井の中の蛙

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.

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:
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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 [↩]

By now most of you have probably heard of the erasure of buraku — the segregated communities of Japanese outcastes — from Google Earth.¹ The continuing discrimination against burakumin — hisabetsuminzoku² is the phrase I was taught to use in the late ’80s, but it doesn’t seem to have stuck — which often uses their unique geographic footprint as a tool for identifying the otherwise indistinguishable burakumin from the rest of the Japanese population was the issue: having the maps on Google Earth made it too easy.

The discussion at H-Japan has been fairly low-key³ and the UCB Library has calmed the scholars’ fears by announcing that the only alterations were made to the Google Earth versions, not to the online digital archive versions. That narrows the problem a bit…
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1. I got that from a student just before it showed up on H-Japan. [↩]
2. literally “peoples who have been discriminated against” [↩]
3. though Paul Stephen Lim’s story of government pressure to downplay burakumin issues is pretty shocking [↩]

Alan Baumler pointed me to peacay’s recent post of Dutch images of 17th century Japan. Some of them are quite accurate — the images of samurai, in particular, are quite nice — and based on the observations of Dutch traders and scholars at the Deshima trading station in Nagasaki harbor. Some of the images are based on Indian or Chinese models (though the tradition of religious statuary shared between these cultures means that they’re not as terrible as you might think). Some are pretty bizarre, but that’s par for the course before the 19th century.

Then there’s the one that stopped me in my tracks:

You can find the original here, in the full context of the book. Someone who reads 17th century Dutch might be able to help me, because I’m quite curious about the text at this point. Without it, though, I can only speculate.

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, mainly the fact that the jinrikisha wasn’t invented for another two hundred years. Also, Japanese did not use wheeled carts for transporting goods.¹. Before that, Japanese traveled mostly by foot and by boat. Samurai travelled by horse, sometimes. Other elites — including samurai, nobles, village headmen, the wealthy — traveled by palanquin (aka litter). Even the transport of commercial goods was mostly by boat and by hand.

While there seems to be some dispute about the origins of the rickshaw, nobody has ever suggested that it developed in the 1600s! I suspect what we see here is a failure of imagination. Having seen images of palanquins and bearers, but unable to concieve of transport without wheels, the illustrator added the — to him entirely obvious and necessary — elements. In the process, he created a shocking anachronism, and if anyone had taken these images seriously, could have radically altered the history of transportation.

1. Hal Bolitho called Japan’s abandonment of the wheel one of the great mysteries of Japanese history, along with the failure to adopt the chair and the survival of the Imperial institution [↩]

Two deadlines are fast approaching:

• nominations for Cliopatria Awards for best blogging, 2008 (covering from December 2007 through November 2008) close Sunday at midnight. I am one of the judges so there are several categories I can’t nominate in (or be nominated in): you have to do it yourself!
• nominations for the December History Carnival (covering November) also close Sunday at midnight. Nominations page here. I will be hosting the carnival here, so keep an eye out!

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.

Japanese historical visual materials are becoming available online in increasing quantities and variety, as seen in two posts from the last week from Pink Tentacle and BiblioOdyssey. The former posted an entry titled “Mythical 16th-century disease critters” which introduces a text owned and published online by the Kyushu National Museum:

Harikikigaki, a book of medical knowledge written in 1568 by a now-unknown resident of Osaka, introduces 63 of these creepy-crawlies and describes how to fight them with acupuncture and herbal remedies. The Kyushu National Museum, which owns the original copy of Harikikgaki, claims the book played an important role in spreading traditional Chinese medicine in Japan.      

BiblioOdyssey’s post introduces a database of late 19th-century, early 20th-century water color depictions of toys. These seem to be by Koizumi Kawasaki (1877-1942): “Japanese Toy Design.” 

Add these to other resources like the Nagasaki University Library’s Metadata Database of Japanese Old Photographs, Database of Nationally Designated Cultural Properties and the Tohoku University Library’s Kano Collection – Image database.

A recent exchange on H-Asia mentioned the Asian Studies Toolbar, which I first read about in March of last year when the maker, John Noyce (“a librarian turned writer/historian”), wrote about it on the same list. At the time I was very disappointed to read that it only worked on Windows. However I just successfully downloaded and installed it on Firefox running on my iMac, and it is AMAZING. It allows instant searches of a variety of Asian engines and blog aggreggators, it lists hundreds of Asian academic and popular journals, newspapers, and other sources as live RSS feeds, and it even includes blogs related to Asia – including the three flavors of Frog in a Well. Links to online atlases, image banks, and other sources really make this a useful tool.

Some of you may know about this tool already, but I just discovered Matthias Schemm’s wonderful NengoCalc, an online or offline converter of Japanese and Western dates.

Converting premodern Japanese dates to the Western calendar is extremely tricky because the years were not coterminus until Japan’s adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1873. So, to cite a well known example, Tokugawa Ieyasu was born on the 26th day of the 12th month of the 11th year of the reign period Tembun. Most of Tembun 11 corresponds to 1542, but not all of it. As NengoCalc nicely informs us, Ieyasu was born on January 31, 1543, which happened to be a Wednesday.

Thanks Matthias!

I recently came across the Ancient Japan weblog. Looking through its archives, I see that it has been offering up interesting postings for over a year now and joins the few weblogs out there, at least that I have come across, which directly focuses on Japanese history. I sent off a few questions to the weblog’s author, Joseph Ryan, to learn a bit more about his website:

Q: What is the scope of coverage for the Ancient Japan blog?

A: The material appearing on The Ancient Japan Blog stretches from the Jomon to the Kofun period. Related to that time frame, I plan on posting reviews and purchase links for new books, updates on current Japanese archaeological issues (such as the Takamatsuzuka Kofun restoration), and personal research that I hope will spark exciting conversation.

Q: How did you become interested in the topic?

A: I originally became interested in Japanese history after a rather embarrassing incident at a local fabric store. I was in seventh grade at the time. I went to the store with my mother and her friend in order to buy some generic “Chinese” fabric for some curtains (I thought they’d look great in my room…). My mother’s friend asked me if I was interested in Japanese items as well. Truth be told, I didn’t know where Japan was on a map. I returned home that evening and read general descriptions of Japan’s geography, history, and economy in the Encarta Encyclopedia. Not surprisingly, the small, romanticized blurb on samurai caught my attention. There was no turning back at that point–I believe I bought all the Japanese-related books that Borders and Barnes and Noble had to offer. As to how I became interested in specifically ancient Japanese history, I was puzzled at the vague references to early Korean-Japanese relations and the relatively small amount of space devoted to the Yayoi/Kofun periods in the first book of Sansom’s /A History of Japan /trilogy. I suppose that was like hiding the Christmas presents from the kids–the less the kids know, the more they inquire. I suppose the small amount of researchers in the field, the effects ancient history had on the formation of Japanese society and government, and the overall challenge of peering through two thousand years of mist to a fascinating age keeps my interest alive.

Q: What do you think are the issues and questions related to the study of ancient Japan which those outside of Japan have most taken an interest to? Why?

A: Two words just popped into my head: Kofun and Yamatai. Why kofun? They’re mysterious, huge, and awe-inspiring manifestations of the rivalry between and the power of regional chieftains and Yamato Kings. Why Yamatai? Thanks to the annoyingly vague Wei Zhi, the location of Himiko’s chiefdom of Yamatai will provide fodder for research for generations of scholars to come. As more and more scholars realize that the path toward answering questions on ancient Japan is one of interdisciplinary cooperation, archaeological and traditional historical methods of analyzing these ancient problems are revealing more and more fascinating details. There are surely other topics that Western researchers have found interesting (such as questions surrounding race and origin), but the size, shape, and meaning of kofun, and the location of Yamatai strike me as most attractive to those outside of Japan. (It’s here that I’d like to plug Professor J. Edward Kidder, Jr.’s new book on Yamatai, Himiko, and the nature of Japanese society during the transition from the Yayoi to the Kofun period. It’s called Himiko and Japan’s Elusive Chiefdom of Yamatai: Archaeology, History, and Mythology.)

Q: What are other good resources online for those who might be interested in the study of ancient Japanese history?

A: I sure wish there was more online–it would save me a bundle not having to buy $80 monographs in order to get a prodding historical question answered! If people don’t know Japanese, it can be very difficult to find trustworthy, detailed information on the Internet. A list of appropriate websites would make this already long post too long, so please check out my new post here. It’s a work in progress.

Thanks to Joseph for his replies, and be sure to check out his links to useful websites on ancient Japan. It looks like the blog may become a group effort in the future. If you are interesting in joining the weblog as a contributor, leave a note introducing yourself here.