New DPRK related documents

There is a great collection of Cold War related docs at Woodrow Wilson Cold War International History Project. There is a really interesting collection of articles and (and in many cases newly discovered) primary documents related to the DPRK. (Thanks to Budaechigae for this awesome link) Incidentally, I am not really comfortable with many of the Korea related blogs around which constantly refer to the DPRK as the “norks.” I don’t know anything about the origin of the term but it has a similar ring to “japs”, “chinks”, and “gooks” etc. It is interesting to note that I haven’t seen any of them refer to the South Koreans as “soks” so I think there is a good possibility they are engaging in a kind of classic dehumanizing objectification of a perceived enemy. I hope they might consider using “DPRK” or even “N.K.” or something if they want an easy abbreviation for North Korea.

Scott Sommers: English Teachers as Migrants

Scott Sommers in Taiwan has a very interesting collection of postings on the issue of English Teachers as Migrants over at his Taiwan Blog. While the issues covered in the postings vary and I don’t have time to give my own take on everything here, I found lots of fascinating little tidbits. One of the postings has statistics showing that Canadian teachers outnumber American teachers, and there is a third large group of teachers: South Africans (17.66%) with South Africans being the largest single group in Taipei county. I have noted a similar prominence of Australian teachers in Japan (though I have no statistics on hand) and on the bullet train yesterday, I noticed that all the English announcements were done by an Australian.

Japanese Migration to China

A few weeks ago I attended a fascinating talk at Waseda by Emer O’Dwyer, one of my 先輩 (seniors) also studying under Andrew Gordon at Harvard. She has been very helpful in giving me advice on the PhD program, and I was impressed by her recent talk. She presented her research on “Emigration, Settlement, and Economic Competition: Japanese and Chinese Experiences in Dairen, 1905-1927″. As her title suggests, she talked about both Japanese and Chinese moving into Dalian 大连 (Dairen is the Japanese pronunciation), a city on the Liaodong 辽东 peninsula in northern China, and she focused primarily on a period when there were significant changes in the demographics of the city as the Chinese population grew rapidly and Chinese businesses began to displace those of the Japanese.

The most important discovery I think Emer made was when she explored the Japanese reaction to the increasing dominance of the Chinese in the local market. I would have expected the usual anti-Chinese ethnic slurs and insults. Instead, she found in the many journals and other writings of the period a fascinating phenomenon: the Japanese were deeply impressed by the Chinese laborers and used the Chinese as a model to follow in correcting their own “lazy”,”decadent”, and “inefficient” ways. They even saw Chinese clothes as more simple and economical, while their own was “irrational” and “not modern” in comparison.

Some time after I heard Emer’s talk about emigration to Dalian, I saw an advertisement for the most recent issue of the Asahi weekly AERA (No. 32) which had its focus on 日本人「職の中国」へ大移動」 (Massive migration of Japanese to the “middle kingdom of work”). The main article focuses on Japanese labor migration to Dalian. A closer look at the numbers shows that the migration isn’t exactly “massive” but still has some very interesting features…
Continue reading Japanese Migration to China

Korean Media and the Political Pendulum

Joel at Far Outliers mentions an article about a trend towards the “suppression of free speech” in South Korea. In addition to the harassment that a “free North Korea” group has apparently gotten from “self-styled ‘progressive'” protesters discussed in the article by Aidan Foster-Carter, Joel mentions the recent bizarre (and inexcusable) banning of online blogs by the South Korean government in an attempt to prevent distribution of footage of the recent beheading of a Korean hostage. He refers us to the great blog NKZone which also has a posting on this (pretty much any blog related to Korea has been talking about this of late).

My only concern with the Foster-Carter article and the sometimes rabid responses to the recent censorship and current left swing of Korean politics on the usually deeply conservative English-language blogs about Korea (in particular Marmot’s Hole and Flying Yangban over at GOPKorea – I should take care to note that despite my own raving liberal politics, I still read these two blogs, which are often excellent sources for recent Korea related news) is that I believe they are portraying Korea—and Koreans—as emotional slaves to political fashion who swing from one political extreme (authoritarian dictatorship and anti-communist ideology) to the other (a pro-unification, pro-North Korean regime) without conceding the exceptionally complex adjustments and changes that are going on in Korean society. One person whose opinions I respect the most on this are those of my friend Lim Jaehwan. His most recent posting on the Korean media emphasizes the continuing dominance of conservative newspapers in Korea, even as populist or left-leaning alternative media sources like OhMyNews are growing in popularity.

The “free North Korea” and “pro-America” segments of Korean society didn’t just die overnight. Nor, for all its faults and recent blunders, does the young and more radical government of South Korea mark the establishment of a North Korean puppet in the south that will crush all voices of “freedom” and dissent. The pendulum has surely swung, but it swung partly as a result, I believe, of a number of contingent political factors (the recent impeachment crisis, desire for reform, etc.) that may not consistently serve the current ruling party in the future. The new Uri Party has had, and will surely continue to have, its share of political excesses, but if it survives another election, it may undergo a process of “professionalization” similar to what is happening with the Taiwanese ruling party now. The adjustment from a party made up of old protesters who, upon gaining power, gathered in the halls of government to sing old anti-government protest songs (Jae – I’m waiting for you to post the details about this!) to one that can function with the bureaucracy, make level-headed and long-term policies, and appeal to mainstream voters in a time when a mass reaction to a political crisis is no longer available—all this takes time.
Continue reading Korean Media and the Political Pendulum

Karen Wigen: Creating the Modern Japanese Alps

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

The Nation and Time

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

Spiderman 2 and Civil-Military Relations

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.

Konglish

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