Asian History Carnival #13

Welcome to the thirteenth installment of the Asian History Carnival.

Martyrdom in Islam – Gracchi of Westminster Wisdom offers a review and discussion of issues behind Rice University professor David Cook’s new book Martyrdom in Islam.

Happy Birthday – Reb Chaim HaQoton writes about birthdays, Jewish theology, and various historical references to one’s day of birth.

Cogs and Wheels alerts us to a Chinese documentary about Bian Zhongyun – an early casualty of China’s Cultural Revolution. Read more at Danwei and view videos at YouTube.

Samurai Baseball: Off Base or Safe at Home? – C. W. Hayford explores some of the literature on Japanese baseball, and the intriguing debates on its authenticity or originality, or as he poses the issue, “differences within a sysem or between systems.”

Matt at No-sword continues to offer us historical snippets from Japanese publications he comes across. See Advice for new women for some allegorical illustrations by YAGURUMA Ryō from ŌSHIMA Shūichi’s 1950 “Life skills reader for new women”, Matt’s discussion of Edo city lights (the gandō), on dating historical postcards

Where’s my check? – Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well – China chimes in on recent debate about whether China scholars in the U.S. have been “bought off.”

Remixing Tagore – Owen at Frog in a Well – Korea has an interesting discussion of teh connections between Rabrindranath Tagore’s poem “The Lamp of the East” and a Korean remixing of the poem with another passage from his Gitanjali.

What sixth graders [in Taiwan] were reading about fifty years ago – Jonathan Benda of Notes of a former native speaker writes about a different kind of martyrdom discussed in a 1956 Chinese language textbook in Taiwan.

The Dangers of Politically Correct History – Michael Hurt, the Metropolitician, writes about the “messy question” that accompanies the debate over comfort women.

Pluto and the Land of the Morning Calm – Matt of Gusts of Popular Feeling introduces us to Percival Lowell, who built the Lowell observatory where Pluto was discovered. Matt makes some interesting observations about Lowell’s descriptions about Korea, where he spent some time in the late 19th century.

The Aral Sea Disaster (Part 1, Part 2) – The Central Asia web log looks at the connection between large scale irrigation and the the changes in the Aral Sea. See also the article commemorating the 800th birthday of the poet Rumi

A Few Recent Historical Gems at Japan Focus:

Proletarian Arts in East Asia – Heather Bowen-Struyk introduces the proletarians arts movement’s development in East Asia in the 1920s and 1930s.

Korean Memories of the Vietnam and Korean Wars: A Counter-History – Theodore Hughes critiques war memories of the US and Korea, and discusses Hwang Suk-Young’s The Shadow of Arms

Multicultural Japan? Discourse and the ‘Myth’ of Homogeneity – Chris Burgess highlights the discrepancies between the popular discourse of a homogenous Japan and the academic discourse of a multicultural Japan, arguing that there is a strong role in the former in shaping social reality in Japan.

Resources

I’m going to experiment with something new here. In addition to regular postings, I thought it might be useful to introduce some online historical resources and reference material related to Asian history that I have become aware of (they may not be new, but should at least not be mentioned yet by an Asian History Carnival). If this catches on, let me recommend that these resources get added to the appropriate section (there are sections for links, organizations, databases etc.) of the East Asia Libraries and Archives wiki hosted by Frog in a Well when they are related to East Asia.

Japanese War Crimes – The National Archives has recently published a book with a collection of introductory essays and produced a great finding aid to help researchers looking for records related to Japanese war crimes. You can download the PDFs directly online.

Denshô – the Denshô website preserves the testimonies of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II and includes an archive with interviews and other materials.

NARA on Google Video – Though this link is well known, if you are interested in Asian history, and especially World War II, there are a number of movies found in the national archive that have made their way to Google Video.

Memory and Reconciliation in the Asia Pacific – Weekly Media Update – The George Washington University project on Memory and Reconciliation in the Asia-Pacific has a weblog which lists recent English-langauge media articles related to historical issues in East Asia.

Travelers in the Middle East Archive – The TIMEA archive is “a digital archive that focuses on Western interactions with the Middle East, particularly travels to Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” (Creative Commons license)

Chinese Text Initiative – The University of Virginia hosts a large collection of Chinese literature texts.

Hawaii Karate Museum Rare Book Collection – This museum has actually digitized some of their materials related to Karate.

The XXth Century – The University of Hawaii has a digitized collection of the 1941-1945 issues of this fascinating Shanghai magazine.

eScholarship Texts – There are many popular history texts related to Asian history that are fully viewable online, including a number of well known books that can be found on the oral examination book lists of PhD students. Well worth a look.

North Korean Captured Documents – While they are unfortunately not online, I have posted some information at Frog in a Well with a few tips for anyone wanting to look at these documents in the national archives.

The next Asian History Carnival will be hosted in May by 花崗齋之愚公 at Jottings from the Granite Studio.