Contact: kmlawson [at] froginawell.net
URL: http://www.muninn.net/blog/
I found this gem in a June 21, 1900 Washington Post article:
It is a cute, and surely manufactured story, but it does get at something I have wondered about: did Asian powers who were granting special rights in their ports to Europeans ever seek any similar special trade access to certain ports in Europe?
When the Japanese National Diet Library started putting Meiji period and Taishō period books online and fully viewable in their Modern Digital Library (近代デジタルライブラリー) I remember thinking, “Wow, this is amazing! If only there could be access to books in other languages on this scale!”
That collection now has over 150,000 books scanned and included in their database. You don’t need any special plug-ins and the page images are JPEGs. Great job!
This past week I have been doing some heavy lifting research without any library access and Google Books has once again showed itself to be a real friend. I have been able to look up things so fast, with such precision, and check even small obscure details with such ease from a kitchen in Sackets Harbor New York that I’m incredibly tempted to abandon my study of the 1930-40s and never again touch a subject which goes past 1920: why? Because there is a good chance that if you search for something Google Books has before 1920, it will be in full view and you can read, search, and download to your heart’s delight. There are exceptions, which I have complained about on numerous occasions, but still, each time I sit down and really do some heavy searching with Google Books I find an ever increasing availability of even quite obscure works in their database scanned from some of the best libraries around. The limited preview is also incredibly useful as I increasingly look things up with a quick search on Google Books instead of picking up that same book on my table half a meter away. When one knows certain tricks, the limited preview is not even that limited when you really need to read a few pages denied to you.
The internet is now filled with debates about what the Google Books settlement will mean for publishers, writers, and researchers, as well as casual readers on the internet. I don’t want to fight that fight here, but I will point out one obvious fact:
The 近代デジタルライブラリー now looks like something out of the stone age compared to the interface provided in full view on Google Books. It is downright painful to go back. It is like going from the web back to the world of gopher on a dial-up connection. It is slow to load each page and single page display. It isn’t just that Google has the money to put a lot of effort into its presentation. To be sure, it isn’t trivial to create a web based reading experience which allows you seamless scrolling while pages load in the background, and the host of other little features they have included.
However, they decided early on that if they will give you full view, they are going to give you full view: allowing PDF and ePub downloads (albeit watermarked and not searchable offline).
A lot of databases like 近代デジタルライブラリー or the アジア歴史資料センター have a completely different philosophy, even for works that have long been in the public domain: sure we will give you a whole page but only zoomed out. If you zoom in we’ll give you a little piece of it in JPEG form. Multi-page download? In the latter case, no way, in the former case, they can create a special PDF for you, with a limited number of combined images:
1度に最大10コマまで指定できます
※ご注意
・コマ番号とは、撮影された各画像に振られた番号です。
・PDFファイルが作成されるまでに時間がかかる場合があります。
・1コマのファイルサイズは、およそ300KBです。
I see how this is designed to restrict the bandwidth usage on an already slow (at least in the US) website, but this tells me that there needs to be a greater pooling of efforts – either with help from powerful private sector companies such as Google (with care to avoid some of the problems this produces, and even worse horrors of such disasters as Footnote.com) or by pooling resources between governments, or in cooperative agreements between governments and the private sector.
Side note: Google Books has a small number of old Japanese books scanned from US libraries. It has Chinese books too but many of these were affected by complaints from Chinese authors and now have little or no access. Unfortunately many of these books are backwards: page numbers don’t work properly and the pages are shown in reverse in many (but not all) old books I have looked at in the past few days. Google: if you unbind Japanese books and present them in a vertical scrolling interface, you will have reverse the order of the pages!
In the Prefatory Remarks to Aizawa Yasushi’s 1825 New Theses (新論) we find an interesting little gloss on the relationship of the “Divine Realm” of Japan and the Western world:
The earth lies amid the heavenly firmament, is round in shape, and has no edges. All things exist as nature dictates. Thus, our Divine Realm is at the top of the world. Though not a very large country, it reigns over the Four Quarters because its Imperial Line has never known dynastic change. The Western barbarians represent the thighs, legs, and feet of the universe. This is why they sail hither and yon, indifferent to the distances involved. Moreover, the country they call America is located at the rear end of the world, so its inhabitants are stupid and incompetent. All of this is as nature dictates.
The translation is by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi.
I haven’t been making any substantial posts to Frog in a Well of late even though I have been buried in fascinating historical materials as I write my dissertation. I have decided, however, to share the occasional short anecdote that pops up in some of the secondary and primary sources I come across.
In his book on wartime Communist efforts in village China, Dagfinn Gatu brings up an interesting technique used by Japanese soldiers. Chinese Communist regular and guerrilla forces were severely short of weapons throughout the war. Since Communist insurgents far outnumbered the weapons available, the capture of one functioning Japanese weapon from the battlefield essentially put one more armed opponent into the field. As in most similar asymmetrical wars, this loss of equipment was taken very seriously by the Japanese occupation forces. However, a Japanese platoon commander who later became a historian, Fujiwara Akira shows how one trick was employed of shifting around one’s losses in reports to superiors:
“In recording combat results greater attention was paid to the amount of captured weapons than to the number of abandoned corpses. For that reason, army units put aside seized weapons to prepare for the eventuality of heavy combat losses by diluting these in reports on battle achievements.”1
The newly relaunched Sino-Japanese Studies open access journal is coming along nicely with a selection of articles and translations, including many translated chapters of Liu Jianhui’s Demon Capital Shanghai: The “Modern” Experience of Japanese Intellectuals.
The editor, Joshua Fogel, and I have decided to add a new Resources page to the SJS website where we will host various reference materials of use to students and scholars of the interaction between China and Japan.
First up for inclusion on our resource page are two handy English language charts published in Fogel’s Articulating the Sinosphere: Sino-Japanese Relations in Space and Time which list Japan’s embassies to the Ming and Tang courts.
1. Chart of the Japanese Embassies to the Tang Court
2. Chart of Japanese Embassies to the Ming Court
While we had to secure permission from Harvard University Press to post these charts in their unedited published form, there is no reason why the content of these charts and the sources referred to in them can’t be used to improve, for example, the relevant wikipedia entry, etc. See also the Chinese entries and much more detailed Japanese wikipedia entries for the missions.
If there are suggestions for other useful reference information or interactive materials to host at the Sino-Japanese Studies website, let us know and those interested in submitting articles to the open access journal may do so here.
The relationship between modern and pre-modern studies in history is the source of lively debate and often much mutual misunderstanding. I’d like to welcome a guest posting on this issue that I hope will generate a productive conversation in the comments and future postings in response here and elsewhere. The author, Michael McCarty, is a graduate student at Columbia University doing a PhD in pre-modern Japanese history, focusing on early Kamakura and the relationship between courtiers and warriors. The following is the opening he gave to a very informal discussion on the pre-modern/ modern divide in East Asian studies at a combined (Korea, China, and Japan) history study group meeting at Columbia last week.
The essential problem in the relationship between pre-modern and modern studies is a question of dependency. The “relevance” of pre-modern studies is essentially dependent in its contribution to modern studies—pre-modern studies is forced to position itself against modernity either as a foil or a precursor to modern development. The only other recourse for pre-modern studies seems to be to posit a timeless, unchanging pre-modern world (which, in the end, falls back into a kind of foil to the modern world).
On the other end, modern studies chooses to define its existence and its relevance precisely by how different its subjects and issues are from what came before. This reinforces the dependency of pre-modern studies.
Attempts to do modern history, at least to me, thus seem to be framed upon hyperbole: “This is the first time (non-elites had a voice, etc),” “Here we see the creation of the first real (nation-state/ modern bureaucracy/ national consciousness, etc),” “Modernity has seen the highest level of (popular participation in government/ violence/ global interconnectedness, etc).”
Since the inherent teleology of modern studies is the way things are now, analysis of institutions and patterns tend to center on crediting certain individuals, processes, or events that were more or less influential in shaping the modern situation. This can be seen in the preponderance of the template “So-and-so and the making of the modern such-and-such” i.e. this institution, person, event was key in changing such-and-such situation to its modern situation.
But the universality of the template only belies the relativity of such claims: almost any person, institution, or event can be said to shape a situation closer to our modern situation than what came before. Can the books Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Cold War and the Making of the Modern World really be talking about the same thing? Since modernity’s teleology is the present, and nothing goes beyond the present, in some sense everything is leading up to modernity. It borders on meaninglessness.
Because of the dependency dynamic and the historian’s (publishing?) desire for relevance, there is a kind of power play between modern and pre-modern studies; but in all cases modern studies takes the lead and pre-modern studies is reactive.
For example, in the Japan field we saw John Hall through the 1960s and 70s taking the field backward from the modern period in a search for precursors (the so-called “modernization” school), first to Early Modern Japan, then the Sengoku period, then Muromachi. Nor has this dynamic disappeared with the breakup of the postwar “modernization” consensus. First come modernist claims that such-and-such an event, institution, or person was responsible for the rise of a modern phenomenon (the nation state, or the rise of capitalism, or the rise of modern concepts of rights, etc). Then the pre-modern reaction: Actually, two-hundred years earlier, changes were happening that set the groundwork for the eventual rise of (the modern state, etc).
One example struck me from Harootunian and Sakai’s dialogue in Positions—in which they clearly dismiss pre-modern studies in general, but this is a diatribe for a different day. The example was studies of “Kamakura law” that treat their subject as if it were no different from modern property law. Harootunian suggests this is ridiculous, and his claim is valid and important. But it bespeaks a kind of possessiveness in modern studies: “This idea is only in the modern period, you can’t have it.”
Such studies of “medieval law” are indeed misguided attempts to restore relevance to pre-modern studies by looking for precursors to modern phenomena. Clearly medieval “law” is NOT the same as modern law. But is this claim based on close understanding of what regulations and prohibitions really meant in the medieval period and how these are different from modern legal institutions? Or are they based on quick assumptions about the pre-modern period from the necessary act of difference (the pre-modern as foil) that defines modern studies?
In the end I feel that if the key to relevance is proximity to (and explanatory power toward) the way things are now, pre-modern studies is in a doomed game.
What the hell is modernity?
To illustrate the frustration I and many pre-modernists feel toward the omnipotence of “modernity,” I’d like to illustrate some instructive variations in terminology. The following is abridged from an abstract from the recent grad conference at Columbia:
“This paper more broadly investigates the way modernist fiction engages modernization… and [embodies] aspects of modern experience. As a study that focuses on modernism’s critique of modernization, it also shows the ways in which literature can be used as a sophisticated means to explore and understand Japanese modernity.”
But what if this were put in terms of the medieval period?
“This paper more broadly investigates the way medievalist fiction engages medievalization… and [embodies] aspects of medieval experience. As a study that focuses on medievalism’s critique of medievalization, it also shows the ways in which literature can be used as a sophisticated means to explore and understand Japanese medieviality.”
It seems discussion of any other time period in the same terms comes off as ridiculous. But what if we exchanged “modern” for synonyms?
“This paper more broadly investigates the way current fiction engages the way things became the way they are… and [embodies] aspects of recent experience. As a study that focuses on contemporeneity’s critique of the way things became they way they are, it also shows the ways in which literature can be used as a sophisticated means to explore and understand the current Japanese situation.”
As soon as the word “modern” is removed, things fall apart. Clearly no other synonym can withstand the multiplicity of meanings that “modernity” encompasses. I think the reason is that modern is both a time period and a set of characteristics.
But this relationship is circular: what is modern? The most recent period. What are the attributes of modernity? The attributes that have shown up in the most recent period. The profundity of “modernity” relies on its ambiguity as a term with a set of different meanings, meanings whose relationships are rarely explained.
Further, in East Asian studies there is no attempt to distinguish between modernity and modernization. Sometimes modernity is a natural process of global interactions that grows organically, sometimes it is a set of processes that people embark upon artificially.
For example, the phrase “Korea had a late experience with modernity” or a “Korea had a very contracted modernity” is permissible. But is it logical to say that “England had a long modernity” or that “England reached modernity before Korea”? In the case of England, modernity is natural. In the case of Korea, “modernity” refers exclusively to “modernization.”
In the end, I believe the circularity of modernity is related to its inherent teleology. If anyone said that countries in East Asia had “become medieval at different rates,” this would probably be laughable. But since the modern period has nothing after it for contrast and context, the circularity between time period and characteristics remains unexposed.
I wanted to post a plug for a project that I have been involved with recently:
Announcing the relaunch of Sino-Japanese Studies online
For fifteen years Sino-Japanese Studies (1988-2003) was published in hard form and distributed throughout the world. It was the only journal of its kind in content, bringing together Chinese and Japanese studies—irrespective of discipline or time period. The relaunched journal will be available open access online and will continue to be the only journal of its kind. It will contain original, refereed articles, translations, reviews, and news from the field. Interested readers and contributors may find further details on making submissions to the journal as well as access the full online archive of back-issues at:
They may also contact the editor directly.
Joshua Fogel (fogel at yorku.ca), editor (傅佛果, ジョシュア・フォーゲル)
Konrad M. Lawson (konrad at lawson.net), web technician (林蜀道, コンラッド・ローソン)
Note: I have announced the availability of the full archive of back-issues here before, but now we are restarting the journal and accepting new submissions.
The 20世紀メディア研究所, which produces the wonderful journal Intelligence and helps manage the amazing online database index of the Prange archive of early postwar Japanese media that is an absolute must for anyone studying Japan during the occupation period, is helping organizing a conference at Waseda University in Tokyo on topics related to Sino-Japanese media issues.
The first day of the conference, December 21st, will be of interest to many historians, as it will focus on media in the foreign concessions (of China). Here is the schedule:
講演会 13:00～17:30
司会進行：川崎賢子（文芸評論家）
歓迎の辞 佐藤正志（早稲田大学政治学研究科長・教授）
講演① 山本武利（早稲田大学教授）
／日本の謀略新聞――『大陸新報』と『東亜新報』
講演② 黄 瑚（復旦大学教授）
／上海「孤島」期（1937.11-1941.12）租界当局のメディア政策について
講演③ 黄 旦（復旦大学教授）
／租界が中国新聞業に及ぼす影響について
特別講演 黄 昇民（中国伝媒大学広告学院長・教授）
／歴史資料を用いたメディア研究の可能性について
Location: 早稲田大学早稲田キャンパス３号館二階第一会議室
Other sessions of the conference look at a number of issues related to media and sports, especially the Olympics. You can find the full schedule for the conference here.
The Japanese began their exodus from what was once colonial Taiwan soon after their defeat in 1945, but the departures really peaked in the spring of 1946 as all but a few Japanese were expelled from the island that now came under the control of the Chinese republic.
By mid-1948, there were only around 300 Japanese left on the island, according to US diplomat George H. Kerr’s Japanese friend Suzuki Gengo.1 Kerr’s letters from the early postwar period in Taiwan reveal how he and other Americans in Taiwan eagerly snatched up the more valuable possessions (especially Japanese books) being sold by their departing Japanese friends and acquaintances at what must have been bargain prices. They even let each other know whenever a Japanese professor or government official seemed to be on the verge of making his move to pack up and leave for home, a sign that a garage sale was imminent.
There are now a few publications which collect the many photographs made, mainly by US military personnel, of Japanese and Koreans being returned or expelled from Taiwan, Korea, and mainland China. I was also interested, however, to come across a series of drawings（by a 麥非) published in successive issues of the Taiwanese newspaper 臺灣新生報 in March 1946 which depicts the Japanese waiting to be transported back to Japan. The drawings and some of the reports about the returnees were relatively sympathetic. However, it should be noted that they were found on the Japanese pages of the bilingual newspaper which, in addition to targeting literate educated Taiwanese for whom reading Japanese was easier than reading Chinese, was also surely targeted at the remaining Japanese population.
See more of the pictures below the fold:
(more…)
While I’m sure there are a lot of similar resources that deserve equal mention, I wanted to post a link while it is fresh on my mind. There are a great collection of online maps of Japan available for direct viewing via the website of the University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. They include a list of US army topographic maps from around 1954 and Japanese city plans from 1945-1946. Wonderful to be able to download this directly and see what these places looked like as of the end of the war.
Japan Topographic Maps
Japan City Plans
You might want to also check out their China maps and Chinese historical maps.
If you agree that this is a great resource, consider leaving them a comment thanking them for making it available online via the U of Texas library comment page.
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