspapers (although it has always looked like a tabloid to me) has a strange way of measuring up the political debate between the party leaders in its Sunday, Sept. 11th issue. It first give all the participants of the debates a grade from 1 to 6 (six being best). It gave a 5 to Jens Stoltenberg (Labor party) and Dagfinn Høybråten (Christian Democrats) and 4s to everyone else except the right-wing Progress party (3 points) and the marginal Coast Party (2 points). Then it marked each one along a scale showing whether they were on the offense or defense in the debate. The highest “offense” ratings went to the hard left-wing Red Alliance, Socialist Left and Labor party, basically the left spectrum of Norwegian politics. Then, most bizarrely, it marked the mood of each participant with happy and sad faces on a scale. The most happy were apparently the Center party and Progress Party, with the most miserable being the Right party (who are set to lose big in this election) and the Coast party.

Critique of Domination

Roger Cohen had a good editorial in the Sept. 10-11 Int. Herald Tribune I got in the airport today where he discusses the political split on discussing looting during a crisis like the Katrina hurricane. He notes that conservatives are taking a hard line “zero tolerance” for looting (even those stealing food and water) but notes sardonically that Rumsfeld once said “While no one can condone looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of oppression.” Of course, he was referring to Iraq, which led Cohen to say that Rumsfeld and conservatives think that “A little mayhem in Mesopotamia was just fine” as long as it wasn’t within the US.

However, I found most memorable a quote from a French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut in the article. He was deeply critical of any sympathy towards looters, who he described as having a “revolting reaction.” Now, I strongly disagree with his take on the looting question and find myself having no moral opposition to any looting for food and essentials in a crisis situation. However, he then added a quote which sums up one of my biggest problems with recent critical theory.

While I’m very much influenced by a lot of recent critical theory out there, especially those important in historical research, I’m worried about the kind of moral paralysis I feel can result from some approaches suggested by things like postcolonial theory and postmodern critiques of society. Finkielkraut sums this up very nicely into one line, “It’s funny, our dominant ideology is a critique of domination in all its forms.”

Though the nasty smelling and polluted streets of Seoul will fill your nostrils alternatively with the scent of sewage, tobacco, and car exhaust, Seoul subways are also far cleaner than New York’s smelly and dirty subways, where conductors occasionally yell at passengers, make bizarrely grumpy announcements, and the summer months are plagued by cars whose air conditioning is broken. The one thing that we can all appreciate about the New York subway is the fact that they very conveniently run 24 hours.

Since I have only been in Korea for a week so I shouldn’t be too confident about my observations but two things I have noticed so far about traffic rules: First, as if the pollution isn’t bad enough, scooters and motorcycles often drive on the pavement. This is perhaps partly because many of the streets make it difficult for them to cross over to the direction they want to drive. They billow out foul smelling exhaust from their tailpipes and I’m not the only one to cough and hack as they drive past. The scooter exhaust mixes with the smoke that flows out from street venders selling various kinds of orange colored food. In Taipei I remember them sticking on the road mostly, often in the hundreds as they collect at intersections. Some of the streets in central Taipei even have “no scooter” streets (such as the one near the central train station).

Secondly, red lights seem to be optional in Seoul when they are by crosswalks. On many occasion I have been happily crossing the street at a crosswalk with a green man showing (and a red light for cars) and the cars will drive by me (albeit somewhat more slowly) both in front and behind. I know they must be annoyed at waiting for pedestrians, but this can’t be a very safe practice. I like to be able to cross crosswalks when the man is green without having to be too paranoid about being run over.

It was thus amusing to me to find a small Chinese-run “Japanese bakery” here in Cambridge, MA (in Porter Square). With the exception of a few unfamiliar items, however, it did, in fact, sell authentically “Japanese Scandinavian” bakery products.

Originally 着 was just a different way of writing the character 著. Now 著 is mostly written only for the pronunciation zhù, and 着 is written for the other pronunciations; but sometimes 著 is still used rather than 着 among full form characters, regardless of the pronunciation.
 着 seems to have more pronunciations and meanings than any other Chinese character. Don’t be discouraged. Even Chinese people can’t always get it straight, especially the distinction between 着 zháo and 着 zhuó. For example, a friend of mine says 着陆 as zháolù though the dictionaries say zhuólù. The dictionaries disagree on whether 着 in 不着边际 (‘not to the point’) should be zháo or zhuó. On the other hand, the distinction between 着 zhe and 着 zháo really is important.

The father held the infant near the glass of the aquarium and moved it here and there so that it might get a good look at the passing fish inside. I noted with great curiosity that the infant wasn’t the least bit interested in the fish. No matter where the father moved his child, it (he? she?) would focus its attention on the stream of bubbles in the center, and especially the top of this stream where the bursting of the bubbles created that bright star-like shape when viewed from an angle below the water.

The couple left after only a minute or two, but I kept staring at the aquarium. At first I felt sorry for the father who totally failed to get his infant to recognize the fact that various colorful living creatures were swimming about in the glass box full of water. However, when I actually took the time to look closely at the stream of bubbles, I shared, if only for a moment, that infant’s sense of delight and enchantment. I would go so far as to say that it pretty much made my day. It made me remember a line from Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, “It is through children that the soul is cured.”

What is so interesting about fish anyways?

Our instructor then made the most remarkable claim, “This character was invented by the Koreans, and doesn’t exist in any other language.” That is an interesting thing to say about a character which is the most frequently used character in the Chinese language. In Japanese, it is also very often used, especially in the creation of adjectives.

The character 的 is the #1 most frequent character in Chinese, according to the two frequency lists found in James Dew’s 6000 Chinese Words: A Vocabulary Frequency Handbook and from an old 1980 sample it is again #1 with 83,0302 hits out of a total sample size of 21,629,376 (I found this in Yin Binyong’s Modern Chinese Characters).

Anyways, my instructor backed off when two of us mentioned that the Chinese and Japanese languages also use the character but he still claimed that, “The Koreans invented the character, and perhaps the Chinese imported it.” That is really interesting! There are certainly lots of Chinese characters that the Japanese invented (国字 or 和製漢字) See the large and small online dictionaries of such characters for some examples. So surely there are Chinese characters that the Koreans invented?

First thing I did was check my two classical Chinese dictionaries (古汉语常用字字典 and 古代汉语词典) neither of which have an entry for 的 with the most common modern pronunciation of “de” but do have entries for “di” which is used, among other things in the character’s other meaning of “target” (まと in Japanese). Both dictionaries list it, with a number of different meanings, including 明，鲜明, which is found in Confucian classics like the Doctrine of the Mean and the Book of Rites. There are also some half a dozen other definitions and their references in various classics. Similar list in the massive 辞海 dictionary. In the classical Japanese 古語辞典 I have there are two entries which include 的：的然 (found in 太平記) and 的伝 (found in in some book I can’t even write). Its meaning as target is also listed.

Also by searching for 的 in the 大辞林 dictionary at Asahi.com, all of the major definitions, including its primary use in Japanese for creating adjectives (「名詞およびそれに準ずる語に付いて、形容動詞の語幹をつくる」) are said to have come from sayings found in Song and Yuan (Mongols) period China, later to develop its use as the english “-tic” in the Meiji period. (「もと中国、宋・元の俗語で「の」の意味を表す助辞であったものを、明治以降、英語の -tic を有する形容詞の訳語に用いたことに始まる」） Now we are getting close to a claim that the Japanese took one use of it from Chinese (the use which corresponds to の which is now the most common use of it in Chinese) and then adopted this use of it to form the “-tic” of English in the Meiji period. If this is true, we are getting closer to a claim that the Japanese introduced it to Korea in or after the Meiji period…as they did hundreds of other nouns like phone, rights, and countless other compounds. Unless, of course, the Koreans did the same independently.

Well, I haven’t looked into any of the library’s professional dictionaries, since I just wanted a short 1 hour break from my history reading and made use of what I had on the shelf and online. But it seems likely that the character was not invented by the Koreans, and instead of being imported from Korea, its adjectival use may have been imported by Korea from Japan. Anyone know for sure what the story on this is?

Well, whatever the case is, I’m still interested in finding out about Chinese characters that the Koreans did invent. The Chinese wikipedia mentions the fact that the Koreans made some of their own characters in the entry for 韓文漢字. Then in the “notes” of the Japanese entry for the same, I found reference to a few of these characters and also a reference by someone to something called 吏読 (which doesn’t look like new Chinese characters when I found its definition in 大辞林:「ハングルがつくられる以前に朝鮮で行われた、漢字の音訓による朝鮮語の表記法の総称。狭義には、朝鮮語の構文に合わせて書き下ろした、漢文の漢字語に添える朝鮮語の部分の表記をいう。新羅の神文王の時に薛総(せつそう)の創案したものといわれ、公文書をはじめ金石文・歌謡の記述などにも用いられた。りとう。」)

Does anyone who can really read Korean know where we might find a list of the characters that Korea really did create? Apparently one of these characters is 돌(乭).

Update:There is a site where you can view all the characters which were created in Korea here. Thanks to Anton for emailing me this link.

Basically you type in the VoodooPad ($20, or free Lite version) notebook and create a new document by putting two words together and making it a “link” which automatically creates a blank document in VoodooPad. You can then create more links within that document to new documents and so on. The new documents can open in a new window or in the same window (kinda like a document “browser”). You can also drag web links into the pad (which open a browser when you click on them) or files (which open the file when you click on its link). I first found this useful when preparing for my PhD applications. I made a “link” for “PHDNotes” and then a link for each school I was looking into, then each professor, department, or various categories of information about the application process. It was then easy to add tons of information within any of these while still having it all kind of “naturally” organized like a Wiki website might be. Of course, you can search through all your documents at once and export data in various formats. For a person like me, either I dump stuff like this in dozens of files and never remember what goes where, or I tend to dump everything into one file which is really a pain to sift through.

「日本に、京都があってよかった。こころの風景、うつくしい時間にこだわった、千二百余年。時代をこえて、永遠をつなぐ風がこの町を駆け抜ける。平安をもとめつづけるこの都で、風に吹かれて出会うのは、”知らなかったワタシ”だったりする。」

I am so glad Japan has this place called Kyoto. It is a landscape of the spirit that, for some thousand and two hundred years has devoted itself to spending time surrounded by beauty. Spanning the ages, a wind bound to eternity runs through this town. In this [ancient] capital that always yearned for peace (Heian) I think I might have found, blowing in the wind, “A Me that I have never known.”

Feel free to correct my translation, but if it seems a little on the cheesy side, I assure you it was no less so in the original. Sayaka noticed that the “Heian” is probably deliberately used with two meanings, peace (which is a very important component of Japan’s national identity in the postwar period), and as the name for the period when the capital was moved to Kyoto and also representative of its glory days.

This advertisements almost always feature a smiling face of a youthful Japanese woman or man, smiling happily and staring off into the sky in some direction (not entirely dissimilar to Chinese and North Korean political posters, or this recent Japanese campaign to promote the purchase of government bonds).

This kind of poster, we should note, is a slight twist on the average travel advertisement. You might go to Disneyland to discover “fun and adventure,” to Hawaii or Niagara Falls to discover “love and romance”, to the US mid-west to discover “the real America” and you might even go to Yoga lessons to discover “yourself” in the metaphysical sense. These advertisements, however, are appealing to Japanese, I believe, in the same way as the “losing the soul of Japan” advertisements do. They are urging Japanese to cast off their decadent and lifeless modern shells in order to reconnect with that beautiful and pure Japanese core inside. The Japanese just need to “find themselves” again. Ultimately, however, “finding themselves,” which is surely a prominent theme found in many countries around world that suffer from various “crises of modernity” often means returning to an idealized past. Whether it is Gandhi returning to an idealized India early Chinese anti-Manchu nationalists turning to the glory days of “Han” rule, there is nothing about this phenomenon unique to Japan.

It does, however, help explain how amazingly positive Japanese reactions have been to a movie like “The Last Samurai.” Most of the Japanese I have spoken to about this movie, especially older men, love that movie. The samurai prancing about mountain villages like an idyllic Native American community, the celebration of “Bushido values” without a single thought to what silliness this led to in modern times (not to mention pre-modern times), and of course, there is the maniacal devotion to the emperor—presumably all these things are a part of that noble old Japan, no matter what the reality was.

No, put that way, most people in Japan today would respond with disgust, but it brings into focus the problem with designating the past, not the least in the case of Japan, as the origin of virtue and the only legitimate source of identity.

In France, the French eat mainly French food, in China they eat mainly Chinese food. This is a pretty obvious fact (当たり前) but in each country they primarily eat that country’s food. And yet, in Japan’s case, we are importing all kinds of food from many different foreign lands and eating all kinds of different things. There isn’t any other country which has made such a mess of (バラバラになった) even their own dietary habits (自分たちの主食までも).

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

除加強偽軍力外，日軍與汪政權也加緊建軍，其中重點是改遍原有偽軍，組建新軍與收遍受到日軍和共軍雙重壓迫的國府雜牌正規軍。 (劉熙明 偽軍－強權競逐下的卒子 1937-1949)

“In addition to strengthening puppet forces, the Japanese military and the Wang Jingwei regime also sped up the building of military forces, some important elements of which were the reorganizing of existing puppet military forces, the establishment of new units and the organization of units put together from ragtag Nationalist government troops that had been attacked by Japanese and Communist forces.” (Zhang Ximing, The Puppet Army – Pawns in the Struggle for Power 1937-1949)

Technically, there was also another book equally near at hand, from which I could have extracted the following marginally less interesting fifth sentence on page 23:

“He received as a reward the rank of marshal but struggled incessantly against efforts on the part of the Peking government to undermine his authority in Shansi.” (Gillin, Donald. Warlord: Yen Hsi-shan in Shansi Province 1911-1949)

Wonderful a Machine
Continuing having simple and delicate feeling – I think that the big difference between this and other things is continuing having simple and delicate feeling. It is how original custom-made spirits budded.
As wonderful a machine as that exists only in this city all over the world.

This one is more sinister, but introduces us to the mysterious Camerd (camera?):

Everyday objects become devices to trigger confusion. These metaphorical tricksters keep mutating like viral atrocities. I work with a large format camerd and between the black hood, the camerd and subject there are demons of dreams. A visual pun, a mnemonic devices, a story by the model perhaps will bring manifestations betond any one identity. I am just a tool of a bigger force. People, objects and ideas come my way. I become a caretaker of sorts I would like for people to say that I’m taking good care. It’s based on some uncommon love I discovered with some deaths.

This one describes our Gramscian world:

Stable Mainstream Group
A history of mutual trust talks about theaccuracy of the product

This new addition to my collection begs freedom for the subject and probes some of the theories of the postmodern linguistic turn, which it surely matches in difficulty to understand (it may indeed be a modified quotation from something, does anyone recognize it?):

Keep Things From Taking Over One’s Life
Metalinguistic ontological distinctions
The general and specific object distinction
Both general and specific objects are abstract generalizations over utterances or texts. General objects represent supersets of specific sets.
The lexical and virtual object distinction
Most specific objects are lexicalised, i.e. known from some previous process of construction and stored, or non-lexicalised, i.e. virtual objects, not yet constructed in actual use and afterwards stored.

Finally, this new long-sleeve addition to my collection is a very happy celebration of hobbies and urges us to find people having the same interests. I wonder if this author’s hobby is making strange T-shirts?

Find Someone Who Likes the Same Stuff
Are there any vidoes you’d recommend?
Watching a movie I saw when I was a student brings back a lot of memories about that time.
There used to be a lot of theaters that played classic movies.
That last scene was so sad, I just couldn’t stop the tears from falling.
I turned my hobby into a career / I’ve met lots of people through this hobby.
I’m putting my hobby to practical use.
Through a hobby you can meet hundreds of (new) people a year.
This song gave me goose bumps the first time I heard it.

They say they don’t
use computer
graphics. So how did they
film that final scene?
004/8/27.taste
1975.taste
…

You sure do have a lot of hobbies.
You really have diverse tastes, don’t you?
Share Common Tastes
Pleasant Hobby

One of my favorite sweaters has been packed away in a box. It begins with the profound quote which I wish I could pin at the top of my Inbox:

Mail Comes on the Contrary