It is the Kind of Town

After my week-long adventure with my father in Alabama, I am visiting my parents and sister in Oklahoma, in a place called Bartlesville. I have never lived there (I refused to move to America when my family moved there from Norway when I was about to begin my senior year at the International School in Stavanger) and I don’t think I surprise my friends or family when I say that I really don’t care much for the place. When I pass through to visit, I spend most of my time indoors with family or in the library, where these days I continue to work on a translation project and, during my breaks, annoy my sister, who works behind the reference desk. This weekend I leave for my two years of dissertation research in Korea, Taiwan, China, and Japan.

But in the meantime, what sort of place is this town of Bartlesville?

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It is the kind of town where it is apparently necessary to place signs on many of the doors of office buildings and other businesses to indicate you don’t want people wandering in bearing firearms.

It is the kind of town where a novel in the local Mid-High school library may get banned for containing two lesbian characters, who, shock and horror, kiss. At least a few local librarians and other concerned community members are showing their opposition to the ban (including my sister) but we’ll see how things turn out. As one editorial by a concerned mother puts it in the local Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise,

“How sad it is to me that people are outraged for a parent to try to protect her child from the message that ‘being homosexual is ok and acceptable.’ God’s word teaches us otherwise. What has happened to our nation in 400 years? We have gone from fearing God’s word to ridiculing it.”

Oh, what a travesty that a junior high school child might haplessly stumble upon a novel in their own Mid-High school library with two lesbian (though one was apparently “experimenting”—even more frightening!) characters. Who is responsible for installing that sort of smut? If only this book was removed then surely the children would be safe to walk the library aisles and bask in the grace of God’s law.

It is the kind of town where, as happened to me only a few hours ago, should your lunch at the Subway sandwich store amount to $6.66, you will be invited to buy a cookie, or at least accept a trivial $.01 “miscellaneous” charge so that the number of the Beast will not mark your purchase.

It is, as you can see, almost like another country.

The Hall of Asian Peoples

Although I lived in New York for two years, I never got around to visiting many of its museums. A few weeks ago I finally paid the Museum of Natural History a visit along with a good friend of mine.

As some of my previous postings indicate, I have become more and more interested in the geographies and narration of museum exhibits. As a student of East Asian history, I was especially interested in how the museum portrayed the cultures of that region.

The museum of natural history is not just home to dinosaur bones and stuffed animals. Between the hall containing the stuffed lions and the one containing the stuffed birds, one can find the “Hall of Asian Peoples.”

In the hall of Asian peoples, with “Asia” defined in the broadest old use of the word, we can find all sorts of exhibits. The hall provides a lot of interesting material for comment, from its exhibit on “the Lure of Asia” to its portrayal of Islamic cultures and China, but I’ll just make a few comments on its portrayal of Korea and Japan. Take a look at this hall plan (click for a larger version):

Hall of Asian Peoples

I was struck by the central location of Japan in the large square room to the right. Surrounding Japan were a number of exhibits, including the “Introduction to Primitive Asia” and others. Among the exhibits on the outside of the Japanese center was one portraying the Ainu peoples.

The Ainu

The Ainu, of course, where almost eradicated by the Japanese. Next to this, also on the outside of the Japanese center, we find the Koreans. The entire mapping of these cultures in the museum closely mirrored the Japanese imperial order of old.

Korea: The Uniqueness

The Korean government, however, has done what it can to spruce up the exhibit a bit, which portrays a Yangban scholar at his studies, with his hanbok-clad wife working nearby. The title of the exhibit is, “KOREA: The Uniqueness.” Ah yes, that familiar claim brought back so many memories. A sign reports that, “This exhibit was made possible through the generous assistance of the Korean Cultural Service.” It saddens me that, far outside of the host countries, the arm of nationalists can reach into the heart of museums. When I was there, a crowd of delighted Korean tourists were snapping pictures. The Ainu next door were less popular with the cameras.

The heart of the square room, with its Japan exhibits, was hardly any better. I could smell the hand of Japanese government influence upon the contents of the exhibit, even if some of the contents showed unmistakable evidence of a non-Japanese hand. See, for example, the kanji characters in this numbered list of photo identifications:

Numbers

Besides the general sloppiness of the handwriting, you may notice the number four (四) shows a little excess creativity. These problems, however, are found in most museums. The element of the Japan exhibit that most showed potential Japanese government or other suspect dabbling was the description of the Japanese emperor system (click for readable version):

Japan Emperor System

This description of the Japanese emperor would not pass muster in a student essay in the most introductory course on Japan. The over-attribution of agency to the emperor in the Meiji period, the description of the “restoration” of Shintô which was more accurately the birth of state Shintô, is bad enough. The most interesting problem with this little snippet is what it leaves out. Notice how the paragraph jumps from the triumphs of the Meiji period, over the decades of Japanese imperialism, directly to Hirohito’s denial of divinity after World War II. How clean this picture looks: no imperial responsibility for the war, no outside pressure of Hirohito to deny his divinity hinted at.

In case the rosy picture of the text failed to persuade, no “Hall of Asian Peoples” could be without a photo of the Japanese imperial couple:

Imperial Couple

Murals at the Birmingham Public Library

I have been working on a translation here at the public library in Birmingham, Alabama. There are large murals painted on the interior walls of the research library where I am sitting as I write this and it struck me that I couldn’t figure out what concept united all the murals.

They were painted by Ezra Winter back in the 1920s. Each mural appears to be representing a nation or culture, but I was puzzled by the choices made.

To represent the English we had Lancelot, a fictitious legendary figure. The Russians got Igor, the Spanish got Don Quixote, the Germans got Faust and Margaret. I thought the theme was fictional characters from literary works, but there were real historical figures as well: John Smith and Pocahontas for Americans, Dante and Virgil for Italians (though I realize they are probably taken from within the Divine Comedy), and Confucius for the Chinese. See the full list here.

LancelotIgorDon QuixoteFaust and Margaret Smith and Pocahontas Confucius

I concluded that they were all chosen as figures which might reasonably pop up, fictional or otherwise in a classical education. However, I still found the choices somewhat bizarre when juxtaposed with the nation or culture they are supposed to represent.

I confess I didn’t recognize the characters for Japan: Otohime and Urashima Tarô, until I looked up the familiar story (J) online. The two are apparently now available in Hello Kitty versions.

Otohime and Urashima Tarô

The only Otohime I remember coming across in Japan was the device occasionally found in bathrooms to conceal the noise of one’s bowel movements. Only now do I realize that the name was not just a “Sound Princess” (音姫) but was at least potentially an additional play on the pronunciation of a version of the name of the mythical characther (乙姫).

Otohime

A Few New Phrases from Alabama

My father, an American born in Alabama, visits his relatives there once a year. Since I left the Boston area last week my major goal before leaving for Korea next month is to finish a translation project I’m working on, something I can do any quiet place. I decided to join my father on his trip this year, since a journey to the South is never without interesting discoveries.

I have been paying a little more attention to the vocabulary and rich expressions that are used around here. I don’t always have a pen handy, but I will try to keep a running list in this posting of those expressions I remember to write down when I hear them.

NOTE: I did not grow up in the United States, so it is possible that much of what strikes me as unusual is in fact quite common all over the country.

Expressions:

• “Smelling high on the bush” = Stage of childhood when boys begin expressing romantic interest in girls. [Note: Not sure if it is used in the reverse case]
• “I’ll cut your gubber off” [Note: Pronounced goober] = A threat made to misbehaving children.
• “Loose as a Goose” = To be very relaxed.
• “Fine as Frog Hair” = To be doing very well.
• “Slick as a spanked baby’s bottom”
• “[Busy|Nervous] as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs”
• “Get above your raisin’” = Trying to live above one’s social station.
• “Hanging on like hair on a biscuit” = To be doing OK, to be stubbornly hanging on (to life, health, etc.), as a hair does in the dough of a southern biscuit.

Vocabulary:

• Hen Fruit = Eggs

Updated: June 3, 2007

The Prison Notebooks

Congraulations to Sayaka on finishing her comprehensive exams. Also, Sayaka has moved her weblog to a new location just as she is moving from her PhD program in Political Science at The George Washington University in Washington DC to her new History PhD program at New York’s Columbia University. The title of her new blog (with old entries imported) is chosen in honor of her favorite Italian revolutionary.

PDF Scanner – A Researcher’s Lifesaver

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During the past year or so, and especially in the last few weeks, I owe a great deal of thanks to a machine I call a PDF scanner, since I don’t know what it normally called.

The scanner looks like a photocopy machine with a computer screen attached to it. Like a regular photocopy machine you can use the glass or the feeder on top to copy documents and books at the same speed as you might expect from such a machine. However, instead of charging you money and outputting these copies on regular paper, the result of the free scan is displayed as thumbnails on the screen to the right. When you are happy with the resulting scans, you may save them together as a PDF (or as separate image files) and have the file sent to a USB drive or to a server of your choice via FTP.

The machine can be set to a number of resolutions (200 dpi and up) and scans in black and white, grayscale, or color. You may also indicate the paper size of the scanned image. If you are using the feeder tray, you may scan either single or double-sided documents. The model I have used on campus does not have shrink or enlargement features available and lacks some of the other advanced features we are used to dealing with on a regular photocopy machine. However, if you are scanning English language documents, there is one wonderful extra feature: Putting a check next to “Hidden Text Layer” will direct the machine to OCR the scanned pages of text and make the PDF documents searchable. The accuracy is far from perfect, but more than good enough to make those usually dead images great for keyword searching.

This machine, and in one case a different variation of it, can now be found at several library locations throughout the Harvard campus. Competition for its use is heavy in some libraries, especially those where visiting researchers are desperate to copy materials before they return home and want to avoid the costs of large amounts of photocopying and the weight of carrying these copies back.

The advantages of this machine are huge:

1. Use of the machine is completely free (at least on our campus). This has probably saved me hundreds of dollars in the past year and a half or so.
2. Except when scanning poor quality documents or large amounts of double-sided documents using the feeder tray, there are far fewer jams and other problems which arise with using a photocopy machine.
3. There is no wasting of paper or ink. No paper also means no lugging around heavy photocopies.
4. The scans are at a very high speed and surpass the speed of any but the most expensive personal scanners and is much faster than most document feeding trays I have seen.
5. The scanner’s glass is much larger than all but the most expensive personal scanners and can thus easily handle very large books.
6. The OCR text recognition provides no opportunity for correcting mistakes but is transparently built into the scanning process. You never actually see it happen. It adds only a short time to the final saving of the document as it is transferred to the USB drive. This dramatically reduces the time the OCR process would take if you were to do it after scanning documents on a personal scanner with something like OmniPage Pro or using Adobe Acrobat Professional or other tools.
7. Easy OCR means searchable PDFs which means faster research through your own scanned materials.

Potential general complaints from the perspective of librarians and researchers:

1. The product is a scan – which you view on a screen. This is less fun to read than on paper and less convenient to annotate and scribble on.
2. Free and fast copying means that violating copyrights in the library is now free and fast too. Since the products are PDF files, rather than a single hard copy, it is easier than ever to distribute these PDF in ways that violate copyrights.

What have I found this useful for?

1. I digitized the entire Sino-Japanese studies journal, which is now hosted online. I have been wanting to do this project with Josh Fogel for a long time and only with the introduction of these PDF scanners around campus has it become something manageable with a limited budget of time.

2. I have boxes upon boxes of photocopies that I have made throughout the years. Dragging them around is a pain. The PDF scanner has allowed me to eliminated several boxes of paper (I simply haven’t had the time to go through them all, and I want to keep some highlighted materials and materials that don’t scan well). These documents are now all on my computer, and backed up on other media.

3. I often take handouts from presentations, various mail and personal documents, and scan them up quickly using the document feeder.

4. Any books I might need to have as reference in the field but which I don’t want to bring with me in my baggage, I simply scan up before I go. It takes me about 30 minutes to scan a 300 page book, or about ten pages per minute. It takes another 2 minutes to save the book if you choose black and white at 200 dpi. This means that many of my favorite history books in my field are not only on my computer, but those in English are easily searchable, thanks to the OCR feature included on the machine. I can then leave the original book in storage while I travel around in East Asia. When you are sitting in an archive or on a train in the middle of nowhere, without any internet connection or access to Google books and other search engines – there is nothing like being able to search through a lot of locally stored data on one’s own machine.

Wish List for the Future

1. As more and more people around Harvard campus discover the power of these machines to reduce paper and produce OCRed PDF files of everything from our personal papers, I have watched as competition for their use has exploded – especially for the PDF scanner in Harvard-Yenching library. I hope that the librarians come to see that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and add more machines to the collection. I would also love to see PDF scanners in libraries and especially archives around the world. The National Archives, for example, is perfectly happy to have me click away with my personal camera at thousands and thousands of pages of articles but still charges considerable photocopying fees. If the archives had a PDF scanner (perhaps the alternative kind found in Harvard’s Widener library Philip Reading room which is face-up rather than face-down and thus less damaging to books) they could seriously cut on machine maintenance fees while providing an incredibly valuable service to researchers.

Obviously the question of copyright needs to be addressed – but the solution is not to cripple the gains from technology advances that improve on existing tools that perform the same essential task: the paper-based photocopier, the slower personal scanner, and the camera, all of which we have had for years.

2. I would love to see these machines support OCR in many more languages.

3. It would be nice for there to be some kind of semi-automated “submission” or “registration” system for scanned materials so that eventually you can reduce the physical burden on the scanned materials in libraries and archives. If certain pages, articles, or archival documents have been scanned before, and are found in the system, then you could simply retrieve this previously scanned document and thereby contribute the preservation of the original by not subjecting it further copy.

4. I would like these machines to have more options than the software they currently have provide such as enlarge/shrink options, crop features, auto-crop features, more media size options, much better color scans of glossy photographs, etc.

Honorable Mention

Another similar machine that I also owe a lot to recently is the Microfilm PDF scanner. A number of my recent postings at Frog in a Well and contributions to the Frog in a Well Library refer to documents that I found on microfilms. The documents I have been uploading are PDFs directly created by the PDF scanning software on the computers attached to the microfilm reading machines that I use in the Government Documents section in the basement of Harvard’s Lamont library. It works very much like the microfilm printers we have seen in libraries for years but this time the product is a PDF rather than paper copies. Like the regular PDF scanner above, all these scans are free and allow me to easily share my findings with others.

Copyright Claims on US Government Documents

In the past I have repeatedly complained about claims of copyright protection where no such protection exists.

I have talked about this problem on Google Books, where books are not given full view when they are fully in the public domain or where public domain books republished by Kessinger Publishing are used which wrongly claim copyright protection. A recent critique of Google Books by a blogger at the AHA has mentioned a similar problem in a posting here.

I have also expressed my frustration with the new Footnote.com service which gives access to completely public domain documents through a paid service and then forbids the viewers to copy and freely use this completely unprotected and public domain content through their restrictive licensing agreement. This is part of the trend towards using licenses to restrict the usage of materials which cannot otherwise be defended by copyright.

Isn’t it enough that we have to face an unjustifiably long lasting copyright protection laws, and various other blocks to the increasing potential for cultural innovation and information sharing provided by the internet?

Well, this problem isn’t limited to the online world. I have been looking at a lot of microfilms lately of US government documents, mostly from the US State Department. These are documents I can usually see the originals of by visiting the National Archives. Almost all of these documents, that is, any documents produced by the US Government, are completely in the public domain and no publisher or individual can “legally assert copyright unless the publisher or individual has added original, copyright protected material.”

So explain to me why it is that University Publications of America, which created the microfilms of these US government archival records, can get away with proclaiming their copyright on the microfilm reel (Click picture to view larger version):

Example1

Even if they could claim copyright on messages they put at the beginning of the microfilm, which is hardly what I think the law has in mind when it says “original material,” then they copyright does not extend to the materials held within. I don’t think that reproductions of these public domain documents in this photographic form, is in anyway original. Furthermore, when there are copyrighted materials (there are scanned published books in the possession of the state department, for example), UPA can hardly claim copyright over such materials, even if I’m grateful that they include such scans in the microfilm, possibly in violation of the copyrights on those materials.

Look at this warning they put in:

Example2

Even if we let them have their copyright on this page of the reel, I don’t understand how UPA has any right to graciously “grant” me permission to make enlarged photocopies of only selected items, or deny me the right to make a reel duplication of almost the entire reel, except their introductory frames. Where do they get this right over the material? If these are public domain materials, I should be able to duplicate and use these materials in any way I see fit, whether it is selected photocopies, or print outs, or by copying every single unprotected page within the reel. I should have this right whether I’m engaged in research, or even if I wished to publish a book (without asserting copyright) with the entire public domain contents shown.

These kind of false claims help contribute to the “permission culture” that we find ourselves in, where we become increasingly paranoid about exchanging ideas and creating new culture that uses the rich variety of materials that we have access to.

Asian History Carnival #13

Welcome to the thirteenth installment of the Asian History Carnival.

Martyrdom in Islam – Gracchi of Westminster Wisdom offers a review and discussion of issues behind Rice University professor David Cook’s new book Martyrdom in Islam.

Happy Birthday – Reb Chaim HaQoton writes about birthdays, Jewish theology, and various historical references to one’s day of birth.

Cogs and Wheels alerts us to a Chinese documentary about Bian Zhongyun – an early casualty of China’s Cultural Revolution. Read more at Danwei and view videos at YouTube.

Samurai Baseball: Off Base or Safe at Home? – C. W. Hayford explores some of the literature on Japanese baseball, and the intriguing debates on its authenticity or originality, or as he poses the issue, “differences within a sysem or between systems.”

Matt at No-sword continues to offer us historical snippets from Japanese publications he comes across. See Advice for new women for some allegorical illustrations by YAGURUMA Ryō from ŌSHIMA Shūichi’s 1950 “Life skills reader for new women”, Matt’s discussion of Edo city lights (the gandō), on dating historical postcards

Where’s my check? – Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well – China chimes in on recent debate about whether China scholars in the U.S. have been “bought off.”

Remixing Tagore – Owen at Frog in a Well – Korea has an interesting discussion of teh connections between Rabrindranath Tagore’s poem “The Lamp of the East” and a Korean remixing of the poem with another passage from his Gitanjali.

What sixth graders [in Taiwan] were reading about fifty years ago – Jonathan Benda of Notes of a former native speaker writes about a different kind of martyrdom discussed in a 1956 Chinese language textbook in Taiwan.

The Dangers of Politically Correct History – Michael Hurt, the Metropolitician, writes about the “messy question” that accompanies the debate over comfort women.

Pluto and the Land of the Morning Calm – Matt of Gusts of Popular Feeling introduces us to Percival Lowell, who built the Lowell observatory where Pluto was discovered. Matt makes some interesting observations about Lowell’s descriptions about Korea, where he spent some time in the late 19th century.

The Aral Sea Disaster (Part 1, Part 2) – The Central Asia web log looks at the connection between large scale irrigation and the the changes in the Aral Sea. See also the article commemorating the 800th birthday of the poet Rumi

A Few Recent Historical Gems at Japan Focus:

Proletarian Arts in East Asia – Heather Bowen-Struyk introduces the proletarians arts movement’s development in East Asia in the 1920s and 1930s.

Korean Memories of the Vietnam and Korean Wars: A Counter-History – Theodore Hughes critiques war memories of the US and Korea, and discusses Hwang Suk-Young’s The Shadow of Arms

Multicultural Japan? Discourse and the ‘Myth’ of Homogeneity – Chris Burgess highlights the discrepancies between the popular discourse of a homogenous Japan and the academic discourse of a multicultural Japan, arguing that there is a strong role in the former in shaping social reality in Japan.

Resources

I’m going to experiment with something new here. In addition to regular postings, I thought it might be useful to introduce some online historical resources and reference material related to Asian history that I have become aware of (they may not be new, but should at least not be mentioned yet by an Asian History Carnival). If this catches on, let me recommend that these resources get added to the appropriate section (there are sections for links, organizations, databases etc.) of the East Asia Libraries and Archives wiki hosted by Frog in a Well when they are related to East Asia.

Japanese War Crimes – The National Archives has recently published a book with a collection of introductory essays and produced a great finding aid to help researchers looking for records related to Japanese war crimes. You can download the PDFs directly online.

Denshô – the Denshô website preserves the testimonies of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II and includes an archive with interviews and other materials.

NARA on Google Video – Though this link is well known, if you are interested in Asian history, and especially World War II, there are a number of movies found in the national archive that have made their way to Google Video.

Memory and Reconciliation in the Asia Pacific – Weekly Media Update – The George Washington University project on Memory and Reconciliation in the Asia-Pacific has a weblog which lists recent English-langauge media articles related to historical issues in East Asia.

Travelers in the Middle East Archive – The TIMEA archive is “a digital archive that focuses on Western interactions with the Middle East, particularly travels to Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” (Creative Commons license)

Chinese Text Initiative – The University of Virginia hosts a large collection of Chinese literature texts.

Hawaii Karate Museum Rare Book Collection – This museum has actually digitized some of their materials related to Karate.

The XXth Century – The University of Hawaii has a digitized collection of the 1941-1945 issues of this fascinating Shanghai magazine.

eScholarship Texts – There are many popular history texts related to Asian history that are fully viewable online, including a number of well known books that can be found on the oral examination book lists of PhD students. Well worth a look.

North Korean Captured Documents – While they are unfortunately not online, I have posted some information at Frog in a Well with a few tips for anyone wanting to look at these documents in the national archives.

The next Asian History Carnival will be hosted in May by 花崗齋之愚公 at Jottings from the Granite Studio.

First Visit to the National Archives

I just spent two days at the US National Archives at College Park, MD. It is a truly wonderful place to work as a researcher. Sunlight streams through the windows in the wide open reading room on the second floor where researchers sit at well spaced workstations with their happily plugged in laptops and work a box at a time from a trolley full of boxes delivered to them during the several archive “pull times” throughout the day. One corner of the second floor is filled with copy machines and a long “research assistance” room behind the workspace area is staffed by often elderly looking archivists who command the range of obscure knowledge required to guide you in requesting the materials most likely to be useful for your research.

To get to the National Archives complex (Archives II) I simply hopped on the Green Line of the Metro and took it to Greenbelt, where I took the R3 bus that goes into the archive campus and will drop you off near the entrance (you can probably get off at one of the earlier Metro stops and take the bus from there as R3 passes several Green Line stops).

There are a few rules and procedures a researcher has to go through to get to their materials but on the whole I found the whole process very smooth and everyone respectful and helpful along the way. When you enter the building you have to put your luggage through an X-Ray machine and go through a regular airport check-in-like screening. If it is your first visit, you then turn right and enter the orientation room where they make you view a computer slide presentation summarizing the important rules and fill out an on-screen form to register yourself as a researcher. After this you are issued a photo ID “researcher card” on the spot which is valid for one year. There are lockers in the basement to store most your possessions. All I brought in with me was my laptop, power cable, headphones, and a few stapled sheets of paper with some notes listing what archival documents I wanted to look at. No bags or pens are allowed inside (they provide pencils, note cards, and paper once you get in), papers brought in have to be approved/stamped, and laptops, scanners, and other equipment need to be registered. When you exit the protected area you have to check the serial number of your equipment against the registration receipt, open laptops to show that no documents are hidden within, and any photocopies you make while on the inside have “Secret” or “Confidential” etc. blacked out if this is written on them, get stamped “Declassified” and identified as copies.

Whenever you enter and leave the protected area they swipe your card. Whenever you enter a room to work in, they swipe your card, and check your materials when you leave. I never felt this process to be that annoying however, and the archivists were incredibly friendly everywhere I went. I left my belongings and microfilms at my workstation whenever I went downstairs and outside the protected area to visit their nice cafe or the convenience store for a snack.

I was impressed by the huge variety of people doing research here.
Continue reading First Visit to the National Archives