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Kimchi Sundubu

In my humble opinion, one of the most delicious dishes on the planet is kimchi sundubu. Sundubu, a spicy tofu soup-like dish comes in many varieties but since I’m not a big fan of seafood, I prefer it when it is served without clams or other seafood in it. I have found that restaurants offering more than one variety and serving “kimchi sundubu,” will, in addition to adding kimchi to the soup, often give you a few scraps of beef in the dish instead of clams.

I’m not sure how the best kimchi sundubu is made but the combination of the spicy red pepper soup, onions, copious amounts of nicely saturated tofu, kimchi, egg, and a side bowl of rice is to me the absolute perfect meal and usually goes for a price of 5000-8000 won here in Korea ($6-9 or so) and around the same price at Korean restaurants in the US. The side bowl of rice is great for dipping in the soup to give it a nice spicy flavor, or you might just dump the whole bowl in the soup while you eat.

While there is also often an egg in the sundubu when you get it, some restaurants just have a basket of raw eggs on the table. When they serve the sundubu in its stone pot, it is usually still boiling. You simply crack your egg into the soup and within a few minutes, the egg white is almost indistinguishable from the tofu. It occurred to me recently that this practice might seem strange to some foreigners, but since I long ago got used to eating raw eggs in Japan with my gyûdon, either cracked on top of the dish or mixed in a side dish with soy sauce (which isn’t even partially boiled in the process) it seems perfectly normal to me now.

Soccer Game

I was just about to go to bed when suddenly the entire neighborhood erupted with wild cheering. The sounds of joyous voices poured in through the window from all around. “Oh,” I thought to myself, “It must be the world cup and Korea has just scored.” But wait a second, haven’t all the newspapers been eagerly awaiting Korea’s first game to come later this week?

I turned on the television just in time to catch the replay of the goal that was scored and created such joy all around me. Australia had just scored a goal against Japan…

닌자 거북

My summer language program is moving along here in Seoul. Although I’m in level 4 of 6, my Korean still sucks. This is especially true for my listening ability, which is so bad I’m almost about to give up hope on it and concentrate on reading. I still struggle to understand anyone in a daily conversation and I can’t answer an overwhelming majority of any questions on any of our listening exercises. Today’s “cute” homework was to make a list of what “image” I get in response to various animal pictures. I had to look up a few of them, including “turtle.”

My electronic English-Korean dictionary, which uses Si-sa Elite (시사 엘리트 영한사전), provided me with what I guess is the correct word, 거북, in its first numbered entry under “turtle.” Entry number 2 explained that turtle could mean turtle meat, such as that which is used in soup. Entry number 3 was “=turtleneck.” Entry number 4 was some kind of computer term.

I was amazed to find the following as the 5th and final entry for “turtle” in my dictionary:

5. (때때로 T-) 닌자 거북이[어린이 영화•만화 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle에 나오는 거북. 방사능에 의한 돌연변이로 태어남].

5. (Occasionally with a capital T) A Ninja Turtle (The turtles which appear in the children’s movie/comic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. [They are] born with mutations due to radiation.)

Apparently TMNT has made enough of a cultural impact to get into the dictionary under the entry for the animal. I think they need to make the “Turtle” in TMNT plural though…

The Kimchi Museum and An Older Kimchi War

Yesterday I made a visit to the Kimchi Museum in Seoul, or as it is officially known the Kimchi Field Museum (Korean site has much more content). To get there, take Line 2 of the subway to the COEX shopping center at Samsŏng station. Walk through the mall and take the escalators down a floor to the museum’s entrance.

The museum is actually quite small, but nicely done, and you can get a reasonably good feel for it through their online exhibition page. All the signs are available in both Korean and relatively decent English, and many displays have small Japanese translations as well. The history of kimchi, displays of common types of kimchi, a discussion of their ingredients, etc. are among the highlights. One long narrow passage, which we might call the “hall of propaganda” has cartoons on all of its walls extolling the endless virtues of kimchi for one’s health. We rushed perhaps a little too fast through this section but were trying to outrun an army of older Japanese tourists who were being guided through the museum behind us.

In the last room there is a kimchi tasting room (the “field work” part of the museum?) and a number of computers set up where you can view, in Korean, Japanese, or English, movies showing you how to prepare kimchi from all regions of north and south Korea.

On one wall of the computer room there were two interesting articles posted from Western newspapers. One of them was particularly interesting article by Calvin Sims from the New York Times February 5, 2000 edition. Here is the opening:

Kimchi, as the cabbage is known, has been a staple of the Korean diet for centuries, and in recent years has become an increasingly popular and lucrative export — particularly to the Japanese market. But now, the Korean kimchi industry is seething because Japanese foodmakers are increasingly marketing their own copycat kimchi (pronounced KIM-chee) — and worse, calling it kimchi.

The Koreans have even brought their complaint to international food regulators, accusing the Japanese of subverting the value of authentic kimchi. A favorable ruling for the Koreans could force Japanese makers of kimchi to call it something else.

Japan has countered that Korea has no monopoly on the term kimchi, any more than Mexico can lay claim to tacos or India to curry. But that argument does not fly with the Koreans.

“What the Japanese are selling is nothing more than cabbage sprinkled with seasonings and artificial flavorings,” said Robert Kim, assistant manager for the overseas sales team here at the Doosan Corporation, a South Korean food manufacturer that operates the world’s largest kimchi factory. “This debate is not just about protecting our market share. We are trying to preserve our national heritage.”

Apparently some 90% of kimchi exports at the time were going to Japan and a map in the museum showed clearly that the stats for Japan were huge in comparison to all other nations. Unlike the more recent Chinese kimchi scare in Korea, according to the article what was seen as especially frustrating to the Koreans was the specific ways that kimchi were made:

In a reversal of the traditional pattern in which Korean manufacturers often copied popular Japanese products at lower cost, competitors in Japan, using cheaper and less time-consuming production methods, are homing in on South Korea’s biggest kimchi export market.

Many Japanese producers skip the fermentation and add artificial sour flavoring using citric acid and gum. The Japanese sometimes use rice paste to give their kimchi a gluey consistency similar to that found naturally in the Korean version.

Critics of the Japanese kimchi say it lacks the depth of flavor and health benefits of its Korean counterpart and that Japanese cabbage contains more water and is not as crispy.

The South Korean government has petitioned the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Codex Alimentarius commission to establish an international standard that would require products using the name kimchi to be fermented according to the Korean tradition.

In negotiations with representatives from South Korea and Japan, the Codex commission is drafting a kimchi standard that is scheduled to be ratified next year by the 150 member countries of the organization, which sets codes for food processing to ensure minimal health standards.

So far, neither the Japanese nor the Koreans seem satisfied with Codex’s draft standard. It defines kimchi as a “fermented” product but permits the use of citric, acetic and lactic acids, none of which are used in the traditional kimchi process.

Though I really don’t know what methods were used in its production, it is true that I have often been left unsatisfied with the cheaper supermarket kimchi I have found in Japan when I lived there. It had less of a garlic taste, felt less “meatier” and so on. However, higher quality stuff can always be found at higher prices. I have to admit that, to some extent, I’m sympathetic to the following kind of argument raised in the article by the Japan Pickle Producers Association as the article continues:

“Should the same standard be applied to curry?” said Toshio Ogawa, an adviser to the Japan Pickle Producers Association, which represents several Japanese kimchi makers. “Everyone knows that curry was invented in India, but the curry that Indians eat is quite different from the curry that Japanese eat.”

On the other hand, at least part of the problem here isn’t about Japan taking Kimchi, throwing in some natto and calling it kimchi. Instead, there is at least something to be said for the idea that a product of significantly less quality is being produced. I think it is certainly reasonable to establish, at the private level, some kind of international standard, and let products which meet that standard carry some kind of mark on them. However, just because there is a rich tradition behind kimchi, there shouldn’t be any kind of legal monopoly over the name “kimchi.” I don’t know how this developed since the article was published in 2000 but the existence of other dangerous precedents of this kind are not comforting. Don’t we have enough problems with intellectual property rights run wild?

Update: One of the other precedents for this kind of national monopolies of a kind of food I had never heard of: Feta Cheese. For more on this read an interesting post by Kerim on the subject.

Michael Breen’s Orientalism

Michael Breen is a journalist and a writer who has published, among other things, a book entitled The Koreans. I haven’t read it. Something about the presumptuous tone of its subtitle “Who they are, what they want, and where their future lies,” I think, prevented it from making it onto my Korea reading list. The phrase is filled with obnoxious assumptions.

Breen also publishes opinion pieces in the Korea Times. In an otherwise fairly unobjectionable article discussing problems with a new international school in Seoul, Breen drops this bombshell on his readers:

I hate to put this in writing but I can think of no example in Korea of a committee of multiple interests working together toward a common goal, unless a foreigner is in charge. My point here is not racist. It is cultural. Confucian thinking does not permit equality. Even friends, as one friend pointed out to me recently, call each other “hyung” (older brother). Thus, in Korea, a group endeavor involving different interests and viewpoints only works when one person is clearly in charge. In this case, the chairman is in charge and the other members, including MOCIE and Seoul City representatives, retreat into passivity.

This sort of comment is quite irresponsible. The Koreans, he is essentially claiming, are “culturally” incapable of politics. After all, what is politics, if not the coming together of a people with multiple, and usually conflicting interests, to work towards a common goal? While it is also remarkable that someone who has published a book on “The Koreans” has only recently learned that friends call each other “hyung” or “older brother” we can assume this was a rhetorical move. It is his portrayal of the static, if not feudal “Korean Confucian” that resembles so many like it in the past century of scholarship and writing about Asia. I have recently become fascinated by Western accounts of China, Japan, and Korea and it makes great easy summer reading. I find this paragraph by Breen just barely less insulting than many of the passages found in those books.

You can read more in this incomplete series of entries I posted over at Frog in a Well:

Early Western Perceptions of Koreans: Part I
Early Western Perceptions of Koreans: Part II
Early Western Perceptions of Koreans: Part III
Early Western Perceptions of Koreans: Part IV
Early Western Perceptions of Koreans: Part V

I obviously don’t share Mr. Breen’s long years of experience working in a Korean business environment but I find it ludicrous to suggest that Koreans are not, without the benevolent leadership of a foreigner, able to work towards a common goal in a committee of conflicting interests. We need look no further than the fact that, for all its problems, South Korea does have a highly developed civil society and extensive political and educational institutions. I strongly suspect that many of these institutions developed without the aid of bitter foreigners like Mr. Breen. That aspects of Confucian culture promote or preserve undesirably excessive hierarchical orders is not terribly controversial (though it has also a long and complex legacy of virtuous and stubborn protest which can and has been co-opted by many Korean protesters), nor is the idea that this has at least some kind of influence on development of democratic institutions, but you cannot simply throw about accusations like: Koreans=Confucians=Only Productive in stable Master/Slave relationship.

A Psychological Test

While visiting Taiwan last week, Sayaka was asked to answer questions in a 心理テスト (A psychological test, a kind of mental game that is supposed to reveal something fundamental about one’s character) by one of her friends there. She was asked to name two 四字熟語 (A four character compound, usually a proverb etc.) that came to mind. After you answer, you are told that the first you name is your “view of life” (人生観) and the second that you name is your “view of love” (恋愛観).

Her answer to the first was a four character compound only used in Chinese (not in Japanese), 擦身而過 (to brush past, but not quite meet). This is apparently her view of life.

Her view of love was, how shall I put it? Just perfectly appropriate for the owner of the domain Securitygirl.net and my girlfriend:

弱肉強食

The strong will devour the weak.
(Literally: Weak – Meat – Strong – Eat)

English Parody of Japanese National Anthem

I came across this article in the Korea Times the other day. Apparently Japanese who protest the singing of Japan’s national anthem, 君が代 (J) have created an English parody of the song. The pronunciation is said to be similar enough not to be noticed when students sing it. The Guardian also picked up the story. Both refer back to the right-wing Sankei report on this which can be read here. The lyrics of the song are also reported to make a reference to comfort women.

I read the article while in a subway station in Seoul. I asked Sayaka what the lyrics for 君が代 were again and she proceeded to sing the song. She did this three times, struggling each time to remember the words, before it suddenly occurred to me that it probably isn’t such a good idea for a Japanese person, in a Korean subway station, to be singing the Japanese national anthem out loud. I stopped her and reminded her that her father had explicitly emailed her before she left for Korea and issued her a very formal and detailed warning on how not to provoke the Koreans by, for example, bringing up sensitive historical and territorial issues. He had neglected to tell her not to sing the Japanese anthem in crowded public places.

As you might expect if you have read any of my previous postings, I’m sympathetic to those who want to resist the reintroduction of flag and anthem rituals in the Japanese schools and find it unfortunate that the government affirmed both officially in a 1999 law. On the other hand, from a tactical standpoint, I really don’t think this fight is worth the effort. I don’t think it is possible in the current global and Japanese climate, to make any progress in a movement to oppose the national anthem and flag—even when it evokes images of a troubled national past.

I understand, however, that for younger students, this is one of the only issues where they may personally get involved. They can feel the exhilaration of refusing to sing an anthem which celebrates the Japanese imperial reign and thus get their first taste of civil disobedience. Though far less controversial than their early predecessors, they can join in a long tradition dating back to that historic moment when the Christian Uchimura Kanzô refused to bow at the reading of the Imperial Rescript on Education.

Instead of disrupting school ceremonies, refusing to show, or remaining silent, I think a humorous parody of the anthem is a wonderful idea. If translating the US anthem into Spanish is enough to get US nationalists all wound up, then a witty parody of the Japanese anthem if students are able to get away with singing it. I can almost see their devious chuckles as they sing it. Unlike the provocative Danish cartoons, which I think were simply a bad idea on pragmatic grounds and not problematic in principle, this is highly unlikely to cause violent riots in, say, Kagoshima.

Then I read the lyrics:

Kiss me, girl, your old one.
Till you’re near, it is years till you’re near.
Sounds of the dead will she know?
She wants all told, now retained, for, cold caves know the moon’s
seeing the mad and dead.

What the…?! Oh no…is it possible that my favorite T-shirt company was commissioned to write the lyrics of the parody?

The Sankei article tries to help us understand how on earth this resembles the anthem enough to go unnoticed:

歌詞は、本来の歌詞と発声が酷似した英語の体裁。例えば冒頭部分は「キス・ミー・ガール・ユア・オールド・ワン」で、「キー（ス）・ミー・ガー（ル）・ヨー・ワー（ン）」と聞こえ、口の動きも本来の歌詞と見分けにくい。

I’m sorry, this is just pathetic. The song does bear some resemblance to the sounds of the original lyrics when you pronounce the English words in their Japanese katakana equivalents, but it is neither humorous nor does it make any sense. This is nowhere near the talented work that lies behind something like Hatten är din (Flash).

I suggest we help these students by giving them something better to work with. Any volunteers to help?

Here are the original Japanese lyrics:

君が代は
千代に八千代に
さざれ石の
いわおとなりて
こけのむすまで

The pronunciation:

きみがよは
ちよにやちよに
さざれいしの
いわおとなりて
こけのむすまで

Romanized:

Kimi ga yo wa
Chiyo ni Yachiyo ni
Sazare ishi no
Iwao to narite
Koke no musu made

Remember, if we make alternate lyrics, our satirical bite will be limited somewhat since we have to make the new version sound as phonetically close as possible to the original. Also, since it will be sung by young Japanese students, we should avoid English sounds that are difficult for Japanese to create. Post your recommendations in the comments! Finally, like the original Japanese attempt we should keep in mind that the Japanese pronunciations of English words aren’t always what you might expect.

More on the Nation-State

I have arrived in Korea after spending a wonderful week in Tokyo. Language classes begin next week so I have a few days to settle down into my small apartment near Naksŏngdae station, a short bus ride from campus, and review material from last summer.

As most who have been reading anything from the Korean media or its English language weblogs know, there was just a major set of local elections here recently. It wasn’t terribly exciting as everyone had expected the conservatives to sweep the elections in all but a few southwestern strongholds. However, it was significant in that it was the first local election in Korea to allow permanent foreign residents the right to vote. Read an interesting posting by Skindleshanks, who discovered this fact. Although due to a requirement related to the length of residency, he thought he might have been ineligible, he has reported that materials regarding the election were all delivered to him and he voted successfully in the election. Yesterday in The Korea Times Kim Rahn reported on the participation of foreigners, almost seven thousand of which qualified to participate, most of which were apparently citizens of the ROC (Taiwan).

This is wonderful news and allows me to make another rambling follow-up on my recent anti-nationalist rant.
Continue reading More on the Nation-State

Book First in Shibuya

Going to bookstores when I’m back in Japan is one of my favorite things to do. Along with going to my favorite ramen noodle shops, hole in the wall cheap udon shops, and meeting friends, bookstores are right at the top of my Tokyo to-do list. Today I took a fellow historian and my host while I’m here to lunch in Shibuya. I spent most of the afternoon studying in a coffee shop and then went to the large Book First bookstore nearby.

Sometimes though I leave the bookstore with really mixed feelings. In fact, I feel a rant coming on… The sections of the bookstore I spend most of my time in (Modern Japanese history, Modern China/Korea history, and the 文庫 paperback section) inevitably have a range of offerings that just disgust me. I can’t help feeling like Shibuya Book First’s selection has gotten worse since when I lived here last in 2004.

Book First is not like the more heavily populist/right-wing smaller bookstores and does have a decent selection of materials. Today I bought the new introduction to modern history of East Asia (『未来を開く歴史』） written cooperatively by historians from China, Korea, and Japan who are trying to develop educational materials for the future. I was also pleased to see several volumes of a new series of books published by the joint Japan-Korea history group with some great looking articles in them (a bit pricey, I’ll get them at the library). Today there was even a full display dedicated to Edward Said translations which included some kind of showing of a documentary about him.

On the same floor though, as you approach the history books, I couldn’t help but notice a whole slew of new editions of Nitobe Inazô’s Bushido and various silly books on how contemporary Japanese should recover their Bushido warrior spirit and a pride in their people.

For the love of Lugalbanda, why can’t the nation just roll over and die…please…doesn’t the 21st century have enough to deal with? What I would give to be alive the day when we can all tear up our passports and laugh at how nonsensical the whole national project was. Those of us who wish to destroy the nation find ourselves continually narrating its violence in the tragic mode, but no one has mastered the tragic mode better than the nationalists themselves. At some point we have to embrace the comic mode and highlight the resounding stupidity of it. We have to move from celebrating the creative and imaginative nature of these communities to a more focused effort at reminding ourself of its farcical core. When it is someday finally severed from the state and that unholy union is finally broken, leave it be…but until then I say spare it no satirical sting; offer it no shred of credibility.

Ok, where was I? The history section seemed to have gotten a bit worse. Maybe it is just me but the selection for nationalist revisionists seems to have expanded somewhat. While not a very scientific measure, to give you an idea, in the standard “Nanjing incident” (Nanjing massacre) section, 4 out of 12 books were of the “what massacre?” variety. This despite the fact that three of the remaining volumes were compilations of interviews with Japanese soldiers who admitted participating in the slaughter (two of them) and of interviews of victims. I have written about one of these important works here at Muninn. I just cannot understand how, with such excellent empirical material out there, any major publisher can still put out such crap. What made it worse was that both of the books about the Nanjing occupation out on display were of “what massacre?” variety. One was a whole book dedicated to talking about the problematic pictures of the massacre (there are indeed many pictures used in Chinese materials about the massacre which have nothing to do with the occupation of Nanjing in 1937 or are otherwise problematic), and the other was a work discussing KMT party archives showing how they mobilized propaganda to spread anti-Japanese sentiment in the aftermath of the occupation of Nanjing. I don’t have any problem with either of the central claims at work in these two prominently displayed books (that there are many problematic pictures about the massacre and that the Nationalists and later Communists milked the massacre for all its propaganda potential) – it is just that neither of these facts prove a damn thing in the face of a mountain of evidence about the widespread slaughter.

Another really well-done right-wing book out by the fascist PHP publishing company I saw prominently displayed was a guide to “Must-know history facts about modern Japanese history” This book was essentially a well-organized manual for those sympathetic to any and all Japanese nationalist silliness. Divided into about fifty short and very concise chapters, it covers all the most controversial themes in modern Japanese history (with bonus chapters on the Dokdo/Takeshima crisis, all of Japan’s other “indisputable” disputed claims, etc.) There was about as much nuance and balance in these books as there is blue in the Japanese flag. Unfortunatley, unlike the many other babbling works by various nut jobs out there, what I think makes this kind of book highly effective was its “executive summary” approach – kind of a briefing booklet. For example, to take the Nanjing massacre chapter as an example, it provided nice one-paragraph summaries of the key arguments of the opposition and counter-arguments so that the defensive nationalist reader will be well-prepared for any debates they might get into with “masochistic” and unpatriotic countrymen. For example, it had one paragraph with pre-war Nanjing population estimates (to prepare the reader for a triumphant take-down when Chinese casualty estimates are shown to be higher, no mention of course of the swelling population of the city due to refugees), it counters the “Safe Zone” violation arguments with the classic “Chinese soldiers were throwing off their uniforms and pouring into the zone [Implied follow-up: so what was the poor Japanese military supposed to do if not charge in and start grabbing/killing males at random]” Of course, there is no mention of the fact that captured soldiers were gunned down by the thousands (Of course, if they had to admit this fact, which many Japanese soldiers there at the time do, they would respond with the classic and feeble, “But we had no food to feed them, and no resources to detain them indefinitely…it is the Chinese military which must take responsibility for leaving its forces in Nanjing to die while its commanders fled.”)

It is so exhausting to see this kind of crap. I’m so tired of it. It is so distracting. I wish I could just ignore it, as I usually do, but the fact that this kind of material reaches a growing audience, in ever more effective formats means that it would be irresponsible not to keep myself relatively familiar with the kinds of vacuous claims being made. Of course, the best way to deal with this is not always to get into the trenches and lower ourselves constantly to their level of repetitive and simplistic discourse, but it remains important for historians in our field to issue the occasional royal smack-down. I am happy to report, however, that what I saw today confirms that they don’t seem to have produced any significant new material other than their regular score of long-ago refuted or irrelevant nonsense. The demand for their drivel though, seems to continue unabated, and I suspect it will grow if nationalist sentiment continues to grow. Ultimately, any time spent thinking about this distracts those of us interested in Sino-Japanese relations history or wartime/colonial history in modern East Asia from the more challenging and, I believe, important work of moving beyond the huge shadow of some of these (non-)controversies. It is not just for the sake of reconciliation in the region, but because the violence of war goes well-beyond a few symbolically important events. There are so many questions to ask, so many issues worth addressing and I so wish we could finally get to the stage where the study of violent wars and imperialism can move beyond the perpetual national mudslinging and nationalist whitewashing that continues today.

More Athletes

Last summer, when I was heading on to Norway after a summer of study in Seoul, my fellow passengers and I found ourselves on the plane with the North Korean national soccer team. On Monday I began a repeat of last summer’s travel and next week I’ll begin a second summer of Korean language study at SNU’s program in Seoul. When I boarded the plan from Chicago to Tokyo (where I’m now hanging out for a week before traveling on to Korea) I found myself surrounded by Japan’s national wheelchair basketball team. One of the players was in my seat when I got there, and I got to see a performance of his amazing arm strength as he proceeded to move, with the use of his arms alone, from my seat to the one behind me.

I didn’t talk to any of players and kept my Japanese language ability “to myself,” but perhaps somewhat sneakily read over the shoulder of the team’s trainer sitting next to me. During our 12 hour flight the trainer spent several hours on two tasks: 1) He seemed to be contemplating game strategy for the team by writing notes feverishly on the back of his notepad, and evaluating the performance of the team in their last game (against Germany’s team it seems, guessing from the game performance worksheet he was filling out). 2) He spent a lot of time filling out daily workout summaries for the team. The detailed worksheets he filled out had some fascinating details. Under the category for “Morning” he wrote what they had for breakfast, and had the option of putting check marks next to two options for “A stroll” (散歩) and “Stretching.” He also detailed other meals the team ate during the day, and there was space on each worksheet for details of up to 5 daily workouts or “team gatherings” (集合) which he seemed to fill up with ease.

Most interesting was the fan mail which was, of course, none of my business, but which I read along with him nonetheless (He saw me staring at the letters but probably assumed I was a curious foreigner fascinated by all the funky Japanese characters rather than actually reading them). If any of you are fans of the Japanese wheelchair basketball team you can rest easy, your mail appears to be getting read. One particularly touching letter came from a Japanese junior high school student, who was a really dedicated fan (closing her letter with “Go Japan! Go Go Go Japan!”). After seeing its somewhat personal contents, I started feeling guilty about my reading and drifted off to sleep again.