Some research is startling, and some research confirms what we already guessed or assumed, but there’s some research which falls between these categories: research which reveals things that should have been obvious, if we’d been thinking about it clearly, or asked the right questions earlier. Siniawer’s argument about the consistency of violence in Imperial Japanese politics falls into that category, as does the new transnational migration scholarship that sees migration as a multi-directional, multi-generational process. I’m sure you have other examples

In the same vein, there’s new archaelogical research from Kitakyushu, announced on LiveScience with the headline “Lead Poisoning in Samurai Kids Linked to Mom’s Makeup.” A study of 70 sets of samurai class remains included several of children:

Children under age 3 were the worst off, with a median level of 1,241 micrograms of lead per gram of dry bone. That’s more than 120 times the level thought to cause neurological and behavioral problems today and as much as 50 times higher than levels the team found in samurai adults. Older kids’ levels were lower, but still very high.

What’s more, five of the children had unusual bone enlargements, and X-rays revealed banding that only turns up in children with at least 70 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood.

The study also found, confirming earlier findings, that samurai women had higher levels of lead exposure than men by a very high degree, suggesting that the lead-based makeup of upper-class women was the primary environmental source, and that the women were exposing the children to lead both through contact and through breast milk. Obviously, there’s a slight sample bias in the study, as the highest levels of lead exposure seem to have resulted in the youngest deaths, and children who were not heavily exposed seem to have survived longer. Other studies of adult remains suggest “that samurai and merchants living in Kokura had much higher lead levels in their bones than did farmers and fishermen living nearby” which may be a result of childhood exposure or may be the result of continued contact.¹ This is interesting, no question, and I’ve never heard anyone actually suggest before that the use of lead — which we routinely point out is quite unhealthy for the women involved — would almost certainly have effects on children as well.

The article then does something which drives me a bit crazy, and illustrates how zombie ideas work, not to mention the journalistic tendency to escalate findings into “smoking gun” monocausal historical narratives. The very next sentence, after the quotation above, is “They also point to individual shoguns known to have suffered from intellectual and health problems associated with lead poisoning.”

In case you don’t get it, there’s a direct invocation of the Lead Poisoning Fall of Rome hypothesis:

It wouldn’t be the first time lead poisoning rang in the end of an era. Others have suggested that “plumbism” among the Roman elite — whose fancy food and wine was laced with lead leached from cooking equipment — contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire.

This is an old zombie chestnut, one that has been slain and risen again and been slain again many times.² I particularly like the “others have suggested” phrase, a journalistic standby for taking a position in a debate, especially a false position, without having to take responsibility for the error.

The assumption that shogunal intelligence and temperment — the aspects most affected by lead toxicity — were the cause of the end of the Tokugawa regime is clearly a gross misreading of the history. There are structural issues which are quite independent of personalities, issues which often have their origins in the earliest — and least likely to be lead-poisoned — policies of the bakuhan system. The archeologists seem to be arguing in this direction, though:

Nakashima and his team think a ruling class addled by lead poisoning may have contributed to political instability, and ultimately to the collapse of the seven-century-old shogun system in 1867, when power shifted cataclysmically from the shogun to the emperor, and life in Japan changed for good.

I don’t see how this can possibly stand up to serious scrutiny: the main problem of the Tokugawa regime wasn’t constant political instability, but excessive political stability in the face of a need for sustained reform. Instability in the bakumatsu comes from a clash of intelligent capable leaders with strong personalities and dramatically different ideas about core issues, differences that are largely ideological, and entirely comprehensible in the long-term context of Tokugawa ideologies. It doesn’t require an epidemic of induced cognitive dysfunction to explain the behavior of the samurai or merchant classes of late Tokugawa Japan.³ And “contributing factor” is such weak sauce, a phrase which is too-often used to describe plausible theories lacking evidentiary support, when it should really be limited to aspects that are documented but whose degree of influence are somehow indeterminate.⁴

I understand the desire to inflate findings, to make one’s own research the causal center of events, to see through one lens. And I understand how that’s exacerbated by journalistic writing, which wants to draw attention to itself. But perpetuating zombie errors and the stereotype of the monocausal smoking gun method of historical storytelling is inexcusable, no matter how interesting the actual findings.

1. as an aside, I don’t recall ever reading that adult males outside of the theater trades used makeup routinely, as this article seems to suggest.
2. Wikipedia currently hedges, but seems to come down on the side that the hypothesis is plausible. As I tell my students, “plausible” does not imply “true” in historical argumentation.
3. the ee ja nai ka religious movements, on the other hand, and the rising tide of peasant protests, are too episodic and entirely based in the wrong classes.
4. as they often are in historical hindsight, once we eschew monocausal simplicity

I was going to post about it here, but Another Damned Medievalist raised the question of how to deal with primary sources in a class where students lack important background concepts, and so I’m going to share the comment I made over there and then expand on it a bit:

I’m not sure if I’d call it a ‘brilliant’ idea, but I faced a similar dilemma in my Early Japan course: rich primary sources, but weak general knowledge. The way I handled it this time was to break the semester up into two units: in the first, we went through the textbook and political/economic source reader, covering the basic narrative, political and economic and religious history in a fairly traditional fashion; in the second half of the course, I went back over the same history through the primary sources — Genji, Heike, etc. — with a big secondary work on mentalite at the end. The goal, obviously, was to give the students the context first, along with some basic skill-building, then to delve deeper into the material that they were now more comfortable with, without all the “you don’t know it yet, but this is important because…” stuff that drove me crazy. The class size wasn’t big enough for a definitive result, but I think it worked pretty well. Our second-half discussions, in particular, were much better informed than I’d gotten in the past.

As a side benefit, by the way, we’d gone through the entire history before students got into their end-of-semester research projects, so they actually could pick topics they were interested in with some level of informed judgement and without a bias towards the early stuff (or pop culture-privileged topics in the later stuff).

This is something which I’ve considered doing for a long time, but not all of my courses break down quite so neatly in terms of the material I use. On the whole, as I said, I think it was quite successful. One of my students suggested a change which makes a great deal of sense: instead of putting Mary Beth Berry’s Japan in Print at the end, after the primary sources — I was using it instead of any particular 17th century reading — she pointed out that it would be a good transition reading. That made a great deal of sense: it introduces a great deal of theory about reading and audiences, and the argument creates a tension between classical/medieval and early modern culture which would be give more focus to the primary source discussions. I would have to add another 17th century reading: Given the rumors of a Chushingura movie in the works, maybe it’s time to bring that back into my syllabi!

Am I the only person who had a bad reaction to the Tomb of legendary Japanese Queen Himiko found headlines I’ve been seeing?

The article says

Archaeologists had previously claimed that the tomb, built in the traditional keyhole-shape design, was built in the fourth century and therefore too modern for Queen Himiko.

But a team led by Professor Hideki Harunari has discovered new clay artefacts close to the site, which radiocarbon dating indicates were made between 240AD and 260AD. According to records from the Chinese court, with which the Yamatai kingdom had links, Queen Himiko died around 250 AD.

The evidence seems quite circumstantial to me, from the oddly specific radio-carbon dating to the fact that they haven’t studied the tomb itself, to the treatment of Himiko and Yamatai as unequivocally Nara-centered.

I was just commenting on Jonathan Jarrett’s article about rehdroxylation rate dating that it would be nice to have better dating technology, as a safeguard against wishful thinking and distortions of the archaeological record.

We’ve been talking about our syllabi for a while here at the Frogs, but we haven’t done a lot of post-semester commentary. I had two Asia courses this semester: Early Japan and Problems and Issues of Contemporary China.

The China course went like gangbusters, and the books worked surprisingly well as a set. The Hessler was a solid starter, and I think I’m going to use it as my closer next time I teach the 20c China course. I followed it up with Cohen’s historiography, which was risky: only one of the five students in the class had anything like a serious historical background. Still, the theoretical perspectives he was describing are still very much alive, and it gave us a structure to talk about a lot of what came after. Qian Qichen’s diplomatic memoir was a nice corrective — focusing on strengths, and the Chinese perspective on the world — and the pre/post-9/11 talks transcribed in the appendices are great texts in themselves: I highly recommend them for anyone teaching a world politics or recent China course. My only concern is that it felt a little light. But if there had been more students, then the student-led reading/discussion section would have been denser. Anyway, aside from one supplemental reference which got underused, if I get to teach this course again, I’m keeping everything. I think it would work pretty well for undergrads, too.

The Early Japan course was a bit more mixed. I’m still trying to do too much, it seems: I need to spend more time on skills in the surveys, especially when I don’t have a core text. Berry’s Culture of Civil War in Kyoto was a great “slice of life” text, and actually sparked some discussion at a point in the semester when interest has often flagged. I can’t in good conscience give up the Genji and Heike readings, but I think I’m going to have to be more selective about the rest of the readings. I really want to add at least one good monograph on an earlier period, to parallel Berry. I’m thinking about Farris or Friday, and about adding student research and presentations to the document-based analysis assignments.

I need to look ahead now. I’ll be teaching my Qing course in the Fall, and so far it’s looking like a small crowd: perfect for the kind of scholarship I’m assigning. I want to work in a stronger research component than I had last time, though, to give students more of a chance to stretch their legs, so to speak.

It was quietly announced this week that researchers would be allowed to examine 11 ancient Japanese tombs, said to be the final resting places of Japan’s earliest emperors. 

The Japanese islands are dotted with thousands of kofun – hill tombs that house the remains of some of Japan’s earliest bigwigs.  While a few of these tombs have been excavated, most of the largest ones have never been touched, because local tradition has assigned them to be the tomb of one or another of Japan’s quasi-mythical early emperors; in the Meiji period, ownership of kofun associated with emperors, no matter how tenuously, was turned over to the Imperial Household Agency, which has not allowed archaeologists to even so much as set foot on them in over a century.

This prohibition has been unfortunate because contents of these tombs promise answers about one of the least understood and most controversial era’s in Japanese history, if only they could be examined.  Circumstantial archaeological evidence has increasingly pointed to Japan’s imperial family having strong connections to Korea, but without examining the contents of the tombs it has been hard to definitively confirm or deny these theories.

Alas, the current relaxation of restrictions–the result of a 2005 petition to the Japanese government by a consortium of concerned scholars from Japan and abroad–only eases the prohibition against walking on the hill tombs, but excavations of any kind are still forbidden, so it is unclear what new information, if any, can be gleaned by just walking around on top of these huge man-made hills.

Still it’s a step forward of sorts, if only a baby step.  I am still hopeful that one day we will not only know the contents of these tombs, but also that they will get the attention they deserve as some of the most amazing constructions ever built by man.  After all, the supposed tomb of Emperor Nintoku, which is among the 11 opened to examination, is the largest tomb ever built in history, about two times as big as the Great Pyramid by total volume. But hardly anyone even knows about it because nobody is allowed to go near it.