Brian at Crooked Timber, mulls over the dilemma he faces answering the following question on his application for a US visa:
Do You Have Any Specialized Skills or Training, Including Firearms, Explosives, Nuclear, Biological, or Chemical Experience? (US Visa form DS-157)
Karen Wigen, a scholar of historical geography at Stanford, gave a fascinating talk last night at Keio University on “Moving Mountains: Creating the Modern Japanese Alps” She looked at the “discovery” of the Japanese Alps (a term given to three chains of mountains in Japan by an Englishman) in the Meiji period by metropolitan and usually elite alpinists (Japanese and foreigners). She describes the new sense of place that resulted, how this got embedded in local/regional conceptions of space, and the transition from the traditional Japanese worship of famous places (名所, places which get their fame from a literary or religious connection）to a more modern appreciation of scenery and landscapes for their beauty and remoteness (風景）in the practice of mountaineering. She at modern mountaineering and nature tourism (as distinct from traditional religious pilgrimages and pre-modern travel), which is a fusion of romanticism and science that often had the (ironic) goal of escaping the modern. She locates the roots of Japanese alpinism both in European Romanticism and East Asian landscape painting. I record just a few of her ideas here that I found interesting.
Continue reading Karen Wigen: Creating the Modern Japanese Alps
Prasenjit Duara is a scholar whose writing which I find nothing short of inspirational. That is no small feat for academic history writing, I assure you. Reading his work is difficult and sometimes confusing, but there are moments when he writes with an eloquence and lucidity which I can only hope to reproduce in my own future writing on history. Look below at his description of the relationship between nations and time,
“History is not only about linear evolution; it is also about timelessness. To be recognizable as the subject of history, the core of the nation has to be unaffected by the passage of time. This core often refers to the unity of a people and its territory. In the nation’s evolution there are historical vicissitudes during which a people may be driven out of its territory or enslaved or become separated and lose consciousness of its original unity. But the historical destiny of the nation lies in the fulfillment or restoration of this unity and sovereignty of a people. National history is fully teleological in that its ends are to be found in its beginnings.” from “The Regime of Authenticity: Timelessness, Gender, and National History in Modern China” in Chow, Kai-wing et al. ed. Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia (University of Michigan Press, 2001), 360
Matt over at No-Sword records how to get a Re-entry Permit in Saitama. For those of you living in Tokyo, I recorded some info in my own earlier posting.
Sayaka has deeply immersed herself in reading related to her potential topic for PhD research: civil-military relations. She will be applying to PhD programs in the fall. I can tell it is getting serious—she has a great posting about Spiderman 2 and its connection to her topic. I also watched the movie in Korea (the first movie I have ever seen at a movie theater at 9:45 in the morning) and thought it was fantastic. Probably the best comic book movie I have seen to date. Frank Rich has a great editorial that I read in the International Herald Tribune which talks about Moore’s new film and Spiderman 2. He lauds Spiderman for being a movie that, “promotes a credo of justice without vindictiveness.” The article also touches on some of the things Sayaka mentioned. For Rich, Peter Parker is the hero that America could have been.
“With great power comes great responsibility” is the central tenet of his faith, passed down not from God but from his Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson). He takes it seriously. Spider-Man wants to vanquish evil, but he doesn’t want to be reckless about it. Like the reluctant sheriff of an old western, he fights back only when a bad guy strikes first, leaving him with no alternative. He wouldn’t mind throwing off his Spider-Man identity entirely to go back to being just Peter Parker, lonely Columbia undergrad. But of course he can’t. This is 2004, and there is always evil bearing down on his New York.
An alternative title for this post might be, “Everything you didn’t understand your Korean friend say but were afraid to ask.” While browsing through the more useless features of my new EW-K3000 I found a section on Korean-English expressions in something called eBoyoung’s Dictionary of English Conversational Expressions. I also found more Konglish words on this site. I typed up a lot of these (I don’t think you can copyright a list of this nature) and listed them below for your perusal. Anyone who speaks Japanese will note that a lot of Konglish terms are also found in Japanese. I am particularly fond of the bizarre or humorous Konglish phrases ones like “overeat”,”walkers”, and “Let’s Dutch pay!” I’m sure there some great stories behind some of these phrases.
Continue reading Konglish
Ok, I don’t want to seem fixated on the subject of bathrooms here, but I saw signs on the outsides of a lot of restaurants in Seoul which resembled this one. I think the text under the sign (click on the picture for a larger version) says something like, “The restrooms in our establishment are open for the benefit of the public.” (at least that is what I can make out, with the help of my new EW-K3000 electronic dictionary)
This may not seem like a big deal, but if that is what these signs mean, that is very cool! Japan, Norway, the US, most of the places I have visited always have obnoxious signs that say things like, “The restrooms here are only available for use by our customers.” That doesn’t stop every drunk on a late night in Stavanger from using the bathroom at MacDonalds (when I lived there, McDs was open really late on weekends) but still! In Stavanger, and many places I can remember visiting in Holland, Germany, and China you have to pay a fee to get into many bathrooms. Japanese train stations usually put bathrooms on the inside, where only ticketed passengers can get too them.
It may not sound like much but for traveling bums like me on a shoestring budget and those who like to walk around big cities and explore, public trash cans (see my earlier entry) and publicly accessible bathrooms go a long way towards making me happy. I should note, however, that in Japan, both of these are pretty much provided by the ubiquitous convenience store.
So last night I was in an underground shopping mall in Jongno looking for a bathroom. I thought I had found one until I approached the sign and noticed it was a little bit different than what I was expecting. Could Korea, one of the most conservative countries in the world, actually have co-ed bathrooms? The woman on the sign has even done her hair up for the occasion! No, of course not, closer inspection revealed that the sign was showing the way to a small clothes store. They’re messin’ with my symbols and forcing my brain to accept new information! Ah…nothing like traveling to other countries to give one’s brain an occasional jolt.
Does anyone know why there are green containers full of sand bags all around downtown Seoul? I counted at least a dozen in a single day of walking around.
Are they to set up little defense points in case of invasion from North Korea, which is just a few miles to the north? In case of flooding? What are they for?
One of my accomplishments during my day in Seoul was the purchase of a Casio EW-K3000 electronic dictionary at “Techno Mart” at Gangbyeon station (I guess this is the Korean equivalent to Tokyo’s “Electric Town” at 秋葉原). The dictionary, which I would like to think I got at a reasonable bargain price, will be great for my future studies in Korean language. It has Korean-English, English-Korean, Japanese-Korean, Korean-Japanese, and Korean-Korean dictionaries, along with half a dozen other dictionaries I have absolutely no use for.
I don’t know how common this is in Korea, and I have seen something similar in at least one department store in Beijing, but Techno Mart has separate floors for domestic Korean electronics (for example, computers made by Samsung) which are conveniently located on the 2nd floor, labeled 국내 (domestic, the characters are 國內 and sounds very similar to the Japanese pronunciation K: kuknae J: kokunai) and foreign “imported” electronics located higher up in the building (for example computers made by Sony) on the 수입 floors (imported, the characters are 輸入, used in both Chinese and Japanese but pronunciation is not that similar in either, so I could have never guessed K: suip J: yunyû C: shuru). I guess that is one easy way to remind customers to “buy Korean”. I have another idea, we could turn off all the escalators above the 2nd floor and make anyone wanting to buy imported goods walk up the stairs!