Komaba International Students House, the Baojia system, and Collective Punishment

Japan once implemented the old Chinese mutual-responsibility system called Baojia (保甲) in colonial Taiwan. In this traditional system, when one person commits an offense, the group of persons to which the criminal belongs are all held responsible. Of course Japan itself, and indeed most pre-modern societies have had similar practices throughout history. Unfortunately, collective punishment for an individual’s misdeeds remains a practice in many places today. These include some military basic training camps, a few despotic boarding schools for children, and the Komaba International Student House near Tokyo University.

A community of Ministry of Education research students/scholars (adults in their mid-20s to early 30s) live together in this very reasonably priced dormitory run by the AIEJ (Association of International Education, Japan) while they receive a generous scholarship to support their studies from the Japanese government. I lived here too, but moved out after only a few months because I got sick of being treated like a child. I still visit friends from time to time and today I see that things haven’t changed much. The current director is a little bit of an arrogant megalomaniac who believes he is a lord in a kingdom of foreign monkeys.

The most recent incident involves a fire in the kitchen of the first floor of one of the buildings. Many of the students cook in the kitchen and they leave their rice cookers and pots and pans in the kitchen. One person apparently did something that created a fire, filling the kitchen with smoke. The guilty party did not report their crime and no one knows who is responsible. The great lord director, in his infinite wisdom, decided to deal with this by holding the entire floor responsible for the crime. The kitchen, and everyone’s rice cookers, pots, pans – basically what all the students who actually cook their meals every day need to get by, was locked up and a sign today hangs there which reads that the kitchen will be closed, “until the person who caused this comes to the Director.”

Basically the first floor “bao” is being held collectively responsible for one individual’s crime. Perhaps they will talk amongst themselves and a snitch will turn the culprit in, a result that the original baojia system was designed to encourage. The Director explains that he is waiting for another result. Last time he did this, the students all got together and petitioned him to relieve them of their punishment. In his benevolence, he heard their pleas and forgave them, but, he says, by forcing them to band together and beg forgiveness as a group, he got them to admit they were, “a single community” who all had to take responsibility for each other’s mistakes. So this time, he says, he is also waiting for all of the students to together beg their overlord’s mercy.
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Travel Plans

I leave for a few days visiting Sayaka in Taipei tomorrow but I’ll be back in Tokyo on the first of March. I’ll be in Taiwan again for research from the 18th until the 28th of March. I’m moving out of my “lucky house” tomorrow and will be staying with friends for most of the time until August. My life will be a two-backpack vagabond existence for half a year but I look forward to it. It has a cleansing effect on me, scraping off just a few of the materialistic shards you collect with an apartment full of junk. Lars is moving into lucky house and I only hope he will get as much good fortune as I have had in the past year. I should be back in Stavanger, Norway for a month from mid-May until mid-June (my best friend Glenn is getting married!). During this time I’ll make a short trip to New York for a few days at the end of May for a conference on Chinese language education where I’m giving a workshop on OWLS. I might also be in Beijing helping present on the same software in July but I don’t know the details yet. I am rewriting OWLS from scratch so that will be my major tech-related project for the Spring.

Back to the US at the end of Summer

I’m still waiting to hear back from some grad schools on my application for a history Phd. However, after some unofficial rejections and acceptances via email, two official letters in the mail, and lots of help and advice from friends I think I’m finally over the anxious period of waiting. I cannot emphasize enough how important my friends and some of my professors have been in helping me throughout this process – it makes a huge difference. Yesterday, I got the official letter telling me that I was accepted to study at Harvard’s history department for the coming fall and for a number of reasons I have decided to take that offer. I’m obviously blown away by this and it hasn’t really sunk in, but at least now I can now concentrate on making the best of my remaining time in Japan. Except for a few short trips, I’ll stay here until mid-August.

International Library of Children’s Literature

Last week I paid a visit to the beautiful International Library of Children’s Literature on the edge of Tokyo’s Ueno park. I added an entry about it on my reference wiki with useful information for others who might also be interested. The library shares an old but nicely renovated building with a museum related to children. Use of the library is free and you can use the card you fill out upon entry for multiple visits. The library is connected to the National Diet Library and in addition to Japanese children’s literature also has a good number of children’s books from other countries – especially in Asia.

Since I wasn’t looking for anything in particular I just browsed their stacks. About half of their collection is open stacks and some of it organized in Photocopies are unfortunately somewhat expensive and can’t be done yourself. I ended up hanging out in their textbook section, comparing coverage of a few controversial issues in some of the newer high school textbooks.

“Weaving Resistance: The Days of the ‘Report from South Korea'”

Together with my friends Jens and Youngsoo I spent a chunk of this past Saturday afternoon at ICU for an event which ended up being broadly related to modern Korea. There were two main speakers, 池明観 who anonymously wrote the “Report from South Korea” for 『世界』 magazine from 1973 until 1988 under the alias “T. K.” and a second talk by 坂本義和, an apparently well-known professor at Tokyo University. The main event was presumably to hear 池明観 reflect on his writing about Korea during the period of military dictatorship but I found it to be a rambling discussion which was something of a combination of a review of modern Korean history and his own random reflections. I slept rather soundly through the middle half of his talk so it is possible it got better then.

Professor Sakamoto’s talk was much better…
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Street Vendor Gangsters?

There is a “gangster war” going on now between the huge Yamaguchi-gumi and something called the “Iijima-kai” (飯島会). Over the weekend there were a spat of murders of the Iijima-kai (More on the war in Japanese). I’m not usually interested in Japan’s crime, except when spending a pleasant evening with a couple of Yakuza movies. What surprises me the most about this past weekend’s violence is the fact that one of the gangs, the Iijima-kai, appear to be a bunch of street vendors（露店）!? Off the top of my head I can think of three varieties of street vendors that I see around the city: Foreigners selling cheap jewelry or fake stuff (clothes, train cards etc.), old men selling traditional Japanese snacks, and younger punks selling barely legal “love pills” and other “party products.” I can’t imagine the former joining something called the “Iijima-kai” and I can’t imagine the last group, which look like a bunch of deeply suntanned beach bums with little or no grey matter between their ears, could actually organize anything with “kai” (group) in its name. So are these gang members a bunch of potato and noodle venders? Why do I never see them in the Yakuza flicks?

Grad School

I’ve started getting unofficial results on some of my graduate school applications and I am happy to say that it looks like I will indeed begin a PhD in history somewhere in the US this coming fall. I will reveal what part of the country I end up in here at Muninn.net once all the official letters of rejection or acceptance have come in and I can be certain that there is indeed a dotted line somewhere waiting for me to sign away the next five years or more of my life. This will probably be sometime in early or mid-March.

The National Museum of Japanese History

I got off my nocturnal schedule and left early to visit the national museum of Japanese history outside of Chiba. I added an entry about the museum on my reference wiki. The grounds for the museum are on the old site of Sakura castle and it is surrounded by a very charming park. I ended up spending much less time than I expected I would and was able to go through its five large fixed galleries depicting various periods and themes in Japanese history in only a few hours. On the one hand I was impressed at how well done and clean the presentation of many things were. However, in the end, I was really disappointed to see how little attention modern Japan was given.

To be sure, the museum focuses a lot on folk culture, art, and many of the areas of Japanese history that students might not get to read about in detail in their textbooks. I actually thought it was refreshing that, while the museum was ordered roughly in chronological order, there was no silly march through Japan’s convoluted political history from one end of the museum to the other. There were interesting sections talking about the history of printing, on mountain farming techniques, images of monsters and spirits, and lots of huge models of villages, boats, and the houses of each period. Still, however, I was perplexed that the entire Showa period (1929-1989) was absent from the museum. This can’t be entirely explained by a desire to avoid portraying Japan’s most troublesome historical period. For example, the museum had an excellent audio/visual presentation on the Great Kantô Earthquake which clearly emphasized the horrible slaughter of thousands of Koreans in its aftermath. Yet, when we get to the end of the Taishô period, where the gallery focused on the rise of women’s magazines and movie theaters, I suddenly found myself at the exit of the gallery. There, a single section of a wall with a rather boring set of a dozen pictures of average Japanese comprised all that there was for the Showa period. It was labelled, “Snapshots of Japan during and just after the Pacific War”. I tried to picture what message the board was sending to the visitor. The only impression I was left with looking at these pictures was that everyone seemed very busy.

One possible explanation for the glaring absence of this period is that the Showa Memorial museum can be found in downtown Tokyo and the museum thus felt that there was no need for a whole exhibit focusing on the period. However, as I already mentioned, that exhibit focuses almost entirely on the daily life and experience of Japanese during this period, and essentially leaves untouched any portrayal of the tumultuous events and other changes which were going on in these decades of national mobilization and war. That only leaves only the Yushukan museum and its frighteningly revisionist narrative to tell the story of Japan’s difficult 20th century on a macroscopic level. There must be another museum that I have neglected. If I find it, I’ll post about it here.

The State of “Joint Study” of the Sino-Japanese War

I had the honor of serving as tea lady again for the Sino-Japanese History study group. Today was a special round-table of Chinese and Japanese scholars working on research of the Sino-Japanese War, beginning with a speech by 張海鵬 who is the 中国社会科学院近代史研究所所長 and followed by other Japanese and Chinese scholars making their own ten minute comments on the state of joint research in the field. As my own professor 平野先生 pointed out in his wrap up of the whole event, the keyword for this round-table was without a doubt 「率直」 (frankness, directness) which everyone agreed was something needed in their joint research of this sensitive historical period. I was surprised to notice a lot of mention of some of the more prickly questions in historiography that I felt are buried in the research I have seen from the group so far.
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