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Session 1: Perspectives on the First Greater East Asian War and Its Aftermath, circa. 1560–1620
Organizer: Kenneth M. Swope, Marist College
Chair and Discussant: Benjamin Elman, Princeton University
The War of the Korean Peninsula, which lasted from 1592 to 1598, has been called the single most important event in the history of Asia. Memories of the heroic resistance against Japanese invasion was used to fuel nationalistic resistance movements in both Korea and China in the twentieth century. On a broader scale, the war has been accurately described as the first regional "World War" in Asia and it pitted militaries using modern technology against one another for the first time in Asian history. It also generated a plethora of folktales, art, memoirs, and memorials that continue to serve as reminders of the scope of the conflict. This panel shall offer a number of perspectives on the conflict, drawing not only from Korean, Chinese, and Japanese participants and observers, including soldiers, bureaucrats, monarchs, and Buddhist monks, but also examining the war within its larger international context. The papers will discuss how the war helped shape images of the self and the other before, during, and after the war and how politics, trade, and war intersected to wreak unprecedented damage on the Korean peninsula and cast a shadow over Sino-Japanese-Korean relations for the next four centuries while at the same time paradoxically contributing to a fluorescence of regional maritime trade and interaction in the early seventeenth century. Taken together these papers place the war into its proper context as a seminal event not only in Asian but also in world history.
Gunpowder Technology, Qi Jiguang, and the Japanese Invasion of Korea (1592–1598)
Laichen Sun, California State University, Fullerton
Despite a recent increase in scholarly interest, the Japanese invasion of Korea is still understudied in the West. Among the lacunae are gunpowder technology and the role of Qi Jiguang (1528–1588). Although the role of gunpowder technology in the war has long been recognized, a detailed treatment with a historical background and a technical perspective is still lacking. For only when viewed against the background of the piratic disturbances along China’s coast in the mid-sixteenth century and their eventual defeat by the tactics of the Ming general Qi Jiguang can the failed Japanese invasion of the 1590s be properly understood.
This paper first provides a brief review of the technical development of gunpowder technology in both China and Korea prior to the arrival of the Portuguese in Japan in 1543, and the subsequent Chinese and Japanese adaptation of European firearms and their implications. It then discusses the creation of the Qi army and its successes in curbing and suppressing Japanese (and Chinese) piracy. Special emphasis is paid to Qi Jiguang’s methods of training and use of gunpowder training, both of which were later employed by the Sino-Korean allies in battling the Japanese. The paper will next focus on the counterattacks of the Chinese and Korean allies against the Japanese and their use of firearms technology. Finally, the paper argues that even though he died ten years prior to the end of the war, Qi Jiguang should be regarded as a hero in the same light as Korea’s genius admiral, Yi Sunsin.
A Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness: The Priest Keinen’s "Korea Day by Day"
Jurgis Elisonas, Indiana University
There is a vast and shrill Japanese literature on Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s Korean war of 1592–1598. Japanese participants who wrote accounts of the invasion invariably invoked the myth of a primordial conquest of Korea by Empress Jingû as a historical precedent and justification. "Japan is the Land of the Gods" was their article of faith, and they gloried in the war of aggression. Commiseration with the dreadful fate of the tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children who were hunted down to be killed, mutilated, or enslaved by the Japanese troops is not a hallmark of this literature. If any of the authors felt doubts about his mission on the Korean peninsula, he kept it well hidden.
The striking exception is Keinen, a priest of the True Pure Land sect who accompanied the daimyo Ôta Kazuyoshi to Korea in 1597 in the capacity of his personal chaplain and physician. "An innocent abroad in this company, an unwilling eyewitness aghast at what he saw," is how I describe Keinen in chapter 19 of the new Sources of Japanese Tradition. When I suggest that he was the proverbial "simple soul," however, I do not for the moment mean to imply that he was a simpleton. Indeed, the work for which Keinen is known, Chôsen hinikki ("Korea Day by Day"; the Japanese title is also read Chôsen nichinichi ki) is a remarkably sophisticated literary document. At the same time a faithful historical source, an artful poetic diary, and a dreamlike stream of consciousness, it is in various senses the outpouring of a voice crying in the wilderness. Above all, it is a testimonial to the survival of the spirit of humanity and compassion in what Keinen called the arena of fighting demons.
Keinen’s "Korea Day by Day" will be discussed in the context of other Japanese sources, in particular the documents produced by other members of the army contingent led to Korea by Ôta Kazuyoshi.
Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Yang Hao and the Siege of Ulsan, 1597–98
Kenneth M. Swope, Marist College
Unlike the first invasion of 1592 when Japanese forces embarked upon a bliztkrieg that almost totally overwhelmed Korean resistance and forced the Korean monarch to seek refuge along the Chinese border, the second invasion of 1597–98 was characterized by bitter, protracted sieges, especially after the initial Japanese advance was checked at Chiksan, south of Seoul, in the autumn of 1597. This paper will examine one of these sieges, the allied investiture of the fortress town of Ulsan, which took place in the winter of 1597–98. This siege was part of a major allied effort to drive the Japanese out of Korea and even though it ultimately failed, the siege was instrumental in convincing many Japanese commanders that their eventual goals could never be attained. Records of the siege provide valuable details about siege tactics and are replete with accounts of valor and suffering. In addition to examining the military aspects of the campaign, this paper will look at the aftermath of the failed siege when a variety of charges resulted in the impeachment and dismissal of the allied commander of the operation, Yang Hao, and created a serious diplomatic crisis between China and Korea. In short, the Siege of Ulsan offers important glimpses into how factional politics influenced war-making and vice versa and can be seen as a microcosm of the second invasion.
Leaving Out Hideyoshi: Transformations in Maritime East Asia, 1590–1620
John E. Wills, Jr., University of Southern California
Immense political upheavals like the Hideyoshi invasions of Korea obviously are the products of larger and longer processes of change and in turn channel and catalyze further changes. But a focus on such a major event can keep us from seeing more clearly other patterns of change. What do we see more clearly in these decades if we leave out Hideyoshi? Among the changes that will be discussed and, I hope, are related to each other are the rise of the Nguyen realm with its port at Hoi An and major Chinese and Japanese participation; Manila near its peak as an attractor of Chinese trade, settlement, and violence; the Satsuma conquest of Ryukyu; Chinese and Japanese beginnings on Taiwan; and the flourishing and contradictions of the Macao-Nagasaki connection. While some of them are not necessarily directly related to the invasion itself, all of these developments constituted the larger fabric of maritime Asia as Hideyoshi and his contemporaries knew it and were affected in various ways by the momentous events taking place on the Korean Peninsula.
Session 21: Contesting Imperial Succession: Comparative Perspectives from Pre-Modern Asia
Organizer: Munis D. Faruqui, University of Dayton
Chair: Stephen Dale, Ohio State University
Discussant: Marina Tolmacheva, Washington State University
Keywords: succession, pre-modern, ideology, legitimacy, comparative.
This panel explores succession struggles in the Ottoman Empire, the Delhi Sultanate, Shogunate Japan, and the Mughal Empire. Historians of each imperial polity have separately debated the nature of succession; yet, little work has been done to compare these debates across national, regional, and historical boundaries. Through use of this single thematic, we seek to collectively pose broader questions about interpretation and methodology. To what extent, we ask, are comparisons of pre-modern Asian states possible? At what juncture do the particular historical trajectories of our case studies render comparisons impossible? As pre-modern historians, how are our readings of historical sources (court chronicles, legal documents, personal correspondence, visual texts) innovative? And can we learn, across regions, from each others’ interpretive innovations?
Tezcan, focusing on the Ottoman changeover from an open-ended system of succession to one that was ordered, demonstrates the promise of working from the interstices of legal, military, and economic history. Kumar investigates the rise to power of Sultana Raziyya, foregrounding the ambiguity and tension that marked the representation of a female dynast within Perso-Islamicate historical traditions. Frank highlights the continued participation of regional rulers in sixteenth-century shogunal and imperial politics thereby revising previous assumptions that they forged separate avenues of political legitimacy. Faruqui focuses on the neglected figure of Mirza Hakim, arguing that competition between the Mirza and the Mughal emperor Akbar (his half-brother) shaped the development of the Mughal Empire. Together, the papers on our panel reveal how "border-crossing" opens up possibilities for historical inquiry.
The Second Empire: The Ottoman Succession Revisited
Baki Tezcan, University of California, Davis
The Ottomans ruled over the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa for more than 600 years (ca. 1300–1922). Although each ruler was succeeded by his son until 1617, it was not always clear which one of the—usually several—sons, trained for rulership in provincial governorates, was going to assume the throne upon the death of his father. This open-ended system of succession brought about fratricide and quite a few succession crises.
Starting from the late sixteenth century, provincial governorates of princes phased out. In the seventeenth century, partly because of some demographic accidents, some younger brothers succeeded their elder ones. Eventually, the eldest surviving male member of the Ottoman family came to assume the throne upon the death of an Ottoman sultan. Younger male members would spend their days in the palace, practically in house arrest, until their turn in the sultanate would come.
This paper will focus on the period of transition from the first system of succession to the second (ca. 1560–1617) with a view to exploring the larger implications of the change within the context of other significant developments in the Ottoman polity such as the monetarization of the economy, the empowerment of the lords of law, and the increasing political importance of the central army. I will argue that the new system of succession is a symbol of the larger changes in the political power structures of the empire.
The Woman in the Accounts (hisab) of Men: Sultana Raziyya and Early Sultanate Society
Sunil Kumar, University of Delhi
Histories of medieval Islamicate societies record the presence of few women as monarchs. Sultana Raziyya, ruler of Delhi and parts of north India, 1236–40, was one of the few exceptions. For medieval Persian chronicles, this was a socially aberrant event and they were in somewhat of a dilemma at explaining the presence of a female monarch. In their line of reasoning, an ideally balanced social order denied women political agency and public office.
My paper studies Sultana Raziyya’s reign from two inter-related perspectives. One part disengages the rhetoric surrounding the Queen’s accession and rule from the social and political conditions of the thirteenth century. In my argument it is not Raziyya’s rule that is particularly curious but the manner in which the traditions of the Delhi Sultanate were synchronized with Islamic and Persianate paradigms. Recontextualizing Raziyya’s reign within the political traditions of the Ghurid and Delhi Sultanates brings out the interesting tensions in the narratives of the period. The second part of the paper develops Raziyya’s history and foregrounds the politics of the imperial household—amongst sibling contenders, the women of the harem, military slaves, Persian literati, and Delhi’s residents. In contrast to the narratives of her reign, Raziyya Sultana was hardly a transgressor in the fluid political domain of the Delhi Sultanate. Instead, her reign enlarges upon a political world and its representations: how a woman could, like many other contestants, aspire to political authority and gain success but have it reported with the greatest ambivalence.
Second in Kyoto? Capital Politics and Regional Legitimacy in Sixteenth-CenturyJapan
Ronald K. Frank, Pace University
It has often been suggested that the regional rulers of sixteenth-century Japan (sengoku daimyo) literally turned their back on the center of the Japanese polity, disregarding both the shogunal and imperial institutions and creating their spheres of power without need for traditional concepts of legitimacy. While this idea certainly captures the main thrust of the developments in sixteenth-century Japan, it neglects a very important sub-current, namely the continued involvement of regional rulers in the political events in the capital. In particular, the powerful daimyo of Eastern Japan, such as Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin, were involved in attempts to prevent the ouster of the last Ashikaga shogun in 1573 and later on to restore him to power. The paper will try to explore the motives these largely self-sufficient rulers had for meddling in political affairs of the faraway capital. Based on correspondence, public statements and subsequent accounts of chroniclers, the paper will show that daimyo did indeed have a need for continued political interaction with the center, all formal and factual "declarations of independence" notwithstanding.
Obscured Vision: Mirza Hakim, Akbar and the Mughal Empire
Munis D. Faruqui, University of Dayton
Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) is rightfully accorded a central place in Mughal historiography. Renowned general, administrator, ideologue, and patron of the arts, Akbar’s imperial polity survived in broad outline almost 150 years. Between the 1560s and the 1580s, however, Akbar’s legitimacy to rule the North Indian-based Mughal Empire was bitterly contested by his younger half-brother, Mirza Hakim, who ruled an independent state based in Kabul (Afghanistan). Mirza Hakim accused Akbar of abandoning the Mughal family’s Timurid heritage and with it Mughal receptivity to Central Asian models of statecraft. Until his death in 1585, the Mirza proved a formidable opponent; and yet his vision has been obscured.
This paper has three goals. The first is to restore Mirza Hakim to his rightful place as a serious competitor for Akbar’s throne. Silence surrounding the Mirza through history, I suggest, is a result of Akbar’s success in sanitizing the historical accounts written of his own reign, which, in turn, influenced all later histories. The second goal is to highlight how Akbar’s imperial vision emerged precisely in conversation and competition with his brother. Finally, this paper demonstrates the immense possibilities inherent in "border-crossing"; it goes beyond the conventional boundaries of South Asian history to focus on the connective links between South and Central Asia. I argue that we cannot understand the post-1550s trajectory of the Mughal Empire, or its particular diversion from Central Asia, without fully appreciating the earlier links as embodied in the vexed relationship between Akbar and Mirza Hakim.
Session 41: Asian Diasporas: Locating Home in Globalization
Organizer, Chair, and Discussant: Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Keywords: diaspora, nationalism, globalization, border-crossings.
In recent literature, the term diaspora has been used not only in its traditional sense—to describe the forcible displacement of a select group—but also to refer to the dual loyalty that migrants, exiles, and refugees maintain to the space they inhabit and to the space "back home." This panel seeks to broaden our understanding of practices of dual loyalties among contemporary Asian diasporas. Through the lens of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and Vietnamese diasporic communities, this panel seeks to explore the positioning of Asian diasporas within nationalist projects in the era of globalization. More specifically, the panel will examine Asian diasporas within the contexts of the modernization-building project of national economies and the construction of national identities in globalization.
The papers in this panel use original ethnographic field research to describe various links that members of a diaspora maintain with their natal or imagined natal territories. In so doing, they capture the nuances of the territorial placements and displacements that embody diasporic communities in their search for home. Moreover, they establish the dialectic relationship between the nation and diaspora in globalization. More specifically, the papers do this by showing how diasporic subjects turn to the symbolic figure of the nation to achieve status and identity in exile; how national identities and economies rely on the diaspora; and how multiple nations figure as home in the imagination of diasporic subjects. Overall, through the lens of diasporic communities, this panel will demonstrate how communities that step outside of their territorial boundaries help reify the nation-state in globalization.
Transnational Communities without a Consciousness? The Case of Japanese Brazilian Return Migration
Takeyuki Tsuda, University of Chicago
Ever since Brazilians of Japanese descent began "return" migrating to Japan as unskilled foreign workers in the late 1980s, they have developed an increasingly cohesive transnational community that consists of Japanese Brazilians in both Japan and Brazil. This paper illustrates the nature of transnational migrant communities by examining the various economic, political, media, and social connections that Japanese Brazilian immigrants in Japan have maintained with their homeland. In contrast to other types of communities, transnational communities tend to be more "deterritorialized" since they are based on telecommunications and media networks, which enable individuals scattered over wide geographical distances to sustain social relationships across national borders. Nonetheless, they are not simply "imagined" but often based on "real" interactive relationships between close kin and acquaintances. This transnational expansion of the Japanese Brazilian ethnic community, however, has not produced a corresponding transnational consciousness but has caused the Japanese Brazilians to intensify their nationalist sentiments toward their homeland of Brazil because of their ethnic and socioeconomic marginalization and other negative experiences as immigrants in Japan. In contrast to the nation-state, it seems that transnational communities do not have the spatial and cultural cohesiveness, as well as the ideological and institutional infrastructure, to instill a sense of loyalty and belonging among its members. As a result, transmigrants continue to define their experiences in nationalist terms.
Suspended Migrants, Nationalist Heroes: The Making of Filipino Seafarers
Steven McKay, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Globalization derives much of its power from the dynamism of its contradictions: at the same moment that it "frees" labor by drawing more workers into the international economy, it also increasingly compartmentalizes migrants, draping them with both old and new ascriptions that shape their identities while limiting their labor market mobility. This differential incorporation is examined through the case of international shipping, which has arguably been globalized for over 600 years and has relied on transnational labor for centuries, yet has long been characterized by its intense racial divisions of labor. Today, it is a curious fact that nearly 30 percent of all workers at sea—some 300,000 seafarers—are from a single country: the Philippines. The paper first traces the forces that have funneled Filipinos into the bowels of so many ships yet have also prevented them from advancing into their commanding heights. It focuses specifically on the role of the Philippine state and how, in its attempt to harness the resources of the diaspora, it has helped construct the Filipino seafarer as both pliant cheap labor and nationalist hero. Finally, the analysis turns to seafarers themselves and how, as suspended migrants—away from home but lacking a locally embedded workplace—they constitute their own identities within the transnational communities, hierarchies, and spaces of the ocean-going ships. The paper engages critical theories of segmented labor markets, ethnic niches, immigrant identities, and data from two months of participant observation in the Philippines to present one of the first close studies of Filipino seafarers and their rise in international shipping.
Instituting Diasporic Consciousness: The Chinese State and El Centro Chino Panameño
Lok Siu, New York University
This paper explores the role of the Chinese state in the formation of the Chinese diaspora. It examines El Centro Chino Panameño (the Chinese Panamanian Cultural Center) to illustrate the extent to which the Chinese state has integrated itself into the cultural and social fabric of the diaspora. Formed in 1983, the Chinese Panamanian Cultural Center is a joint project of the Chinese state and the community of diasporic Chinese in Panama. The Cultural Center sponsors community activities and houses a state-approved kindergarten through twelfth grade school. Analyzing the activities of the center and the educational program of the school, the paper will trace the process of Chinese state participation in the cultural, social, and political arenas of the diaspora. It will discuss both how the state exerts its influence through this cultural-educational institution and what is at stake in its involvement in the diaspora. This paper contributes to diaspora studies by illustrating the manner in which the deterritorialized homeland state (i.e., the nation) goes abroad to influence and shape the formation of the diaspora.
Seductions of Home and Narratives of Counter-Modernity in the Vietnamese Diaspora
Hung Thai, University of California, Santa Barbara
One manifestation of the "aging" Vietnamese diaspora is a transpacific arranged marriage market made available to women in Vietnam and Vietnamese men who live overseas in Western countries. In 1986, Vietnam shifted from complete state-sponsored socialism to partial free-market capitalism by adopting an economic policy called doi moi. Full diplomatic relations with the United States were established in 1995. Both of these events effectively re-opened Vietnam’s economy to the world, enabling the movement of capital, goods, labor, and bodies across its borders. Utilizing participant observation, in-depth interviews, and data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Immigration and Naturalization Service, this paper examines the intimate and personal dimensions that have occurred in tandem with processes of economic globalization in Vietnam and in the Vietnamese diaspora. I explore the ways in which transpacific husbands from the diaspora utilize globalization as a "gender strategy" to narrate discourses of counter-modernity in order to make sense of synthesized emotional economies of home and abroad. They simultaneously confront global forces and the material consequence of migration as they rely on home as the reference point for achieving masculinity. I argue that transnational migration creates the transnational connections that make transpacific marriages possible and simultaneously migration creates both demographic imbalance and human capital imbalances that make such marriages necessary. By focusing on geo-political identity and the globalization of marriages, I argue that contemporary transnational arranged marriages differ from traditional arranged marriages in crucial ways even as they resemble them in some ways.
Session 62: The Audience Question in Asian Media
Organizer, Chair, and Discussant: Yingjin Zhang, University of California, San Diego
This panel approaches the audience question in Asian media from an interdisciplinary perspective. A decade ago, Western film theorists like E. Ann Kaplan impatiently dismissed the validity of audience study in Chinese cinema when no such study had been conducted in English. Since then Asian audience study has been largely confined to contemporary media industries and often within specific national boundaries. This panel draws on the expertise of history, political science, communication, film and TV studies, and literature, and seeks to expand our knowledge of Asian media by contextualizing the audience question in historical, interregional, and transnational patterns of distribution and reception of not only Hollywood films but also Hong Kong and Japanese media products.
Stanley Rosen surveys a variety of responses to Hollywood’s dominance from Asian markets and speculates on relevant lessons for contemporary China. Zhiwei Xiao brings us back to Republican China by delineating a neglected aspect: the Chinese audience’s reception of American films. Lori Hitchcock offers an ethnographic account of Japan’s female fans of Hong Kong cinema and illustrates local appropriation of media products overlooked by theories of film spectatorship. Finally, Stephanie DeBoer moves between media and gender theories and unravels two decades of marketing the Japanese TV drama Oshin in Taipei, Hong Kong, and Shanghai and the female audiences’ contribution to the distinctively regional "Asian media." Overall, this panel intervenes in current debates on globalization, regional industry restructuring, and national policies by highlighting an interdisciplinary perspective on the audience question.
Hollywood, Globalization, and Film Markets in Asia: Lessons for China?
Stanley Rosen, University of Southern California
Global Hollywood (BFI, 2001) begins with multiple perspectives on "Hollywood’s power and the immensity of US popular culture." Whereas Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, gushes that audiences of all races and cultures on all continents have "affectionately" received American films, German director Wim Wenders laments, "Americans have colonized our subconscious." But American director John Ford argued as early as 1964 that "Hollywood is a place you can’t geographically define." Whether one celebrates Hollywood’s world cultural leadership, bemoans the seeming inevitability of U.S. cultural domination, or argues that "transnationalism" has made problematic the very opposition between Hollywood and the rest of the world, there is no question that Hollywood has been extremely successful in penetrating the film markets worldwide and that governments and film industries in the affected markets have responded in differing ways to the Hollywood challenge.
This paper examines Hollywood’s "global strategy" and the responses from a variety of film markets in Asia and attempts to draw conclusions about policies and countermeasures that have and have not worked. After examining the cases of South Korea, India, and Taiwan, I study the relevance of these "models" to the film industry in mainland China. Given the differing politics, economics, societies, and cultures in Asia, which policies have the potential for a successful transfer to China, and which ones have been devised to fit local conditions and are therefore untranslatable to other contexts? And what do current trends in Hollywood’s "Asian connection" tell us about the likely future of this relationship?
Hollywood’s Receptions in China, 1897–1950
Zhiwei Xiao, California State University, San Marcos
American film was first shown in China in 1897 and, after the outbreak of World War I, quickly dominated China’s market. For the next thirty years, with the brief interval of the Pacific War (1941–1945), Hollywood maintained a formidable presence in China. On average, it exported some 400 features to China each year, along with documentaries, newsreels, raw film stock, and other film producing and projecting equipment. In terms of its share of screen time in China’s major metropolis, American films made up over 85% of the scheduled movie programs. As observed by a commentator in the 1930s, Hollywood "replaced the missionaries, educators, gunboats, businessmen and English language literature as the most important venue through which the Chinese learned about Western cultures and life in industrialized societies."
However, current scholarship on pre-1949 Chinese cinema mostly deals with the leftist critique of Hollywood, analysis of Hollywood’s business prospects in China, and the Chinese government and cultural elite’s attempts to resist Hollywood. What is missing is a study of how the Chinese movie-going public responded to American films. This paper aims to fill this research gap and focuses on the diverse ways in which the ordinary Chinese reacted to American films, with the main thrust of the narrative gravitating towards the 1920s–1940s. Among key issues to be discussed are modernity, agency, and nationalism—all of which are central to cross-cultural studies and will provide a historical perspective on the current debate on China and globalization.
Hong Kong Cinema and Its Japanese Female Fans: A Comparative Study of Film Spectatorship Practices
Lori Hitchcock, Indiana University
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Japanese practices of Hong Kong film spectatorship were transformed by the emergence of a substantial—and unexpected—audience of female fans. In contrast with their Japanese predecessors and Western counterparts, the appeal of Hong Kong movies for this group of fans lay less in their generic, auteur, or camp appeal than in their stars. In particular, the generic and industrial hybridity of Hong Kong stars has been critical to their privileged reception among Japanese female fans, and the diverse ways in which these fans describe and act upon their interest in Hong Kong film (stars) suggests an alternative to recent scholarship on the transnational reception of Hong Kong cinema as ironic and resistant (within the context of the hegemonic Hollywood film industry). Moreover, it offers a more diverse understanding of the appeal of Hong Kong films to its international audiences than heretofore accounted for in such research. This paper is an ethnographic study of such Japanese female fans of Hong Kong cinema. It examines specific cases of star-oriented fan activity through the use of personal interviews, fan-created texts, and popular media accounts, tracing the ways in which Hong Kong cinema at once acts upon, and is utilized by, its female Japanese fans and, in so doing, constituting a counterpoint to the center/periphery orientation of scholarship on media spectatorship within the East Asian context.
Interrogating the Regional Audience: Gendered Imaginings of Asia, Technology, and Oshin
Stephanie DeBoer, University of Southern California
This paper addresses the disjunctive ways in which gendered audiences have been reconstructed against the ideals of a regional "Asian media" linked with the travel of the Japanese TV drama Oshin. Promoted by NHK in a wide range of markets and formats over the past twenty years, Oshin’s transnational reach has been important to the promotion of Japan’s centrality to a regional media identity—an identity here established through a rhetoric of the common experiences (of a "non-Western" modernity and gendered history) seemingly shared by the predominantly female viewers of this Japanese program in Asia and beyond. This paper interrogates discourses on the gendered "Asian" viewer through a site-specific examination of the ways in which Oshin spectatorship has been conceived in popular publications of three distinct Chinese language contexts—Taipei, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Such attention to the multiple locations through which its audience has been imagined complicates the cohesiveness of regional media purported by discourses of the "commonality" of women’s non-Western experiences of Oshin, even as it resonates with transnational feminist critiques of the ways in which women’s experiences are often explained as universal in the promotion of transnational media. Specifically, as opposed to the universality and connectedness of women across this humanistic TV program, these popular discourses suggest the disjunctive imaginings of gender’s relation to television technologies as its landscapes and histories are repurposed throughout Japanese and Chinese language contexts of the region.
Session 82: The Asia-Pacific War as Transnational Encounter: Experience, Representation, and Memory
Organizer: Ethan Mark, Leiden University
Chair: Louise Young, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussants: Louise Young, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Franziska Seraphim, Boston College
This interdisciplinary panel examines three different kinds of "borders" that have too neatly contained our understanding of the Japanese empire: (1) the supposedly unilateral colonial encounter between the Japanese militarists and the Asian people they oppressed; (2) the temporal severing of the Asia-Pacific War from the period post-1945; and (3) the related marginalization of Japanese colonialism in the larger sweep of national, regional, and global history.
In the aftermath of the Asia-Pacific War, forces including nation-building interests in postcolonial Asia, perennial Orientalism towards Japan, the demands of the Japanese postwar political order, and the postwar hegemony of the former Western colonial powers and their worldviews echoed and reinforced one another in representing the wartime Japanese empire as a deviant form of hyper-imperialism. This image has remained entrenched despite much recent work examining the fluid and interdependent nature of colonial relationships elsewhere.
To open up the discussion, each of the papers locates the process of empire writ large at a different site and highlights a particular story from a distinct methodological perspective: Ethan Mark’s historical reconstruction of ideology across borders in wartime Java, Yiman Wang’s feminist reading of wartime film imagery in Japan and China, and Steven C. Murray’s anthropological excavation of commemorative practices in postwar Palau. The two discussants with respective expertise in the cultural history of the Japanese empire and war memory in Japan and Germany are well placed to situate these different interpretive sites within a properly transnational and transwar narrative of 20th-century cultural history.
Asia between Colonialism and Postcolonialism: The Japanese-Indonesian Encounter in Wartime Java
Ethan Mark, Leiden University
Highlighting the multivalent workings of culture and power in the colonial encounter, this paper focuses on an interaction generally portrayed in starkly black and white, unilateral terms: relations between Japanese and non-Japanese Asians in the Asia-Pacific War. It identifies Greater Asianism as a transnational ideology of multiple interpretations whose appeals are not readily contained within the conventional conceptual boundaries of nation, right/left, oppression/resistance, or colonialism/anti-colonial nationalism.
This is illustrated in the experience of two complex personalities in Japanese-occupied Java, one Japanese and the other Indonesian, whose histories, social positions, worldviews, and agendas intersected: novelist Takeda Rintaro and poet/historian Sanoesi Pane. Takeda worked as a propagandist for the 16th Army that occupied Java in 1942; Pane was cultural commentator at Asia Raya, a newspaper staffed mostly by Indonesians and founded by the 16th Army propaganda department. Pane and Takeda later worked together in a Japanese-sponsored culture center. Both were progressive, leftist literati respectively representing the voice of their societies’ rising, disenchanted, modernizing middle classes in a time of a crisis of capitalism, of Western institutions, of imperialism, of Western modernity itself.
In their own ways, each envisioned a postcolonial "Greater Asia" that might overcome the inequities, contradictions, and tensions of the modern Western status quo while at the same time enjoying its benefits. Moreover, each saw the possibility of Greater Asia reflected in one another’s cultures. Highlighting their constructions of Greater Asia reveals the hidden legacy and relevance of this wartime cultural encounter to the postwar, postcolonial world.
Between the National and the Transnational: Japan’s Pan-Asianism through the Lens of Yamaguchi Yoshiko
Yiman Wang, Haverford College
Japan’s expansionist policy, starting with the 1894 war with China and culminating in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere during WWII, constituted a grave form of inter-Asia colonialism. The popular culture that it gave rise to, however, manifests complexity that demands our reconsideration of the relationship between entertainment and propaganda, ideological interpellation and situated reception, and colonialism and fantasy of community, especially when these processes take place across borders. When assessing these highly ideological wartime cultural forms, one needs to ask how a national expansionist project managed to acquire a certain transnational appeal, and how this bears upon contemporary East Asian popular culture.
I approach these questions by examining the construction of Yamaguchi Yoshiko, the Japanese-born and China-raised singer-actress, passing as a Chinese, and a pan-Asian idol embodying the promise of East Asia co-prosperity. I ask: Why was Yamaguchi considered especially suitable for the inter-Asia colonialist agenda? What factors contributed to her pan-Asian appeal? What utopian potential did her continuous border-crossing and identity-shifting suggest, and how did it help to transport the pan-Asian audience from the everyday experiences of geopolitical boundaries to a cosmopolitan realm where agency could be imagined in equitable terms?
My analysis is based on Yamaguchi’s Manei (Manchurian Film Cooperative) films and publicity materials in the early 1940s fanzines. By recontextualizing and historicizing the making of this wartime icon, I seek to reassess the cultural politics of Japan’s pan-Asianism. This will in turn provide a new angle for understanding the transnational appeal of Japanese-made pop culture in our digital age.
War and Remembrance on Peleliu, Palau: History and Tourism for Islanders, Americans, and the Japanese
Stephen C. Murray, University of California, Santa Barbara
This paper examines competing representations of war memories on the island of Peleliu, site of a major battle between Japan and the U.S. in WWII. It contrasts the way the island’s residents conceive of history and experienced the war with the American and Japanese conceptions of the battle’s meaning.
For the Islanders, history has always been private and inextricably tied to stories of lands and landmarks, which were devastated in the fighting. Residents struggle today to reconstruct their society, retain and recover their prewar past, and attract tourism, an essential component of their economy.
Japanese memorial tourists (Ireidan) have collected the bones of their dead and erected monuments whose messages range from leftist expressions of regret to rightist invocations of the prewar emperor system. More aggressive Japanese nationalist groups have rebuilt Shinto shrines from the Nanyô period of Japanese administration (1914–45). These shrines and monuments thus reflect the contentious debates within Japan itself regarding interpretations of the war and Japan’s responsibility for it.
American service units for their part have erected memorials dedicated to the heroism of their members during the battle. The US National Park Service is actively promoting a large battlefield park that would become part of the U.S. park system and consume over one-quarter of the island’s land. Dependent on aid and tourism from the former combatants, Peleliu’s residents again find themselves caught between the two powers that have pursued their own interests on the island for almost a century.
Session 100: Transnational Histories of Japanese Food Culture
Organizer and Chair: Jordan Sand, Georgetown University
Discussant: Sumie Jones, Indiana University
Keywords: food, cuisine, trade, cultural exchange, cultural history, material culture, Edo, Meiji, postwar.
The rapidly growing field of food history offers a wealth of possibilities for interpreting culture outside the traditional frame of politically defined boundaries. Despite the substantial research in Japanese, little work on Japanese food history has yet appeared in English. The few available works, such as Ohnuki-Tierney’s Rice as Self and Ishige’s History and Culture of Japanese Food, focus primarily on national food culture. This panel is organized around historical themes that highlight questions of trade and cultural exchange in order to resituate Japanese food globally. Timon Screech’s study of foreign cuisine in Edo puts one more nail in the coffin of sakoku by showing that early modern Japan engaged with the outside world not only at intellectual and high cultural levels but in everyday practice. Jordan Sand’s study of MSG situates this Meiji Japanese invention in the context of the global industrialization of food production, revealing the fluctuation of meanings attached to a food additive in different moments of its twentieth-century diffusion. Kim Brandt’s study of the post-WWII macrobiotic movement examines a little-considered Japanese cultural export and the political ideologies at its origin. Spanning the long modern era, thematically diverse yet tightly focused methodologically, this panel offers a first step toward incorporating Japan into the global history of food.
Western Dining in the Edo Period
Timon Screech, University of London
An enthusiasm for Western food spread across Japan as part of the Meiji regime’s attempts to "advance" the nation on the road of Civilization and Enlightenment. Western-dining was not unknown in the Edo Period, however. Although Western-style meals were never the norm in Edo, small-quantity imported items did feature on many menus, and candies and wines were frequently available. Here the term "dining" is used to indicate more than just the ingestion of food, including rather the full experience of consumption, in a meal or as part of a larger social event. In certain contexts, people would take routine Japanese food and drink with wine glasses and spoons and knives.
Visual and literary works of the period will be adduced to show how Western dining was replicated in Japan. There is ample data, from the top echelons (wine was given by the Dutch East India Company to the shogun) and the most louche (Pleasure Quarter banquets) to the quotidian (candy vendors on the streets). But more importantly, the novel dining experience went beyond the exotic enjoyment of unfamiliar tastes or utensils. It proposed a new relationship between the consuming body and the world around it. Of prime relevance were the transfer of executive power from the chopstick to the knife and from the opaque cup to the transparent glass. This paper will also explain the cognitive and metaphorical dimensions of these changes.
"You Are All Sanpaku": Zen Macrobiotics and the Post-WWII Recuperation of Japan
Kim Brandt, Amherst College
This paper explores the origins and history of the so-called macrobiotic diet during the early postwar decades of the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, I examine texts by macrobiotic theorist Sakurazawa Yukikazu (better known in the West as "George Ohsawa") and some of his disciples, notably the Kushis (Michio and Aveline), to consider the postwar and Euroamerican adaptation of dietary principles formerly associated with Japan’s mobilization for total war. Sakurazawa and his students exported his ideas to Europe and North America during the 1950s and early 1960s. They were especially successful in the United States, where the philosophical and dietary program Sakurazawa dubbed "Zen macrobiotics" gained a devoted following among groups of Japanese and Americans in New York, Massachusetts, and California. Macrobiotic activism, which was linked in early postwar Japan to world federalism and anti-nuclear pacifism, soon became associated in the U.S. with several strands of the American counterculture, namely Buddhist-influenced mysticism and the natural foods and alternative medicine movements. I wish to consider the changing meanings and practices attached to foods such as brown rice, miso, and tofu as they were transmitted from wartime and postwar Japan to 1950s and 1960s America. I propose that macrobiotic activists—both Japanese and American—played an important role in helping to recuperate Japan for U.S. consumption after World War II.
MSG: Japan’s Greatest Contribution to World Cuisine?
Jordan Sand, Georgetown University
In terms of its scale of distribution and penetration into food products around the world, monosodium glutamate has probably had more global influence than any other foodstuff or culinary concoction to emerge from Japan. This essay will look at the history of this ubiquitous and much-maligned Japanese invention in three stages: first as part of the industrialization of Japanese cuisine that began in the late Meiji period; second as a mid-twentieth-century export that had a particular impact on the Asian continent; and third as the center of contemporary debate about the science of flavor. The growth of the Ajinomoto company, MSG’s sole manufacturer, is closely tied to the industrialization of food production and modernization of cooking practices in Japan and elsewhere. How did Ajinomoto persuade Japanese and subsequently others to introduce this unfamiliar white powder into their kitchens? Why have Westerners come to associate MSG particularly with Chinese food? And what is at stake in claims that the flavor sensation it produces, referred to by Japanese and some non-Japanese specialists as umami, belongs outside traditional Western flavor classifications? Scientific opinions and popular tastes form in a constantly evolving cultural context. The aim of the essay will not be to pronounce monosodium glutamate chemical or natural, toxic or safe, a fundamental flavor or otherwise, but to provide some historical and cross-cultural perspective on these issues. Retracing the emergence and global diffusion of this Japanese invention should thus illuminate questions in both Japanese and transnational cultural history.
Organizer: Andrew Scobell, U.S. Army War College
Chair: Charles E. Morrison, East-West Center
Discussant: Anthony Smith, Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies
Keywords: China, Japan, Pakistan, Southeast Asia, United States, terrorism, Global War on Terrorism.
Much attention has focused on the self-declared Global War on Terrorism being waged by the United States. While there has been some consideration of other countries, this has largely been in the context of how the rest of the world is helping, hindering, or indifferent to the efforts of the United States. Extremely little attention has focused on how individual states are tackling the threat of terrorism in both its transnational and domestic variants.
This panel considers the experiences of Confucian and Islamic countries in Asia since the tragedy of September 11, 2001 (China, Japan, Pakistan, and selected countries in Southeast Asia). The panel examines the impact of domestic politics, such as form of government and the role of the military, and explores the influence of social and cultural factors, such as religion and ethnicity, on how these states have responded to terrorism within the larger context of the international system.
Al-Qaeda and Its Associated Groups in Southeast Asia: Threat and Response
Rohan Gunaratna, Nanyang Technological University
With the U.S.-led coalition intervention in Afghanistan in October 2001, the security environment in Southeast Asia changed dramatically. To survive the U.S.-led global hunt, Al-Qaeda (AQ) has steadfastly relied on its associated Islamist groups worldwide, including its Southeast Asian counterparts, to continue the fight. For instance, a Southeast Asian group, Jemmah Islamiyah (JI), trained, financed, and ideologized by AQ, conducted the coordinated simultaneous bombings in Bali, the world’s worst terrorist attack since 9-11. Southeast Asian governments have uncovered links between AQ and local groups. To meet the current and emerging threat, Southeast Asian governments are slowly but steadily strengthening their intelligence and strike capabilities. Cooperation between ASEAN countries includes: harmonizing legislation, common databases, joint training, and combined operations.
In Southeast Asia, the terrorist threat has moved beyond AQ. Although terrorism is not new to the region, both its scale and nature have changed since 9-11. AQ imparted ideological, financial, training, and operational support to groups such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines, Lashkar Jundullah in Indonesia, and Kumpulan Mujahidin Malaysia in Malaysia. AQ is increasingly relying on these Southeast Asian groups for sanctuary, support, and strike operations. AQ ideologically penetrated regional and local groups fighting territorial struggles. They have adopted AQ ideology and tactics. AQ’s most enduring impact on Southeast Asian groups has been to instill in them a sense of duty to fight near enemies but also the distant enemy—the United States of America.
Terrorism: Implications for Pakistan’s Security
Salma Malik, Quaid I-Azam University, Islamabad
Until the 1980s, terrorism was not so dangerously intrinsic in Pakistan. Religion was by and large a personal issue, deeply ingrained in the national identity but demarcated from the daily functioning of the state. With the advent of Martial Law and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the clergy’s hand was infinitely strengthened, by the influx of arms and money from outside countries sponsoring the jihad against Soviet occupation. The rise of transnational religious groups and most importantly Pakistan’s own domestic situation were instrumental in making Pakistan a hotbed of terrorist activities.
Terrorism took on global significance in the wake of September 11, 2001. Suddenly the world became aligned against those supporting the U.S. in its unilaterally pronounced war against terrorism and those who did not. For Pakistan it presented opportunities to manage its domestic terrorism problem, to recapture its lost international standing, and to reclaim its status of trusted U.S. ally. However, the government of Pakistan was in a precarious situation. On the one hand, Islamabad faced immense pressure from domestic forces, both religious and secular, for its decision and on the other hand this international support was entirely conditional with no long term guarantees.
This paper will address the following questions: How have domestic forces reacted to Islamabad’s decision to side with Washington? What factors compelled Pakistan to take this course of action? What has been the impact on Pakistan of the entire experience since 11 September?
A New National Security Agenda? The Impact of the "War on Terrorism" on Japanese Security Thinking
Sheila Anne Smith, East-West Center
In the weeks following 9/11, Japan’s Prime Minister articulated a firm position of support for the U.S.-led "war on terrorism." New legislation passed the national Diet that allowed for the dispatch of forces to support U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, and steps were taken to cooperate in identifying and stopping the flow of financial resources to countries that might harbor or support international terrorist activities. Leading Japanese politicians visited capitals in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East in an effort to offer incentives for cooperation with the United States. Within Japan too the impact of 9/11, and subsequent efforts to devise a "coalition" of international support for the U.S., had a broad impact on public perceptions of Japan’s own security needs. Two specific changes in public attitudes can be traced to this period: first, at a general level, the Japanese population began to question openly the long-standing notion that Japan should mobilize its military only when attacked. Second, the Bush Administration’s later identification of North Korea as a member of the "axis of evil" gave further impetus to ongoing Japanese efforts to confront Pyongyang over outstanding security-related issues (such as the past abduction of Japanese by North Korean agents and drug smuggling). This paper will examine the impact of 9/11 on Japan’s security policy agenda, as well as on the domestic policy related to potential terrorist activity, to identify and analyze how it has affected Japanese perceptions of what constitutes national security.
Terrorism and Chinese Security
Andrew Scobell, U.S. Army War College
Terrorism as a major concern for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a relatively recent phenomenon. It only became a topic worthy of note domestically in the 1980s, a topic of significant concern in China’s Asian neighborhood in the 1990s, and the subject of great anxiety at the global level during the first decade of the 21st century. While Beijing has a heightened awareness of ethnic separatism, religious extremism, and terrorism in border regions, and a new appreciation of terrorism as a global problem, China’s leaders view their principal terrorist threat as coming from alienated Han Chinese in the urban heartland.
Terrorism has caused considerable alarm in China during the first decade of the 21st century because it is seen as threatening all aspects of national power, including political stability. Terrorism threatens China’s internal security, Asia’s regional security, and international security. These aspects tend to increase the degree of alarm in Beijing.
This paper examines how Chinese civilian and military leaders define and conceptualize terrorism and how this has changed since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The paper considers how Beijing assesses the threat of terrorism on three levels: domestically, on China’s periphery, and at the international level. It examines how the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and subsequent events, including the ongoing U.S.-led global war on terrorism, have affected Chinese foreign relations and domestic politics.
Organizer and Chair: James L. Watson, Harvard University
Keywords: globalization, East Asia, consumption studies, biotechnology.
This panel focuses on a specific global food chain, linking North American farmers with East Asian consumers. Transgenic soybeans (resistant to Roundup Ready™ herbicide) were created by the Monsanto Corporation in the 1990s and now constitute more than 70 percent of United States and Canadian soy production. Contributors to this panel are members of an international team of anthropologists who are investigating the reaction to bioengineered soybeans in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Members of the team began the project with a visit to Henry County, Illinois—a major center of transgenic soybean production. Each paper investigates the economic, political, and cultural issues that condition Asian consumers’ responses to the new crop. This project is part of a broader effort to bring primary production (especially agriculture) back into the central discourse of anthropology.
Japanese Buyers, Canadian Farmers, and the Moral Economy of Non-Transgenic Soybeans
Gavin H. Whitelaw, Yale University
This paper is based on field research carried out in Ontario, Canada, and in Nishiyoshino-mura, Nara Prefecture, Japan. Many farmers in Ontario pride themselves on producing high-quality, non-transgenic soybeans for Japanese consumers who are increasingly resistant to new, bioengineered varieties produced in North America. The relationship between Canadian producer and Japanese buyer is a highly personal one, reinforced by annual visits to farms in Ontario. On the consumption side, Japanese bean curd manufacturers are keen to avoid Roundup Ready™ produce and pay a high premium for non-transgenic varieties. An investigation of small-scale bean curd enterprises in Nishiyoshino and their local clientele demonstrates that Japanese resistance to bioengineered foods is linked to recent food scares (mad cow, contaminated milk, etc.). Cultural sensitivities and personal experience thus condition the response of Japanese consumers to bioengineering and the globalization of food chains.
Chinese Responses to Genetically Modified Foods: The Soybean as Test Case
Yuhua Guo, Tsinghua University
This paper examines the recent history of China’s efforts to create an indigenous biotechnology industry, with emphasis on genetically modified food products. New biotech ventures started in the late 1990s in response to American successes, including Monsanto Corporation’s invention of Roundup Ready™ soybeans. Field research was carried out among American soybean producers in Henry County, Illinois, to gather background information on the new technology. In China, interviews with consumers of soy products (bean curd, soy sauce, etc.) revealed mixed views on the health and safety of the new crops. Most Chinese consumers are unconcerned about the long-term effects of transgenic soybeans. Meanwhile, in response to the American challenge, Chinese companies are seeking to create local versions of bioengineered crops. This paper demonstrates that the Chinese reactions to transgenic soybeans parallel in interesting ways China’s overall response to globalization.
Resisting American Imports: Food Politics in South Korea
Okpyo Moon, Academy of Korean Studies
In South Korea the response to American-inspired bioengineered foods has been almost uniformly negative. This paper explores the economic, political, and cultural reasons for this resistance. Fieldwork was carried out on both sides of the global food chain (in Henry County, Illinois, and in Seoul). American farmers do not see their crops as an instrument of foreign policy or as a mechanism for globalization; in their eyes transgenic soybeans are healthy and environmentally friendly. The majority of Korean consumers, on the other hand, make a direct connection between American food products and American government policies. Korean farmers unions and anti-globalization organizers have worked hard to demonize transgenic food products as inferior, unhealthy, and counter to Korea’s national interests. This paper explores both sides of the global soybean trade in an effort to understand the life worlds of primary producers and end-product consumers.
Taiwan and the Biotech Revolution: Competition and Globalization
Kwang-ok Kim, Seoul National University
Taiwanese consumers, unlike their counterparts in Japan and Korea, appear to be basically unconcerned about the importation of North American bioengineered food products. This paper examines the reasons for this reaction, drawing on field research in Taipei as well as a first-hand investigation of transgenic soybean producers in Henry County, Illinois. Taiwan’s ambiguous relationship with the United States is no doubt one reason why Taiwanese consumers have not rejected the new foods; close ties between Taiwan and the United States are reinforced by the import-friendly Taiwanese economy. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s government has consistently supported high-tech ventures that foster local prosperity. Biotechnology, with respect to both food and medical sciences, is held in high esteem by ordinary Taiwanese. Furthermore, Taiwan has not experienced a seemingly endless series of food scares of the type that terrified Japanese consumers in recent years, nor has Taiwanese anti-Americanism reached the level of vehemence characteristic of Korea. Cultural, economic, and political developments thus explain why the transgenic soybean has not become a symbol of anti-globalization in Taiwan, as it has elsewhere in East Asia.
Session 160: Replaying Modernity and Globalism in East Asia
Organizer and Chair: Helen Funghar Siu, Yale University
Discussant: William Kelly, Yale University
For two decades, the Chinese government has made serious efforts to liberalize its economy. Officials and the public are repositioning themselves with unabashed determination. Officials build their political future on grand infrastructural projects. Modernity is equated with airports, industrial parks, WTO membership, and international sports. Farmers pursue their dreams of becoming modern by migrating to urban areas and endure intense discriminations. City residents assert their new freedoms by an energized consumption of private housing, designer apparel, foreign fast food, women, and modern lifestyles. The energies are feverish, yet the language of the state intertwines with people’s fervent embrace of the global market. Commodities or images, local engagement reflects a volatile one-dimensionality. The two papers on China examine the phenomenon with ethnographic observations.
The nature of this agentive moment in China is contrasted with the ambivalence in Japan two decades into a recession. Postwar Japan has contributed to the definition and practice of modernity and global affluence. Its engineering talents have supplied the world with commodities. Its banks have financed global real estate. Confidently middle class, its popular culture has been widely sought after. Yet, many Japanese engage the new century with a different bundle of emotions. Consumers are hesitant. In government maneuvers and popular discourse, the pill is viewed as an encroachment of global marketing and a disruption of the social fabric. The presence of foreign migrant workers, whose cheap labor sustains a sagging economy, challenges the once mono-ethnic society.
What then are the structures of meaning and practice surrounding modernity and globalism in East Asia as their uncritical imaginings are replayed in specific historical junctures? The cultural styles of Chinese and Japanese populations will continue to impact East Asia in profound ways. The papers explore the styles with this larger framework in mind.
"New Beijing, New Olympics": The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games in China’s Quest for Modernity
Susan E. Brownell, University of Missouri
When Tokyo hosted the Olympic Games in 1964 and Seoul in 1988, it symbolically marked the arrival of Japan and South Korea as world powers. Chinese leaders similarly view a Chinese Olympic Games as proof of China’s emergence as a modernized nation, a view that is widely supported by the Chinese people. Based on interviews with Chinese sportspeople, the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee, and China’s senior member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), this paper discusses the meaning of modernity in China today as seen through the lens of the 2008 Olympic Games. The main conclusion is that modernity is not as linked to a concern about Westernization as might be expected. Becoming a modern nation is seen as a way in which China can not only fully express its Chineseness but also sinicize global culture, a conception that was embodied in the official slogan proclaiming a "high-tech Olympics, a civilized Olympics." This perhaps indicates the self-confidence of the most populous nation in the world that it can transform world culture rather than being transformed by it. This contrasts with the modernizing goals of groups in the West—including IOC members—who hope the Games will improve human rights in China. Top Chinese leaders did not openly express concern about this possibility during the bid since they do not acknowledge that there is a human rights problem in China.
Fashioned Modernities vs. State Authority
Tiantian Zheng, State University of New York, Cortland
Nightclubs emerged in the post-Mao era following the initiation of economic liberalization in China. This paper examines the male patrons of the karaoke bars in Dalian, a city in the northeast which flaunts its foreign investment, migrant labor, and modern skyline. Although the consumption of sexual services of hostesses (mostly women from the surrounding rural areas) is illegal and subject to different degrees of harassment by local police, the patrons claim to be pursuing a "modern" lifestyle in tune with China’s new market economy and human nature.
The rationale for their behavior is borrowed in a simple-minded way from what they consider to be a "Western" model of the natural society—a social system in harmony with both good and bad aspects of human nature. The government is blamed for putting artificial restraints on their natural desires—such as lusting after wealth and women.
Based on fieldwork among the bar hostesses and their male patrons, I would argue that in the post-reform decades local agents challenge state authority in diverse ways. These male patrons loudly use a hollow state ideology of modernity and market consumption to pursue their hearts’ desires. At the same time, their rationale disguises a cacophony of defiant sentiments. It is too early to judge whether this behavior and rationale constitute a broad-based critique of state authority. The men’s determination to turn their backs on decades of revolutionary deprivation, however, is highly charged and at times desperate.
An Unpopular Pill: Modernity, Globalism, and Japanese Birth Control
Allison M. Alexy, Yale University
Despite the best efforts and substantial funds of large, predominantly Western pharmaceutical companies, the low-dose birth control pill was banned from Japanese markets until September 1999. Since that time, less than 5% of Japanese women who are using birth control are using the pill. There are many popular medical(ized) explanations for why Japanese women are not using the pill; it increases cancers in women who take it, increases cancer rates in the general population, causes harm to a fetus conceived while a woman is on the pill, and increases rates of STDs. Further, some people believe that the pill will threaten the Japanese social fabric; because younger generations are waiting longer to marry and women are having fewer children, there is already a public discourse on "parasite singles" and how their actions are changing Japanese society. Thus, within Japanese discourses, the pill’s low popularity is described in both medical and social terms.
Yet the pill’s entry into the Japanese market offers a productive vantage point through which to consider modernity and globalism. As women weigh their birth control options, the pill can index globalization, global marketing, and the power of multinational corporations. In addition, the bifurcated social agenda of the Japanese government involves the pill in attempts to increase the birth rate while keeping women in the labor force.
Based on ethnographic accounts of a women’s healthcare center in Tokyo and of pharmaceutical marketing executives, this paper considers how meanings of modernity and globalism are shaped and reshaped in birth control practices, doctor visits, and marketing campaigns surrounding the pill.
Migrant Perspectives on Japanese Modernity
Joshua Hokata Roth, Mount Holyoke College
The mass production of high-technology consumer products and the rise of an affluent middle class have garnered for Japan the status of a modern nation. Many consider Japan to have achieved not merely a Western-defined modernity, but a viable alternative modernity, through the successful blending of Western influences and indigenous traditions. Foreign migrants in Japan, however, provide a very different perspective on Japanese modernity. This paper focuses on the perspectives of Japanese Brazilians, several hundred thousand of whom have migrated to Japan since the 1990s.
For Japanese Brazilian migrants in Japan, the apparently successful blending of Western-defined modernity and Japanese tradition appears as a set of dystopic dichotomies. Before migrating to Japan, Japan’s traditionalism was inherent in its status as homeland. It represented the warmth of family and social bonds. At the same time, they have imagined Japan as a high-tech wonderland. However, after migrating to Japan to work, the locus of modernity and tradition seemed to have been switched. Most have worked through labor brokers and small subcontractors. Conditions have been lousy, equipment antiquated. Moreover, contractual work relationships mediated by labor brokers have meant that most Japanese Brazilians have been marginalized within the workplace rather than brought within it as full members. Rather than modern products and traditional relationships, migrants have experienced antiquated products (tradition read negatively) and contractual relationships (modernity read negatively). This paper explores the possibility of a more positively defined alternative modernity in Japan and the obstacles to achieving it.
Session 180: Discussions of Percussions: Drumming Up "Veri-Asians" of Identities and Tradition
Organizer and Chair: Millie Creighton, University of British Columbia
Discussant: Deborah Wong, University of California, Riverside
This panel explores various constructions of identities and "tradition," through the venue of Asian drumming genres within different areas of Asia, among Asian diaspora groups, and among those who are neither Asian nor of Asian descent. The title suggestion of "veri-Asians" highlights both the variations in (frequently contesting) identity statements and the ways they represent assertions that those making them are "very Asian." The discussion provides an inter-Asia perspective with papers based on in-depth "apprenticeship-like" participant-observation fieldwork on Japanese taiko, Indian tabla, and Korean samulnori. The discussant enhances the panel’s border-crossing nature as a researcher of one of these traditions among diaspora groups and others in North America. Further contributing to its border-crossing nature, several papers discuss the ways these drumming traditions are utilized outside of Asia among diaspora groups and the contradictions and confrontations involved when these markers of "Asianness" become transnational music cultures of their own, challenging boundaries of "insider" and "other" when proficient drummers are not from Asian ethnic backgrounds.
Negotiations of identity being "drummed up" include ultranationalistic assertions of pristine cultural forms, minority group struggles to challenge these, youth attempts to question established norms, and diaspora performances of Asian heritage elsewhere. Sometimes attempts to renegotiate identity boundaries involve performances of gender or sexual orientation that challenge community norms within Asian areas, or diaspora communities, such as with a North American all lesbian drumming group. Tensions over the integration of electronic technology, the historic diffusion of drumming styles throughout Asia, the use of these traditions in constructing a pan-Asian heritage identity elsewhere, and attempts by drummers to integrate music forms from other parts of the world allow the panel to explore another fuzzy boundary—that separating "cultural appropriation" from long-accepted practices of diffusion among human groups.
Samulnori: Playing to a Different Beat
Keith Howard, University of London
Samulnori, a quartet playing two drums and two gongs, is today probably Korea’s most popular musical tradition. Yet, the first samulnori performance was in 1978. This paper explores how the genre has been developed and marketed, both in Korea and abroad, looking closely at the group now led by Kim Duk Soo and his organization, Nanjang Cultures.
I will give a brief chronological history of the genre, from its inception as a quartet lifted out of a folk instrumental ensemble, through forays into pop and jazz, to the multimedia extravaganzas that culminated in what the Guinness Book of Records lists as the largest drum performance ever. I will then focus on three aspects: (a) repertory, (b) aesthetics and the development of a teaching/training programme, and (c) the national and international contests known as SamulNori Kyorugi. I interrogate concepts such as Hobsbawm’s invented traditions and the implications of Korean attitudes toward preservation and change, in the latter considering how samulnori challenged student populist movements in the 1980s and how it questions the validity of the Intangible Cultural Asset system. My paper is based on research conducted over the last twenty years and my own experience as a (very inadequate) samulnori performer.
The (Unconscious) Aesthetics of Timbre in (Electronic) Tabla Music
Lowell Lybarger, University of Toronto
Hindustani art music changed irrevocably with the advent of electronic amplification and recording technology in the early 20th century. Yet few musicians and music scholars have consciously recognized this fundamental acoustic-timbral shift and its wide-ranging sociocultural and aesthetic implications. Instead, the syntactical-structural understanding of rag (melodic mode) and tal (rhythmic mode) dominates most discussions of musical meaning and remains the sine qua non of knowledge in the culture of Hindustani musicians.
This presentation explores the uncharted waters of timbre in the age of the electronic mediation of Hindustani art music. Presuming that most tabla music is electronic music, I will review and demonstrate the process of sound recording to show how timbre is a fundamental factor in determining the dynamics and playing techniques that influence the unconscious aesthetic judgments of listeners and performers.
The Sound of Fascism or Folklore? Ensemble Taiko Drumming and the Politics of Performance in Contemporary Japan
Shawn Bender, University of California, San Diego
The emergence and popularization of taiko drumming ensembles in the decades following World War II has been greeted in Japan with a mixture of apprehension and approbation. To some, ensemble taiko represents the revitalization of withering local culture; for others it symbolizes the enduring legacy of wartime ultra-nationalist ideology. In its capacity as a cultural signifier, ensemble taiko highlights latent divisions within contemporary Japanese society. It demonstrates that "traditional" folk culture is not merely inherited uniformly in Japan as a natural category but is actively contested, (re)interpreted, and (re)defined in divergent ways by taiko performers.
In this paper, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork among Japanese ensemble taiko groups, I show the centrality of Japan’s most influential ensemble taiko groups, O-suwa Daiko and Kodo, in defining the ideological spectrum of ensemble taiko performance in Japan. I argue further that, although they are both engaged in the promotion of ensemble taiko performance, their activities and identities are predicated on two contrasting conceptions of Japanese folk culture: one defined by lateral flows of exchange and communication among regional communities; the other by vertical transmission of locally rooted culture within discrete and bounded regional communities.
As part of a panel presenting varieties of drumming across Asia and among Asian diaspora communities, my paper not only contributes to the description of drumming in a specific Asian locale but also highlights the problems with assuming uniform understandings and conceptions of native drumming styles within societies when attempting to make comparisons across them.
Changing (Heart) Beats: From Japanese National Identity and Nostalgia to the Taiko Rhythms of Citizens of the Earth
Millie Creighton, University of British Columbia
Taiko, long a part of local area festivals in Japan, refers to the playing of large drums. Once taiko drums marked the boundaries of a localized community identity, delimited by the area the sound of the drums reached. This paper presents research done on contemporary taiko in Japan and the Earth Celebrations held on Sado Island, where the popular and widely acclaimed contemporary taiko group Kodo trains, and also on groups practicing elsewhere in the world. It utilizes apprenticeship as a fieldwork method, along with emerging concepts in translocal ethnography, exploring ways contemporary groups of taiko players are recapturing this "traditional" Japanese music style for non-traditional purposes, creating new arrangements of music and identity in and for diverse places in the process. The Earth Celebration on Sado Island is explored in terms of how it fits into a modern tourism craze for remote marginal areas, drawing them into central focus, and the nostalgia for a lost Japanese identity while creating a forum for "internationalization" on the periphery of Japan. It looks at how marginal groups within Japan, such as Burakumin, have utilized taiko to express their identity issues and how taiko has been used to confirm or negotiate identities as a marker of Asian heritage outside Japan, as well as to shift the boundaries of identity or the definitions of acceptable behavior in diaspora communities.
Session 200: Swords across the Borders: Transnational Currents in East Asian Popular Fiction
Organizer: John Christopher Hamm, University of Washington
Chair: Madeline Yue Dong, University of Washington
Discussant: Ted Mack, University of Washington
Keywords: border-crossing, East Asia, literature, popular culture, martial arts.
This border-crossing panel explores the transnational circulation of themes, ideologies, and narrative modes in 20th-century East Asian popular martial arts and historical fiction. Martial arts adventures have constituted some of the most prominent representations of East Asia in the modern international cultural imaginary. Such globally recognized icons as Bruce Lee or the ninja are often cinematic incarnations of character types and narratives from popular fiction traditions; and where the cinema has employed the martial arts to represent East Asia to the world, printed fiction has often used them as a vehicle for the myth-making, popularized history, and "invention of tradition" through which modern national subjects have created and contemplated their images of themselves. One might expect such concerns, no less than the specificities of the written language, to foster insular or nativist genres. In fact, however, the martial arts fictions of modern East Asia have been shaped by multiple layers of translation, borrowing, and self-conscious differentiation from or adaptation of cultural and national others. The papers on this panel explore various of the transnational currents in the popular martial arts and historical fiction of 20th-century China, Japan, and Korea. They aim both to illuminate particular problems in the histories of these genres, and to loosen the national boundaries which have often structured the study of East Asian literature and popular culture.
It All Started with a Monkey: Sarutobi Sasuke, Tachikawa Bunko, and the Origins of Ninja Fiction
Scott C. Langton, Austin College
The ninja is a ubiquitous fixture of Japan’s popular historical fiction and martial arts films. And while mountain men steeped in the arts of stealth and warfare have a historical basis in Japan’s feudal age, the mystical, magical assassins portrayed in contemporary popular fiction, comics, and film have their origins in the early-20th-century novels of the Tachikawa Bunko library. First published in 1911 and aimed at a juvenile readership, Tachikawa Bunko novels derived largely from the semi-historical martial narratives performed by vaudeville storytellers (kôdanshi) and enjoyed moderate success. But with the introduction in 1913 of the fictional ninja hero Sarutobi ("Leaps-Like-A-Monkey") Sasuke, the library’s popularity exploded, spawning the "ninja boom" of the 1910s and 1920s. Though Sarutobi Sasuke was a clear departure from the historical characters of earlier Tachikawa Bunko novels, and the plots of the fantastic ninja narratives were fresh and original, cultural historian Adachi Ken’ichi suggests parallels in theme, structure, and characterization with the popular 16th-century novel Xiyou ji by Wu Cheng-en. However, Adachi does not support this provocative theory with specific textual analysis. This paper examines the history of the Tachikawa Bunko library and its contribution to the popular conception of the ninja through the creation of the archetype, Sarutobi Sasuke. It also interrogates Adachi Ken’ichi’s postulation of textual resonance between the Tachikawa Bunko’s ninja novels and the Xiyou ji by comparing key passages from the texts.
The Martial Arts in Dystopia: Xiang Kairan’s Unofficial History of Sojourners in Japan
John Christopher Hamm, University of Washington
Xiang Kairan (Pingjiang Buxiaosheng, 1890–1957) is credited with triggering the craze for martial arts fiction in Republican-era China. His seminal novels Jianghu qixia zhuan (Marvelous gallants of the rivers and lakes) and Jindai xiayi yingxiong zhuan (Righteous heroes of modern times), both of which began serialization in 1923, offer divergent but complementary visions of the world of traditional Chinese martial arts: in the first, as a marginal space blending the underworld of vagabonds and tricksters with the preternatural domain of adepts and immortals, and in the second as an arena for the patriotic rehearsal of events from recent national history. These two works were preceded, and the author’s reputation as a novelist established, by a novel in a very different thematic genre—Liu Dong waishi (An unofficial history of sojourners in Japan, 1916). This caustic exposé, inspired by the author’s own experiences as an overseas student, relates the scandalous adventures of Chinese students and profligate "revolutionaries" in the foreign enclaves and pleasure quarters of late Meiji and early Taisho Japan. One element in certain characters’ lives, and in their interaction with the foreign society in which they live, is the practice of the martial arts. This paper analyzes the text of Liu Dong waishi to explore two questions: How, within this fictional world, are the martial arts implicated in the negotiation of personal and national subjectivity? And how does the representation of the martial arts within the generic conventions of the satirical novel bear upon the author’s subsequent, influential formulations of the conventions of martial arts fiction?
The Body Aesthetics in Chinese Martial Arts Novels, 1920s–1940s
Tze-lan D. Sang, University of Oregon
How did Chinese popular literature and media represent heroic bodies as society and public taste underwent rapid transformation in the early twentieth century? How did the martial arts novel—a quintessential national and nationalistic genre, help to articulate a changing aesthetics of the body? Since antiquity there had been vastly divergent ways for Chinese historians, writers, and storytellers to imagine the physical appearances of assassins and outlaws. Some emphasized musculature and stature. Others dwelled on the immateriality of perceptions—how one opponent’s visual impressions of another’s body can be deadly misleading. In some stories, the most powerful martial arts skills are even housed in a seemingly feminine, senile, or handicapped body. Into the twentieth century, were the classical imaginings of the chivalrous body put to test by the cross-cultural encounter with imported images of strong and athletic bodies? How did writers who had actual physical training think of the body differently than those who relied solely on legends and the imagination to create a martial arts world? How are the appearances of women fighters represented vis-à-vis their male counterparts? In this paper I will examine a selection of physical descriptions found in Republican martial arts novels, ranging from Xiang Kairen’s enormously popular Marvelous Gallants (Jianghu qixia zhuan) to Wang Dulu’s Crane-Iron Series (He-tie wubuqu), of which Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong) is the fourth volume. I contend that while many Republican marital arts writers adopted certain traditional conventions for visualizing gallant bodies, they were inevitably under pressure to Westernize the body aesthetics in specific ways in order to appeal to an increasingly cosmopolitan readership.