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International Library of Children’s Literature

Last week I paid a visit to the beautiful International Library of Children’s Literature on the edge of Tokyo’s Ueno park. I added an entry about it on my reference wiki with useful information for others who might also be interested. The library shares an old but nicely renovated building with a museum related to children. Use of the library is free and you can use the card you fill out upon entry for multiple visits. The library is connected to the National Diet Library and in addition to Japanese children’s literature also has a good number of children’s books from other countries – especially in Asia.

Since I wasn’t looking for anything in particular I just browsed their stacks. About half of their collection is open stacks and some of it organized in Photocopies are unfortunately somewhat expensive and can’t be done yourself. I ended up hanging out in their textbook section, comparing coverage of a few controversial issues in some of the newer high school textbooks.

“Weaving Resistance: The Days of the ‘Report from South Korea'”

Together with my friends Jens and Youngsoo I spent a chunk of this past Saturday afternoon at ICU for an event which ended up being broadly related to modern Korea. There were two main speakers, 池明観 who anonymously wrote the “Report from South Korea” for 『世界』 magazine from 1973 until 1988 under the alias “T. K.” and a second talk by 坂本義和, an apparently well-known professor at Tokyo University. The main event was presumably to hear 池明観 reflect on his writing about Korea during the period of military dictatorship but I found it to be a rambling discussion which was something of a combination of a review of modern Korean history and his own random reflections. I slept rather soundly through the middle half of his talk so it is possible it got better then.

Professor Sakamoto’s talk was much better…
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Street Vendor Gangsters?

There is a “gangster war” going on now between the huge Yamaguchi-gumi and something called the “Iijima-kai” (飯島会). Over the weekend there were a spat of murders of the Iijima-kai (More on the war in Japanese). I’m not usually interested in Japan’s crime, except when spending a pleasant evening with a couple of Yakuza movies. What surprises me the most about this past weekend’s violence is the fact that one of the gangs, the Iijima-kai, appear to be a bunch of street vendors（露店）!? Off the top of my head I can think of three varieties of street vendors that I see around the city: Foreigners selling cheap jewelry or fake stuff (clothes, train cards etc.), old men selling traditional Japanese snacks, and younger punks selling barely legal “love pills” and other “party products.” I can’t imagine the former joining something called the “Iijima-kai” and I can’t imagine the last group, which look like a bunch of deeply suntanned beach bums with little or no grey matter between their ears, could actually organize anything with “kai” (group) in its name. So are these gang members a bunch of potato and noodle venders? Why do I never see them in the Yakuza flicks?

Grad School

I’ve started getting unofficial results on some of my graduate school applications and I am happy to say that it looks like I will indeed begin a PhD in history somewhere in the US this coming fall. I will reveal what part of the country I end up in here at Muninn.net once all the official letters of rejection or acceptance have come in and I can be certain that there is indeed a dotted line somewhere waiting for me to sign away the next five years or more of my life. This will probably be sometime in early or mid-March.

The National Museum of Japanese History

I got off my nocturnal schedule and left early to visit the national museum of Japanese history outside of Chiba. I added an entry about the museum on my reference wiki. The grounds for the museum are on the old site of Sakura castle and it is surrounded by a very charming park. I ended up spending much less time than I expected I would and was able to go through its five large fixed galleries depicting various periods and themes in Japanese history in only a few hours. On the one hand I was impressed at how well done and clean the presentation of many things were. However, in the end, I was really disappointed to see how little attention modern Japan was given.

To be sure, the museum focuses a lot on folk culture, art, and many of the areas of Japanese history that students might not get to read about in detail in their textbooks. I actually thought it was refreshing that, while the museum was ordered roughly in chronological order, there was no silly march through Japan’s convoluted political history from one end of the museum to the other. There were interesting sections talking about the history of printing, on mountain farming techniques, images of monsters and spirits, and lots of huge models of villages, boats, and the houses of each period. Still, however, I was perplexed that the entire Showa period (1929-1989) was absent from the museum. This can’t be entirely explained by a desire to avoid portraying Japan’s most troublesome historical period. For example, the museum had an excellent audio/visual presentation on the Great Kantô Earthquake which clearly emphasized the horrible slaughter of thousands of Koreans in its aftermath. Yet, when we get to the end of the Taishô period, where the gallery focused on the rise of women’s magazines and movie theaters, I suddenly found myself at the exit of the gallery. There, a single section of a wall with a rather boring set of a dozen pictures of average Japanese comprised all that there was for the Showa period. It was labelled, “Snapshots of Japan during and just after the Pacific War”. I tried to picture what message the board was sending to the visitor. The only impression I was left with looking at these pictures was that everyone seemed very busy.

One possible explanation for the glaring absence of this period is that the Showa Memorial museum can be found in downtown Tokyo and the museum thus felt that there was no need for a whole exhibit focusing on the period. However, as I already mentioned, that exhibit focuses almost entirely on the daily life and experience of Japanese during this period, and essentially leaves untouched any portrayal of the tumultuous events and other changes which were going on in these decades of national mobilization and war. That only leaves only the Yushukan museum and its frighteningly revisionist narrative to tell the story of Japan’s difficult 20th century on a macroscopic level. There must be another museum that I have neglected. If I find it, I’ll post about it here.

The State of “Joint Study” of the Sino-Japanese War

I had the honor of serving as tea lady again for the Sino-Japanese History study group. Today was a special round-table of Chinese and Japanese scholars working on research of the Sino-Japanese War, beginning with a speech by 張海鵬 who is the 中国社会科学院近代史研究所所長 and followed by other Japanese and Chinese scholars making their own ten minute comments on the state of joint research in the field. As my own professor 平野先生 pointed out in his wrap up of the whole event, the keyword for this round-table was without a doubt 「率直」 (frankness, directness) which everyone agreed was something needed in their joint research of this sensitive historical period. I was surprised to notice a lot of mention of some of the more prickly questions in historiography that I felt are buried in the research I have seen from the group so far.
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Showakan

On Wednesday I visited the Showa National Memorial Museum and collected various reference information about the museum and its libraries which I added to my reference wiki. The 6th and 7th floor are fixed exhibitions of life in the Showa period, particularly wartime Japan and caused a bit of a stir when it was opened since the exhibit talks about everything except the war itself. Of course, you can walk just down the street to Yasukuni shrine and the revisionist Yushukan museum if you want to learn about Japan’s valiant but ultimately failed attempt to “liberate Asia” in the the “Great East Asian War”.

I was most interested in the libraries on the 4th and 5th floor which has an excellent collection of materials and audio/visual. They have several digitized wartime journals, lots of books and periodicals from throughout the Showa period (corresponding to the reign of emperor Hirohito from 1926-1989) and a fantastic collection of movies and records. I found no less than three records with songs connected to Kawashima Yoshiko (see my earlier entry). Two with lyrics she wrote, and a third Manchurian folk song which she actually sings herself. I had heard mention of this in a biography of her, but never expected to find and hear the actually records. Now, if I can only get them onto mp3…

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.