Month: February 2004

Oya Sôichi Library

I had a very productive day. I went to the Oya Sôichi Library and found an article I have been looking for now for some time. It is an article written by Kawashima Yoshiko about her own life, including her intelligence work, published in the September 1933 issue of 婦人公論. The library, which is an archive of magazines and journals in modern Japan, was fantastic but extremely expensive for photocopies. I got the article, which helps feed the myths about her, created in part by the novel 『男装の麗人』（”A Beauty in Male Attire”). I shall have occasion to write much more about her interesting case later.

The article I found today may no longer be protected by copyright. If I can confirm this I will put the whole thing online, and if I get around to it, I’ll translate it to English for inclusion on a website I will be creating about this fascinating woman and the many representations of her in Japan and China. I will also fix that retarted Wikipedia entry about her that I linked her name to above. I’ll keep to web stuff, however, because there are already two scholars in the US working on her (in addition to the legions of journalists, fans, and others who have studied her in Japan). Dan Shao, a former student of Joshua Fogel, has written a dissertation on her and is publishing a chapter on her in a soon to be released book on Manchukuo, and Barbara Brooks is also apparently working on her.

Dean

In my posting Dean against the Incombent I was extremely confident Dean was going to sail through the primaries and face a tough battle against Bush. After Dean’s failure to win a state so far, and especially his losing Washington, it looks like I was completely off the mark. He did amazing things for politics in the US and I think he would have brought an excited new army of voters into the election. We can now only hope that Kerry will be able to generate some of the same passion in the electorate that Dean has. To be honest, I’m very depressed about this election…

The Blogosphere as a Graduate Seminar

Lago, on the blog Rational Ignorance brought up an issue in response to a blog entry by Joi Ito (Joi’s response) that I think is very important for the academic world to chew on. The net, in many respects, reproduces, in a warped and tilted fashion, the offline state of debate on almost any issue. This includes the more personal and casual reproduction of knowledge about any given issue through the commentary of blog writers like Joi, and also the cooperative and more explicit attempts to reproduce knowledge online in environments like a Wiki. I’ll be blogging more about Wikis when I get some notes in order, but for now, what I want to point out is that I think there are three central problems we face:

1) No matter how much wonderful stuff there is online, the vast majority of empirical data on just about anything is still offline. This immediately limits the ability of online postings on issues to mirror offline debates, especially in fields like mine (East Asian history), when many posters simply don’t have access to the materials. Some, like myself, hope to spend their careers getting lots of fascinating offline material online and encouraging everyone to get their ideas and research online (hopefully released for free and open exchange). Some, however, might argue that there is no compelling reason to transfer the “offline” world of knowledge to the net and that we need to give up the myth of knowledge being a cumulative enterprise.

2) The blogosphere has not only radically reduced the cost and difficulty of sharing your ideas with the web-accessing world, it has radically accelerated the speed of exchange in a global (in so far as the rich, mostly western and English-speaking blogging world can be called that) conversation called the internet. If academics, obsessed by peer review, imagine a future world in which the traditional academic discourse would simply shift online in the form of searchable journal databases and archives of various kinds, I believe they have underestimated the changes that the medium of the blog, the online forum, the wiki, and technologies like it can potentially have even on “academic” discourse in the long term. In other words, when Lago initially complains in his posting that some list of works should have been read before a particular post was made, this frustration can actually be expressed in two ways: a) the vast collection of research on a particular issue is not necessarily ignored, it is often simply not ready-at-hand in the form of a google search or some free bookmarked database. b) Even if we have access to a vast amount of material online, we (and this includes many scholars who blog too) are often compelled, out of either laziness or busyness, to post our thoughts without doing all the background research or consulting our notes. This is what Lago calls the lack of “academic rigor”.

I believe that those of us with academic aspirations must realize that a blog is not an online version of the world of academic journals. For those of us prowling the halls of the ivory labyrinth, the blogosphere might be more accurately described as the online version of a graduate seminar: Sometimes we back up our comments (postings) with logical arguments, vaguely remembered data, or a few scribbled points from our notebooks. Other times, well – other times we just pull it out of our ass.

3) The third issue is related to network effects and hegemonies in ideas. I really don’t want to “raise my hand” in this “graduate seminar” of a blogosphere to comment on this until I have read a lot more.

Refugee Relief in Wartime Shanghai

I got to be tea lady again for the Sino-Japanese history research society (日中関係史研究会) which my professor Hirano helps run. It is great opportunity because in exchange for pouring tea I get to hear some interesting presentations on the Sino-Japanese war that usually only a small group of professors get to attend. The group is the Japanese chapter of the Joint Study of the Sino-Japanese War project.

Today’s presentation was by 小浜正子, a professor at 鳴門教育大学 talking about refugee relief in wartime Shanghai. Her presentation was filled with detailed statistics on relief efforts, fund raising, refugee flows, and the various organizations who did the work. A lot of her materials were from Red Cross records, the popular Shanghai newspaper 申報 and records from 上海市档案馆. She also discussed a Japanese book I’m going to have to look at: 『日中戦争期の上海』edited by the 日本上海史研究会. Because her essay, full of rich empirical material will probably be published in a year or two I don’t want to go into her presentation in detail, but the interesting discussion following the presentation often revolved around whether or not you could treat the highly successful fund raising campaigns for refugees as part of an outpouring of anti-Japanese resistance sentiment. I found one of the slogans she dug up as quite telling: 不救難民不能談救國 (If we don’t save the refugees, how can we save the country?) I think the phrase is playing on one of the popular slogans during the war of the resistance: 抗日救國 (Resist Japan, Save the Country).

The Tokyo Trials and International Criminal Law

I attended the DIJ forum on Thursday. The presentation, 「国際刑法からみた東京裁判」 was in Japanese and given by a young German scholar Philipp Osten.

Since he was looking at the Tokyo War Crimes trials from a legal perspective, I didn’t expect the talk or the discussion to get that controversial and that he would most likely delve into lots of legal details I wouldn’t understand. Instead, his talk, which was delivered in beautifully fluent Japanese, was mostly a general overview which did get into the more central controversies of the trials during discussion.

He looked at three categories of crimes covered in the trials, the “conventional war crimes” (通例の戦争犯罪) which makes up the B and C class criminals who were tried all over Asia, the “crimes against humanity” (人道に対する罪) and “crimes against peace” (平和に対する罪). He seemed to be most interested in the last of these categories.

The first category is covered by treaties like the Geneva and Hague conventions. The latter two always become an issue when looking at the postwar war crime trials (and incidentally, also for the treason trials that I have been researching lately in China) because the charges brought against the accused were based on laws that didn’t exist when they committed the acts (a violation of the old legal principle of “nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege“). This is also a problem in the case of trying Chinese “traitors” who cooperated with the Japanese after the war. Many of the treason or 漢奸 laws were made from scratch during or after the war with Japan. The war crimes trials, the treason trials, and many other early postwar events like it have been recently grouped and studied as examples of “political retribution“. My own interest in the study of treason and collaboration, and especially how it figures into postwar political and historical discourse can be said to fit under this category…
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Synching Japanese Sony Clie with iCal on a Mac

Skip reading this unless you need help synching your Clie with iCal. I bought a used Clie PEG-T650C at the used PDA shop in Akihabara. Beautiful model, and doesn’t have the silly keyboard on newer models. Unfortunately, I could only synch with my mac, and only with Palm Desktop when I set OS X to use Japanese as the primary language. I bought the “missing Synch” program thinking that would help but to no avail. Tonight, however, I gave it another try and it worked great so I wanted to pass on the simple procedure here…
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Swallowtail Butterfly

Shaviro at The Pinocchio Theory has posted an entry about the movie Swallowtail Butterfly directed by Iwai Shunji. The movie is one of my favorites for a number of reasons. It is, as Shaviro notes, a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic movie set in Japan (Yen town) and it is full of ambiguous identities. Shaviro concludes with, “The film begins and (almost) ends with Chinese funerals, in which money – the Japanese yen for which the immigrants have come to Japan – is burned in a potlatch that consumes both the hypocrisies and racism of Japanese society, and the grief, rage, and desperation of which the immigrants’ lives are composed.”

I am a big fan of this rather odd movie but not everyone finds this movie to be a celebration of multi-ethnicity and a condemnation of Japanese society…
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Design

I downloaded a style sheet from Movable Style and modified it a bit before installing it for this blog. I also added a few things to the list of links, and the Muninn raven picture. I don’t know if I’ll keep it, but for the time being this is how the site will look. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

Steven Clark and Ubiquitous Gaze

For people doing research on Japan, just a few quick random notes. Steven Clark, a Phd student at Yale has just put of a page of great quick and useful information he is calling Tokyo Archives. The blog Ubiquitous Gaze is a great blog with information related to Japan Studies and lists of resources. I am also hoping my own East Asian Libraries, Archives and More website will catch on and that people will begin adding useful entries to it.