Taiwan: A Study Abroad Heaven

Sayaka has written a wonderful little summary (in Japanese) of why she thinks Taiwan is a fantastic place for students wanting to study abroad. It is mainly geared towards Japanese students but I have to say that personal experiences from a few short trips to Taiwan confirm almost all of her points, both positive and negative.

Also, don’t miss her posting (in English) about some Japanese Fanta commercials that came up during her Chinese language class. You can watch the commercials with Chinese subtitles here. UPDATE: Matt has a great posting explaining each of the Fanta commercials.

SCOTS

You can now search The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech database (Tip to Language Hat). It is a relatively small database which is of most use to linguists rather than historians but I’m always happy to see these kinds of projects grow in number. Although the project seems to be motivated by a growing Scottish national consciousness, they take a very pluralistic approach to their approach and want to provide a reference source on the languages instead of a single national idiom.

What is in an Aquarium?

I had some Kimchi Sundubu at a little Korean mom and pop restaurant in a mall north of my dormitory. As I tried to eat without splattering the bright orange soup sauce onto my copy of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations (a task I ultimately failed), I watched a couple approach the restaurant, the father holding an infant child. At the entrance of the store is a large blue aquarium. Inside the aquarium were various coral like decorations, a bunch of brightly colored tropical fish swimming about, and a stream of bubbles flowing from out of the rocks in the center to the top where their release at the top created an expanding star like shape.

The father held the infant near the glass of the aquarium and moved it here and there so that it might get a good look at the passing fish inside. I noted with great curiosity that the infant wasn’t the least bit interested in the fish. No matter where the father moved his child, it (he? she?) would focus its attention on the stream of bubbles in the center, and especially the top of this stream where the bursting of the bubbles created that bright star-like shape when viewed from an angle below the water.

The couple left after only a minute or two, but I kept staring at the aquarium. At first I felt sorry for the father who totally failed to get his infant to recognize the fact that various colorful living creatures were swimming about in the glass box full of water. However, when I actually took the time to look closely at the stream of bubbles, I shared, if only for a moment, that infant’s sense of delight and enchantment. I would go so far as to say that it pretty much made my day. It made me remember a line from Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, “It is through children that the soul is cured.”

What is so interesting about fish anyways?

Switched to WordPress

Some of you may already know that on November 1st, many the web sites belonging to my family and friends disappeared and over the next few weeks have only slowly begun to reappear. My own Muninn site was one of them, and there were various files missing from my backup (fortunately, all blog entries and the database was intact). Until today, I only partially restored the Muninn blog and decided that when I had the time I would go through with a switch to WordPress, something I have been wanting to do every since Movable Type abandoned the free software movement.

The short version of the story behind this saga of website downtime is that the horrible host we were using lost all their files, including backups (if they ever had them). You can read more about my horrible experiences with Blutekhosting if you like, but suffice to say that I have switched hosts for all the projects and continue to try to get the various projects I hosted up and running while not letting my studies suffer as a result.

I’m still in the process, however, so expect fewer postings, and a few glitches here and there at Muninn while I put a few hours aside every few days to restore a feature or fix a few bugs. In the meantime I’m also borrowing a site design (made by Alex King) that I’m also using at Frog In a Well until I can get some time to work on the design for the site.

UPDATE: I’m slowly working on the design. I have switched to another design, this time by Michael Heilemann and modifying it. I’m going to change the colors to a dark green eventually, but one thing at a time…

The Character 的

Today during my Korean class, our instructor was introducing everyone to Korea’s use of Chinese characters, or 한자. It was a welcome respite since I usually don’t understand about half of what the instructor is saying. Chinese characters, on the other hand, I feel much more comfortable with. At one point in the discussion our instructor introduced us to the character for 적(的) which we first found use for in a vocabulary word for this week 인상(印象). When you put the two together you can say that something was impressive, or left an impression (as you can in Japanese and Chinese with this same word).

Our instructor then made the most remarkable claim, “This character was invented by the Koreans, and doesn’t exist in any other language.” That is an interesting thing to say about a character which is the most frequently used character in the Chinese language. In Japanese, it is also very often used, especially in the creation of adjectives.
Continue reading The Character 的

Frog in a Well – Japan History Group Weblog

Today I want to officially “launch” a new Japan History Group Weblog at Froginawell.net. The title is 井の中の蛙, the Japanese version of an old Chinese proverb. You can read a detailed introduction to this new project at the site, including an explanation for the site’s title, but essentially the site is a multi-lingual (Japanese and English) weblog with a focus on the history of or related to Japan. Its target audience is primarily those studying Japanese history, either as undergraduate or graduate students, or scholars in the field. Some of the postings include Japanese or are written entirely in Japanese, and some background in Japanese history is assumed, but I think there is something to offer anyone with a love for history or Japan.

So far this group blog is made up of a small group consisting of two professors of Japanese history and a collection of graduate students. I hope over time to slowly increase the number of participants, until we have a fairly consistent flow of postings on a variety of topics. I especially hope to increase participation from Japanese students and scholars, or at least those studying the field outside of the United States. A primary goal I have for this project, also mentioned in the site’s initial posting, is to increase interaction and discussion between students and scholars in places like Japan and the United States. While we have only one participant studying in Japan to start, I’m going to be aggressively looking for more members for our team amongst my contacts in the Japanese academic world.

I think I will be keeping a heavy academic focus for this site that may unfortunately limit our readership. My reason for this is that I want to appeal to an audience of students and scholars who have little patience or appreciation for the world of blogs. There are no other group blogs related to the history of Japan, that I know of, and I hope this will help some people working in this field gain an appreciation for this medium of communication and writing.

The Japan history group blog is only the first of the “Frog In A Well” projects. I’m in the process of building a team of scholars and students for a China history blog (井底之蛙), a Korea history blog (우물 안 개구리), and one closest to my own heart: a fourth blog dedicated to transnational historical study of East Asia and/or its place in a broader global context. This last blog will also include duplicate postings from the other three which didn’t fit neatly within national boundaries.

Another Salvo: Kim Hee-sun’s Father

The accusations of the national betrayal and collaboration of relatives in South Korea’s politics continue with “confirmation” that the father of Uri party Kim Hee-sun’s father was a special operative working for the police in Japanese controlled Manchukuo (see older stories on this via Google News). The Uri party has been most aggressive in favoring a government investigation into collaboration in the colonial period. The anti-Uri Chosun Ilbo has, at least in the English edition which is all I can read at this point, been leading the way in reporting these charges in a Korea which is charged with emotions about its difficult history as a colony of Japan.

The claims of legitimacy by linking oneself to Korea’s independence movement (Kim Hee-sun apparently claimed to be the “daughter of the independence movement”) and the taint of treason that comes with being connected in any way to those who cooperated or worked for the Japanese colonial administration are powerful currency in the politics of the ROK. Only in the last few years, however, has this really bubbled to the surface in mainstream political discourse. Again, I can’t wait to get my Korean up to a level where I can plunge into looking more closely at the history of treason in the aftermath of the colonial period.

Koreans in Korean Textbooks

My 2nd year Korean textbook has this flattering view of Korea in its “culture” segment:

Koreans, especially women, are very sensitive to fashion. With seasonal changes, Koreans change their clothes (and shoes, in the case of women), conforming to the most fashionable trends. In the workplace too, men and women like to dress in a more or less uniform way. The quest for fashion and the wearing of similar formal attire are ubiquitous in Korean cities, perhaps because of Korean’ culture of uniformity and formalism.

Although diluted to a certain extent by the American culture of diversity and pragmatism, Koreans still place a considerable value on traditional uniformity and formalism in social interactions. In general, a Korean’s mind is tied to his/her immediate family, organization, and community. Koreans are very much concerned about how others are behaving and what others think about their behavior.1

Am I the only one who finds this description, designed to introduce foreigners to Korean culture deeply problematic? These kinds of generalizations, which I was only happy to make when I first started studying Japanese and Chinese years ago now totally disgust me and I find them totally unhelpful. As evidence, the picture shows a bunch of Koreans walking down the street in business suits. Exactly how is this different than any business sector in Asia, New York, London, or anywhere else? And can anyone tell me a culture where we can not find people “conforming to the most fashionable trends”? I’m also amused by the use of the term diluted by American culture.

1. Cho, Young-mee et al Integrated Korean: Intermediate One (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001) p. 49.

South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Law

I have been watching the development of South Korea’s fascinating “Truth and Reconciliation Law” very closely. The leading Uri party is digging up old skeletons by looking at the pro-Japan collaborators during the colonial period. This is especially interesting to me given my interest in the uses of treason in East Asia. In addition to a genuine desire to look into the dark aspects of the colonial period and point a few fingers, there are very powerful political motivations at work. Also, this law has actually caused some tension in ROK’s relations with Japan.

The most recent news is that the Uri Party have completed their final draft of the law. While I’m getting plenty of information on this through Korea’s English language media, I can’t wait until I can read more about this in Korean…unfortunately my language studies progress only slowly…

Obsolete Kana and Other Wacky Combos

Matt had a good question: How do we type some of those obsolete kana like ゐ and ゑ? I found the answer in the Apple ことえり help file which, unlike most Apple help files, was surprisingly helpful. For the above characters you type WYI and WYE, respectively. Japanese is not the only language with this problem. I occasionally forget how I type nü using the pinyin input method for Chinese (the answer is a wonderfully intuitive nv).

UPDATE: In a comment to this posting, my mom added a great link to a page listing various special roman characters and how to input them. I guess I could also add a plug for my own Pinyin to Unicode Convertor website which you can use to create unicode pinyin with tone marks.

UPDATE: Adamu pointed out that this list doesn’t have the ヱ from Yebisu beer! The list below is all hiragana. If, while typing Japanese you type “wye” you get ゑ but if you type “wye” with the “shift” key down, you can get the desired ヱ that is familiar to beer fans in Japan.

Kana Chart