I have been collecting and reading various materials that could potentially reveal how people lived in rural villages between the 1910s and 1940s. Village teachers were particularly eager to write down their thoughts and experiences. Since most of them did not get enough pay to survive, being a teacher (especially in the late 1920s onwards) required a lot of commitment and self-sacrifice on their part. In their writings, good information is often covered by the thick coat of ideological arguments on nationalism, agrarianism (農本主義), which the Home Ministry encouraged to develop as a part of social moral suasion (社会教化), and/or respect for the military that became more and more ostensible during the 1930s. In fact, it is impossible for me to tell whether they truly embraced these ideologies, but their writings are passionate enough to appear that they meant it.

Now I face a difficult question of how to interpret these teachers. How would I depict them if I was making a movie? Were they ideological machines to create an ideal nation? Were they the first ones to be “brain-washed” before brain-washing other populations? As soon as I put the question this way, I am urged to say “no, things must have been more complex than that.” No matter how blindly nationalistic they sounded,  I also see that this was out of their struggle to find a way to give their students control over their own lives. In most of the cases, they found the methods that the central government advocated the most effective way. One youth school teacher in Oita Prefecture, for example, argued in 1939 that becoming a hardworking and advanced farmer was the only way to survive in the increasing susceptibility of agricultural business to external factors:

農業は外界の事情に支配されることが多い。経済界の動き、自然的事情特に天候の如何によっては半年の労苦を一朝にして水泡に帰せしめることが有り勝ちだ。今日の農業は安全確実な職業とは言えなくなった。…かかる時代においては篤農家、老農、精農の手合いが次第に輝きを増してくるように感じられる。世間が押し並べて風害虫害病害にしてやられる中に一人老農は以前と農作を謳うものだ。物価は下落し農村は不況の裏に沈淪し鋏状価格差の声頻々たる中に平然として余裕ある生活をなし禍を転じて福となす者は篤農の士である。86　（下郡平治『専任教員農村青年学校の経営』東京・第一出版協会　1939、86）

I came across his writing right after reading another book which introduces a teacher in the Meiji/Taisho period who was extremely dedicated to teaching the standard pronunciation of the Japanese language to children in Akita. The skill in the standardized Japanese, or the lack thereof, tremendously affected how young people experienced their national lives like the conscription and higher education, and still means a lot to the people from this region today. It is a typical and blatant nationalizing project from historians’ point of view, yet he was also providing control over life to their students in an important way.

Going over these thoughts, I just realize how similar the problem of interpretations is between these teachers and intellectuals in the colonies. Just like in the cases of colonial intellectuals, however, I also wonder if it is irresponsible for me to leave them outside of my own judgment, pointing out that they were in difficult positions. This must be a ‘being a historian 101′ question, but I still cannot find a comfortable solution to it.

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!

My China-side colleague, Alan Baumler, noted that China seems to have supplanted Japan as the go-to model for economic development. This has, he says, required him to alter his own attitude towards Chinese history, which never really had much of a triumphal arc before. He says, though

Well, the Japan people seem to have adjusted to going from an Asian Anomaly to a model for humanity and back, so I guess we can.

My response was

Actually, Japan’s gone 180 degrees and has become a negative example for demographic, financial and rights development. Between the “aging Japan”, “Lost Decade” and rising tide of neo-nationalism….. we need a new narrative, too.

The last few times I’ve taught my Japan course that comes up to the present, I’ve used Bumiller’s book, but that one comes just at the beginning of the economic stagnation, and is now approaching 20 years old. I haven’t seen much that I’d like to use to replace it, either literature or ethnography. There’s Japan After Japan, but it seems like the kind of stuff I’d have to spend more time explaining and excusing than making good use of. I’m tempted to shift in the direction of global diaspora or something on the globalization of Japanese culture, but both of those seem a bit like avoiding the question.

What’s the new narrative? Have the economic slowdown, normalization, and globalization affected the way you present the post-war arc, or are the last two decades a distinct period?

One of my projects this summer has to do with the use of images in history classes: I’m trying to improve my teaching, and perhaps help others, by scanning pictures¹ and identifying online sources for good images, as well as trying to figure out ways to do more with the images in the classroom. There’s been some great discussion of powerpoint and images in the classroom at Edge of the American West over the last week, the upshot of which is that images don’t really help all that much, unless you use them well. Not a surprising result, but the fact is that I use images sparingly in the classroom (and have never used powerpoint) because my training — and natural talents, I think — is heavily textual. I love a good map or chart, and I do use art in class both for cultural history and as historical documentation, but not enough. It’s not about “appealing to visual learners” as much as it is my belief that visual and physical materials are going to be increasingly important in historical analysis, both as sources and as forms of presentation. This isn’t cutting edge theory, or at least it shouldn’t be.

Anyway, that’s by way of preface for some of the stuff I hope to be posting here² over the next few months: images from my collection, and discussions of what they might mean, historically and pedagogically; other resources for visual materials and commentary on potential uses; links to other discussions of visual analysis; that sort of thing.

So, here’s my first collection of links:

• The North American Clearing Coordinating Council Japanese Image Use Guide is a great set of definitions and resources, especially for publication purposes. Their comparative discussion of copyright law is worth a quick look, even before you start thinking about publication.
• The Asian Art Museum of Tokyo (via pmjs) has a small online collection, but the commentary is solid and you can click through to some very high resolution and complete images, which is very unusual for museum sites.
• As noted here³ , the Tohoku modern map collection is a pretty rich source, though still spotty in places. There’s a bunch of interesting material which isn’t yet online, and the navigation is kind of finicky.
• The Gapminder World economic history animations are extremely cool, and fairly adaptable. It’s a bit of a time sink, though, I warn you: it’s a toy! I’m tempted to set my world history students loose on it, and see what happens.
• From the PMJS list, courtesy of Helen Moss, a wealth of material on historical hairstyles: Izutsu Costume Museum (which also has great material on clothing), Kushi Matsuri, and the ultimate source, the Nihongami Museum.
• I went looking for him and found Claremont Library Digital Resources Ukiyoe Page
• The Joseph Berry Keenan Digital collection at Harvard Law School, including photographs: aerial images of Hiroshima and Nagoya, village and temple scenes, and lots of meeting and banquet shots.
• Finally, a catalog of Educational and Cultural Video sites

1. both from books, which has copyright limitations, and from my own collection of slides and digital pictures, which doesn’t (at least for me, which is what matters!)
2. and at the other Frog blogs
3. peacay, who sent me that link, is a one-stop visual resource too.

I always get a little nervous when a world history textbook cites details about Japanese history which I’ve never heard of before. I’m still mostly enjoying teaching with Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s The World: A Global History, but I’m also still having some trouble with the Asian material.¹ Imagine my surprise when I turned to the chapter on “Global Politics in the Twentieth Century” and it opened with this anecdote:

In the Manchuria of the 1920s and 1930s, the brothels in the city of Harbin were not merely, or even primarily, places of vice, but resembled clubs, where the regular clients became friends and met each other. The Russian journalist Aleksandr Pernikoff frequented Tayama’s, which was Japanese owned and flew the Japanese flag. At the time, Manchuria was part of the sovereign territory of China, but Tayama’s displayed signs of the gradually increasing level of Japanese infiltration. The Chinese government—run by the nationalist, republican party known as the Guomindang (gwoh-meen-dohng)— rightly suspected Japan of plotting to seize Manchuria, detach it from China, and turn it into part of the Japanese Empire.

Ron Loftus has an essay at his website which supports the brothel/secret agent contentions.² I’m not terribly familiar with the literature on the secret societies and espionage, I admit, but my impression has been that the secret societies were a sideshow, more a symptom of the expansive nationalism of the early 20th century than a driving force.³ The text continues:

On September 19, 1931, Pernikoff arrived at Tayama’s as usual, crossing the seven-foot high fence of rough boards that screened the windows of the brothel from the street. The door was opened not by the regular attendant but by a cleanshaven, scholarly looking Japanese man with gold-rimmed glasses. As he shook hands with his friends, Pernikoff became aware of the tension in the atmosphere:

“What’s all this about?” Pernikoff asked in a whisper.
“Didn’t you hear?” replied one of the men. During the night, he explained, the Japanese had invaded, seized the Manchurian capital of Shenyang, and “exterminated the Guomindang vermin,” on the alleged grounds that the Chinese “tried to blow up a Japanese train near Shenyang.”
“Did they blow it up?” asked Pernikoff.
“No,” answered the man, with a crooked half-smile. “The mine went off after the train had passed. But the Japanese troops were ready and waiting—they occupied the town within thirty minutes after the explosion.”
“How did they know it was going to happen?”
“You’re a fool! The mine was set wrong. . .. The Japanese expected it to wreck the train and create a proper turmoil. That’s why there wasn’t a single Jap on the train. Clean work,” he added with admiration.

Louise Young, the only Manchuria work I have at home, cites the Osaka Asahi

in an act of outrageous violence, Chinese soldiers blew up a section of Mantetsu track lockated to the northwest of Beitaying and attacked our railway guards. Our guards immeditely returned fire and mobilized artillery to shell Beitaying.⁴

Every other account I’ve ever read was consistent with this, though international reports were more critical, but it’s conceivable that Japanese in Manchuria might well have known that the attack was a sham. Then things get really weird:

A Japanese member of the brothel’s clientele, who—Pernikoff now realized for the first time—was really a secret agent, gathering intelligence on his fellow clients, rose to read out the official Japanese report of the incident. “Chinese bandits” had tried to blow up the train. Fortunately, a Japanese officer, who happened to be nearby, “being a samurai, knelt in the direction of Japan and humbly invoked the help of Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, the divine ancestress of all Japanese.” Miraculously, “by divine intervention,” although thrust “up into the air” with the force of the explosion, the train descended back onto the rails, resumed its journey, and reached its destination without loss. “All of us in the room, wrote Pernikoff, “felt uneasy at hearing this childish account”
“What will happen now?” he asked.
“War.”

Fernandez-Armesto then goes on to claim that the invasion of Manchuria “was a preemptive strike, before China became too strong and outclassed all rivals.” (954)⁵ Oddly — or perhaps not so oddly — aside from the source for this anecdote, no other Japan or Asia focused sources are cited or listed in the chapter bibliography.

The cited source, as noted in the excerpt, is a Russian journalist’s account published in 1943, called Bushido: the Anatomy of Terror. I’d never heard of this “official statement” nor of Pernikoff⁶ , so I started doing some digging. JSTOR got me a couple of reviews of the book. Stuart Portner, in Military Affairs⁷, called it “a truly weird recital of of Japanese brutality … This book purports to be a narration of events during the first days of Japanese control in Manchuria in 1931-32. Pernikoff … relates in gruesome detail evidence of the reign of terror in Harbin and other cities….” That’s not a strong recommendation, particularly coming in the midst of WWII. You’d expect a book published in 1943 that depicted the Japanese as inhuman brutes would get pretty solid reviews, no matter how weird or unbelievable. But no.

Richard T. Lapiere⁸ went even further, writing (emphasis added)

Pernikoff, on the other hand, sets out in “Bushido” to make the Japanese incomprehensible and inhuman and, unencumbered by a high regard for facts, succeeds in fitting them into the standard dramatic stereotype of the beast in human form. His medium is the autobiographical story of a young Russian who lived in Harbin at the time of the Japanese occupation and who was ultimately inducted into the Japanese inner circle. Action centers around the methods by which the Japanese train their candidates for the inner circle, a brutal dehumanizing procedure that leaves survivors with a split personality, the major part of which is utterly and mechanically loyal to Japanese leadership. All this is intended to prove that no Japanese of importance can ever be trusted to behave in terms of those sentiments and values which we consider the essence of being human. The book is written in the best horror-story style, and as such has few superiors. As propaganda it seems too convincing a story to be effective. The reader is likely to classify the book as a shocker, and enjoy it as such, rather than as a factual account that would lead to the stereotyping of the Japanese as subhuman beasts.

For a book to be too lurid and one-sided to be acceptable in the depths of WWII strikes me as extraordinary. It’s not necessarily evidence of anything: some of what went on during WWII was incomprehensibly vile, hard to believe even with incontrovertible evidence. And, if the secret societies were involved, there is some evidence that they had pretty extreme beliefs. But it seems very, very unlikely that anything like samurai prayer levitation would make it into “the official Japanese report of the incident.” It’s possible that the person reading the report lied about it’s provenance, or Pernikoff was mistaken. It seems more likely that it is evidence of Pernikoff’s desire to portray the Japanese as brainwashed, primitive and cunning, and a writing style “unencumbered by a high regard for facts.”

This raises serious issues for me as a teacher. It’s not an obscure factoid that students will miss: it’s the chapter opening, and it’s the only really exciting writing in the chapter.⁹ It’s memorable, but attempting to put it in context and qualify my concerns appropriately will take a lot of time — and this is a World History course, where time is very much at a premium — and runs the risk, ironically, of reinforcing the anecdote in my students’ minds. This is compounded, I’m afraid, by the fact that the next chapter — “The Pursuit of Utopia” starting with genocides and other atrocities — starts with the Rape of Nanjing as witnessed by John Rabe. I have until Monday to come up with something. Any thoughts?

1. I’m also not entirely happy with the “one topic over the whole world for a century” structure in the 20th century. It worked OK in the earlier segments, but the 19th century was a gallop and the 20th is pedal-to-the-metal. Yikes.
2. The authorship of the essay is actually a bit unclear, and there is a bibliography, but no citations. The sources listed range from the fairly authoritative (Yuki Tanaka) to the very unfamiliar but with somewhat lurid titles.
3. In fairness, as a social historian, I’m naturally deeply suspicious of conspiracy theories, and prefer to look at long-term structural causes.
4. Japan’s Total Empire, p. 58
5. This itself would be worth a serious critical look, were it not overshadowed by the preface.
6. Whose name is spelled correctly, “Pernikoff” (953-4), as well as incorrectly — “Pennikoff” (991) and “Persikoff” (989).
7. Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1943), p. 113
8. American Sociological Review, Vol. 8, No. 6 (Dec., 1943), p. 733. He is cited as being at Stanford.
9. The chapter is interesting reading, especially for its innovative approach, but students won’t really understand that.