Over at Frog in a Well, we are launching our new collaborative Korean history weblog. You can read more about the goals of the site here.
I’m going to start it out with a series of postings this week on Western perceptions of Koreans in the late 19th century and colonial period.
I have uploaded a new index page for our Frog in a Well project. It displays the new Frog in a Well logo, based on a painting by Joseph Y. Lo, who has kindly given us permission to use a modified version of it for our project.
In addition, I have prepared two buttons that you are free to use when linking to Frog in a Well:
Kurosawa’s movie Ikiru (1952) has to be one of my all time favorite movies. Every time I watch it, I feel grabbed by the movie from the very opening scene, when we are introduced to the main character, Watanabe Kanji. We are shown him working at his desk at the local municipal government office, completely disinterested in the world around him. The narrator introduces him to the audience saying,
これが、この物語の主人公である。しかし、今この男について語るのが退屈なだけだ。なぜなら、彼は時間を潰しているだけだから。彼には生きた時間がない。つまり、彼は生きているとはいえないからである。“This is the protagonist of our story. However, to tell his story now would simply be tiresome. This is because [at this point] he is simply passing his time. He has no time to live. That is, you can’t even say that he is alive.”
Jonathan Dresner has hosted our first Asian History Carnival. This bi-monthly blog carnival will collect excellent blog entries related to Asian history that have appeared online. Check it out and spread the good word. He is also looking for hosts of future carnivals.
Orac has the newest history carnival hosted here: History Carnival 16. Find out more at the History Carnival blog for info on past and future contributions. This is a great way to get a look at interesting history postings up and around the web.
I have returned to Boston and moved into a new apartment here in Cambridge. School to begin in one week and lots of things to do. It was a wonderful summer. I felt I made significant progress in Korean, had a productive (except I completely abandoned my attempt to teach myself German) but also wonderfully relaxed month back in Stavanger. I’ll try to post a bit on my reactions to the Norwegian election, though I’m a bit out of the post-election loop since I left the day it was held. After that, I will be most likely go back to posting more on the usual East Asia related topics, with much of it going on the Frog in a Well blogs.
Two Korean friends, Seyeon and Youngsoo, visited me for a few days in Stavanger before continuing their month of travel around Europe. I treated them to some outdoor fun, a stroll around old Stavanger, and splashed about in a forest lake nearby my apartment. We rode the Clipper tour boat into the beautiful Lysefjorden and were lucky enough to get warmth and sun with only moderate cloud cover. I took them walking about the city and Sandnes and up nearby Dalsnuten, probably the shortest climb nearby and fitting for a couple of city slickers.
I think they enjoyed their time here, and it will provide a bit of contrast to their more urban and cultural sightseeing elsewhere south on the mainland. Interestingly, I think they were most impressed with my young cousin Frida. They seemed to appreciate her vibrant energy and fearless adventurer’s spirit.
They seemed especially surprised when, as we approached our neighborhood forest, she jumped off her bike and ran full speed into an unharvested wheat field, rolled about in the tall stalks there, and yelled for my friends to join them.
I have uploaded a selection of pictures from Lysefjorden and the short Dalsnuten climb closer to the city:
ChinaJapan.org Down
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.”
Sunday was hiking day. I have been biking around islands recently, but it was time to head to the mountains for a nice day trip. Joining my uncle, cousins, and a number of friends, we took the ferry to Tau, and drove to one of my favorite places to hike in this area: Trollkjeften.
I don’t know if this is the official name of this mountain ridge, riddled with caves, but the locals apparently call it that. Thomas heard rumors that there were a lot of caves in some mountain in the area when he was in the Norwegian military but old locals he spoke to had never heard of them. I can’t remember how he finally found them but he has been visiting them ever since. Each time Thomas brings his climbing equipment and we enter the almost hollow mouth of the troll by rappelling into one of the deep chasms on the top.
The Ghost in the Mountain
The last time I joined him here was in high school, on a camping trip with children from Stavanger’s karate club. He sent a friend and fellow climber up the mountain and into the caves the day before to hide the skeleton of a sheep. After we arrived and had all rappelled into the mountain’s interior, we set up candles around the edges of a large cavern. There Thomas proceeded to tell us the (fictional) story of a group of German soldiers who went into the mouth of the troll during the war while looking for Norwegian resistance forces who had earlier abandoned the caves. Thomas claimed that the Germans fled in fear of something inside the mountain but that one of their troops never emerged from the cave alive…
At just this point, and the timing just couldn’t have been better – one little boy suddenly jumped up and screamed at the top of his lungs. All of us turned our flashlights to him and saw that throughout the telling of the story he had been sitting on pile of bones… Only later that night did Thomas tell me that the bones were not human and I don’t think the other children were ever told. As best as I can remember, we all fled the cavern in fear.
Today Thomas told me that the boy was apparently not permanently traumatized by the shock and is now a university student in Oslo. However, he apparently told Thomas that he has never forgotten that moment of complete terror.
The entrance we chose to rappel into today involved dropping down about 23 meters and connected to a medium network of cave passageways. There are hundreds of such entrances and cave passageways, slimy dark granite slits found in a mountain which essentially amounts to a large pile of huge boulders left by the glaciers.
The kids loved this trip, as of course did we. Rappelling is lots of fun, and not something non-climbers get to do much for fun, not to mention cave exploration. We explored the mountain’s interior for a few hours, and then made our way back on a trail taking us through a mossy forest and a refreshing swim in the river below. All of the forests are covered in a bed of heather and blueberry bushes. At any point we could reach down for a bit of sweet blue goodness and like most hiking trips which include a pass through a forest in this region, the adventurer can scarcely avoid returning without fingers stained dark blue. The mountain waters are delicious and as always, we refilled our water bottles anywhere we came across running water.
I posted various pictures from our trip today here:
I hopped on my bicycle and left Saturday afternoon to go on another elaborate reading/biking adventure. I decided to go to Kvitsøy which is a small island full of historical relics which is accessible by ferry about 30 minutes bike ride from my home. My uncle Thomas’ last question to me as I left the house, “Shouldn’t you check the ferry schedule?” I simply replied, “No problem, I’m going to read and if I’m early, I will just read outside in this beautiful weather.”
I didn’t know the ferry was not going to get there for 3 hours. I did get some good reading done and the weather was beautiful but I ended up falling asleep. In my somniferous state I did notice a few people and cars pass me but when I actually woke up, the ferry had left some 10 minutes before. I was not about to wait for the next one. I decided to make the best of the remainder of my afternoon and catch the bus to Rennesøy, another very scenic island, just north of Mosterøy, which is the subject of a previous entry. The bus passes nearby the ferry to Kvitsøy so things worked out alright.
When I got to Rennesøy, I decided to enjoy a few hours scenic riding around the Eastern half of the island, then finish off by going over the top of the eastern hilltop where there is a little nature reserve on top, before catching the bus home. Half way around the coast, however, my back wheel got a puncture and I had to walk my way back to one of the two small villages on the island from which I could take a bus home. I have been borrowing a very old but nice quality bike from my friend Glenn and already replaced a dangerously bulging old front tire after my trip to Mosterøy, before it could finally give way. I was warned by the store clerk that the back tire looked bad too but I told him I thought it would hold out for my last week here in Stavanger. No such luck so I will have to replace the back tire as well, as its dangerously worn state probably led to my puncture.