Author: Muninn

The Month of the Flying Squirrel

In celebration of the month of the flying squirrel, a holiday spanning late September and most of October with a 3000 year long tradition in the land of Muninn, I have resolved that for about one month this blog’s name will change to the Chinese for Flying Squirrel (鼯鼠 or wushu in Chinese, musasabi in Japanese, naldaramjui in Korean). Because I have a horrible memory, can someone remind me to do this next year? Oh, and can someone else remind me to change the name back again in late October?

鼯鼠: My Life as a Flying Squirrel

Many of us here on earth cultivate for ourselves an identity. After some reflection and a little imagination, we take extra pride in identifying with some particular configuration of abilities, characteristics, or even physical or ethnic features.

I am one of these people, and I have long cultivated, and perhaps taken pride in, my “jack-of-all-trades” nature. I remember making a business card on some vending machine in London back in 7th grade. On the card I made “Jack-of-all-trades” the “title” attached to my name. Perhaps from around that time I decided that my interests and abilities were so diffuse and I was so utterly incapable at excelling in any one of them that I would have to develop some unique combination that would get me through life. What is somewhat odd about this, though, is that this ended up leading me to celebrate my own mediocrity in any and all of my pursuits.

I was reminded of this tonight. After rereading a book by Kenneth Pyle on The New Generation in Meiji Japan for my modern Japan historiography class, I wanted to see how Pyle’s portrayal of the Japanese intellectual Hasegawa Nyozekan meshed with Andrew Barshay’s portrayal of him in the latter half of his book State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (Whole book is online). There I found quoted an old passage from Nyozekan’s journal that I had highlighted a few years ago:

He is a good jumper, but can’t reach the roof; a skillful climber, but can’t make it to the top of the tree; an easy swimmer, but can’t cross the stream; a deep digger, but can’t cover himself up; a fast runner, but can’t outrun a man…

Five skills you possess
Yet not in one are you accomplished.
Flying squirrel, how can you brag?

Barshay notes that this is a reference to a passage in the first book of Xunzi (“The wingless dragon has no limbs and yet it can soar; the flying squirrel has many talents but finds itself hard-pressed.”) I really like this little passage, and I think that, like Nyozekan, I feel very much like a flying squirrel. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not the least bit unhappy with my fate as a flying squirrel. I believe that I have successfully developed a combination of skills and interests so bizarre and unlikely that my very presence in the world helps mitigate its monotony. I believe I am the only squirrel in the entire world to have precisely this particular configuration and by golly, there was a niche for me in society after all.

Sheer Humanity

I’m reading an interesting book focusing on the early postwar period in Western Europe called The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965. It focuses on three groups: veterans, drafted wartime laborers, and victims of Nazi persecution. The section on veterans highlights some of the diverse and often bizarre disputes involving the recognition of resistance fighters and such as war veterans – something important in the process of rebuilding national pride after liberation by the Allies. In one interesting Belgian case, a volunteer of a relief action for victims of Allied bombing applied for recognition in one such veteran organization and was questioned as to how such activities were appropriate for inclusion:

‘…our activity had no clandestine character whatsoever. We usually wore an arm-badge to be allowed on the site of the disaster. There was no risk involved and the Germans were quite positive about our action.’

The volunteer had been urged to apply for membership because the actions might be included in the clause, “works of patriotic solidarity.” But there is more,

The administration rejected the demand on the behaf of his relief work, but assured him that he was entitled to the statute under another heading of the law, since he had given shelter to two Jewish clandestines during the occupation. This the applicant refused, since, according to his own declaration, this had nothing to do with resistance, but with sheer humanity.1

There are a number of fascinating things which come out in this little anecdote. Among other things it shows the difficulty in weighing the “value” of resistance in wartime, which might include publishing anti-German pamphlets or sabotage and which implies a nation’s active contribution in its own liberation, as compared to the non-national, potentially even “collaborationist” humane act of relief work in the face of Allied bombing in a German occupied Belgium, and then the non-national, non-resistance action of hiding Jews from death at the hands of the Holocaust. Ultimately, however, what naturally got privileged in the early aftermath of any war of “resistance” were acts which contribute to a national epic of salvation from the humiliating experience of occupation or, as in the case of recognizing help for Jewish clandestines, those which counter the evils of the enemy. As the author Pieter Lagrou clearly goes on to show, however, these too become almost comically co-opted, manipulated, and recreated by the early postwar regimes that came into power.

In applying for recognition, however, this volunteer shows on the one hand a willingness to interpret an act which embarrassingly preserves the reality of Allied bombing in national memory, as “patriotic”, while on the other exposing the absurdity of recognizing aid to Jews in hiding as some kind of national service.

1. Lagrou, Pieter The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) p. 55-56

Charles Maier: The Question of Meaning

I’m really excited about starting my history PhD. I’m sure the misery and loneliness of grad school will hit me eventually but not yet. One of the professors who I hope to learn a lot from is Charles S. Maier, a professor of modern European history. I knew him from the introduction to a book on the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre and a book called The Unmasterable Past on the German historiographical debate of the 1980s called the Historikerstreit.

Since I’m meeting him soon I have been reading up on his other stuff. In an opening essay in an old 1978 book called The Origins of the Cold War and Contemporary Europe he writes about the debate between “revisionist” left leaning historians who have been motivated by the horrors of the US involvement in Vietnam to reexamine the US role in the origins of the Cold War and more traditional historians. While I don’t like a few of his terms that much, he actually has a much more balanced approach than the use of that word might imply.

He concedes several points to the “revisionist” scholarship even as he critiques it, but more importantly, I think that his article, which might otherwise be considered quite outdated in its portrayal of the field now, can be used with almost exactly the same terms to describe one of the central points of contention between “empirical” or “positivist” or “traditional” history on the one hand, and more theoretically framed, self-reflective, but perhaps more ideologically charged history that might be said to descend from the very group of scholars he is talking about here. Here is how he frames the two approaches in the case of Cold War historians of the late 1970s:

For those who stress history as bureaucratic process, all questions of historical responsibility can appear ambiguous and even irrelevant. Foreign policy emerges as the result of a competition for fiefs within governmental empires. Bureaucratic emphases can produce a neo-Rankean acquiescence in the use of power that is no less deterministic than the revisionist tendency to make all policies exploitive in a liberal capitalist order. But what is perhaps most significant about these alternative causal models is that they are addressed to different questions. The non-revisionists are asking how policies are formed and assume that this also covers the question why. The revisionists see the two questions as different and are interested in the why. And by “why?” revisionists are asking what the meaning of policies is in terms of values imposed from outside the historical narrative. The revisionists charge that the historian must pose this question of meaning consciously or he will pose it unconsciously and accept the values that help to uphold a given social system. History, they suggest, must serve the oppressors or the oppressed, if not by intent then by default. The historian who wishes to avoid this iron polarity can reply that social systems rarely divide their members into clear-cut oppressors and oppressed. He can also insist that even when one despairs of absolute objectivity there are criteria for minimizing subjectivity. On the other hand, he must also take care that the history of policy making not become so focused on organizational processes that the idea of social choice and responsibility is precluded.1

When Professor Maier quotes the “revisionists” as claiming, “The historian must pose this question of meaning consciously or he will pose it unconsciously and accept the values that help to uphold a given social system,” I think he has really struck on one of the central points here which is just as much an issue today. I would also go so far as saying that not only “traditional” history but also the field of Political Science in American universities today apply when he says, “The non-revisionists are asking how policies are formed and assume that this also covers the question why.”

What I’m getting here at is that one more obvious element of the clash between the kind of history which, in my understanding, has dominated the field for some time now, and the theoretical crisis that many find it in today, is not that there is an iron polarity between necessarily serving oppressors or the oppressed. However, I do think there is a growing consensus around the idea that there isn’t a way to just skip the “question of meaning” all together. This is something, I think Professor Maier hints at in the last line of the quote and one he goes into more detail in his work on German historians debating the historical relevance of the Holocaust.
Continue reading Charles Maier: The Question of Meaning

Orwell: Politics and the English Language

I met a nice Australian guy by the name of Gregory. He lives on my floor here in Perkins hall and popped in last night for a chat. He has been a consultant, taught communications in Denmark, and studied Danish and Chinese languages. During our talk he introduced me to Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language which has apparently become the basis of the Economist‘s style guide.

Settling In

I have made my move to Cambridge in the Boston area and I’m still getting adjusted. I haven’t met many people, visited my department, or done much else than locating food, various shiny objects for my den (like a spoon for cereal), and doing a bit of random exploring by bike. Classes start on the 20th and I’ll hopefully have more to report by then, but in the meantime, enjoy the wonderful Shi Shi poem. I was delighted to find this online, complete with audio versions in Mandarin and Cantonese thanks to No-Sword.

Testing Theories of Japanese Security Policy

Over on the EAIA blog I mentioned and summarized an article in International Security on the US-Japan alliance. I brought it up as a kind of controversial Realist article. Sayaka took the bait and bit a chunk out of the essay in a response she wrote in the next posting. She makes several excellent points about the article, which completely dismisses Constructivist approaches to Japanese security policy in favor of a clean “Passing the Buck” Realist interpretation. Sayaka accuses the author of oversimplifying the opposition with a straw man argument.

It is wrong to assume that Constructivists only look at notions and ideas even if Realists only look at power and the structure of international society.

Third, related to the previous point, the attempt to answer the question “Is [Japan’s policy really about] Pacifism?” by looking at the size of the military is off the point. The questions should be, “Why do[es Japan] not exercise normal military power even though it has acquired a huge military capability?”

Columbia: Chinese Connection

There is a conference coming up (Sept 10-11) at Columbia University on its “Chinese Connection” or famous former students of Columbia who went on to become famous people. It is kind of a promotional event for the university so I think it will mostly be warm and fuzzy but may have some very interesting talks. The RSVP page doesn’t say anything about charging money to attend. There is an article on their site on the early history of East Asian studies at Columbia University. I haven’t read the whole thing, but similar celebratory tone. It is written by Professors Theodore de Bary and Donald Keene, two of CU’s giants in the field.