I will be hosting the thirteenth installment of the Asian History Carnival at Muninn on the evening of April 21st. Please make your submissions by noon the 21st, US Eastern time. See the carnival’s homepage for more information. You can nominate postings here or simply tag them with the Delicious tag: http://del.icio.us/tag/ahcarnival/
This is a “dump”: all the Asia related stuff I’ve saved over the last…. two months? Anyway, nobody else has blogged about it, so I thought I’d toss it out there. I hope to resume more … measured blogging soon.
[Crossposted at all three Frog Blogs; sorry about the irrelevant stuff.]
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Roy Berman, the MutantFrog himself, will host the next Asian History Carnival at Mutant Frog Travelogue on the 18th. Get your nominations in to him directly (roy dot berman at gmail dot com), through blogcarnival.com or with del.icio.us tags. Remember, if you don’t submit anything, we may pick the worst thing you ever posted publicly….
A few other news notes:
Korean-American relations have always been tense says Daniel Sneider. This is an excellent brief survey of the last fifty years, a stark reminder that even our staunchest allies have minds of their own….
And in the “full employment for nationalist historians” category, Korea-China History Wars Continue, in anticipation of the collapse of North Korea. Or not, but they continue anyway.
Welcome to the sixth Asian History Carnival with some of the great blog postings related to Asian history from around the past month.
China
EastSouthWestNorth is one of the best blogs online covering the Chinese media in English and often offers full translations of Chinese media articles with commentary. In a recent posting, complete with an article translation, we learn of an example of what happens when massive numbers of online gamers respond to rumors of a pro-Japanese conspiracy on the part of the game’s designers. A flag looking suspiciously like Japan’s found in the online historical/fantasy setting of the game gets a closer evaluation in the posting.
Matt from Blind Man and the Elephant discusses Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practices and the work of American missionary Arthur Henderson Smith, especially his work Chinese Characteristics in his recent posting Arthur Smith and Chinese Characteristics
Dave and Stefan over at Blogging…Walk the Talk continue to post wonderful Hong Kong related historical articles based on contemporary historical documents and media. One recent posting looks at local resistance to British on April 1st, 1899, when the flag was to be hoisted in the New Territories leased from China. Another entry looks at Immigration and the Sanitary Laws of Hong Kong in the 19th century, especially during the outbreak of a plague in 1894-5.
Dave and Stefan also bring up the Kowloon-Canton Railway, its controversial status in 1899, and the uses of railway lines to increase imperial power – drawing a direct connection to China’s Tibetan line today.
Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well: China also wrote a posting about the Tibetan rail line and Sun Yat-sen’s earlier dreams of a similar railway in the aftermath of the 1911 revolution.
Our newest member at Frog in a Well: China Scott Relyea has posted about two illustrations he came across from Chengdu in 1912 and what we can learn about the growth market economy and crony capitalism in China.
Dan Harris over at the China Law Blog confesses his pro-capitalist views and sympathy for David S. Landes’ explanation of Why China Stagnated in some of his recent writings.
Korea
Gerry Bevers over at Korean Language Notes has continued his now 13 chapter long examination of the history of Ulleungdo for the purpose of challenging Korea’s claims to the controversial Dokto/Takeshima islands. His thirteen postings include clippings of the royal annals in the periods discussed in Classical Chinese, modern Korean, and English translation. His first posting on the topic, in May of this year, can be found here.
Over at the Sanchon Hunjang, there is an interesting posting about a memorial table in a Seoul park, the author Taemin’s attempt to understand the tablet, some of its more interesting features, and questions one might raise about the nearby explanations provided on site. Read Owen Miller’s comments on the posting here at Frog in a Well.
Here at our own Frog in a Well: Korea, Pak Noja (Vladimir) has been busy posting some English summaries and comments on recent Korean historical works he has been reading. See his postings on South Korea’s welfare policies in the 1960s, Patriotic School Athletics in the colonial period and after, and South Korea’s War on Rice (or the “쌀밥 전쟁”)
Asia All Around
I have put other postings on regions which didn’t merit their own section this time below:
In a posting by Matt at No-Sword there are some interesting quotes from and comments about the English writing of two famous Japanese writers (Natsume Sôseki and Dazai Osamu). While your visiting No-Sword, which often has postings on Japanese language, literature, and pop culture, don’t miss Matt’s own translations of Japanese literature in the links at the left.
Joe Kissell writes a posting about the history of the Indonesian language and contests the simplistic claim that the language is nothing more than an “artificial language”
Michael Turton from The View From Taiwan posts a summary of a July Meet Up on the history of martial arts in Taiwan. In includes something of an outline of points from each period which might be worth further discussion, with perhaps reference to Craig Colbeck’s posting on Karate and modernity over at Frog in a Well: Japan.
Resources and Articles
Mutanfrog links to a scanned online wartime comic which claims to show Americans how to accurately identify their enemy.
Owen here at our own Frog in a Well: Korea wrote a posting about the Glossary of Korean Studies.
In a separate recent posting, I noted that Yun Chi-ho’s Diary can be viewed online at history.go.kr.
Jonathan Dresner has pointed to some of the gems at the Korean Heritage Library in his posting here.
Read about UC Berkeley’s Japanese Historical Text Initiative announcement here.
T. Mills Kelly has written an interesting article on the Role of Technology in World History Teaching at World History Connected.
Check out this wonderful collection of Chinese propaganda posters at Maopost.com. The collection is being constantly updated and includes translations of the text.
After being down for a short period of time, Japan Focus is up and running again with a new design.
Alan Baumler points to an online biography of Western Language Publications on Chinese popular Religion.
Thanks to everyone for their submissions! The next Asian History Carnival will be hosted at the Mutantfrog Travelogue on September 9th.
Thanks to Antti for making note of the fact that all the papers for the 2006 annual conference of the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology are available online as PDFs.
While I’m mentioning Antti, whose weblog is a must read for anyone interested in Korea, readers here might be interested in a number of his recent postings including one on Korean name romanizations, the claim that Pak Hon-yong’s reputation has been reinstated in the DPRK , on “defensive nationalism” in Jo Jung-rae’s new novel, discussion of some photos of Seoul in the early 1970s and the Daeyeonggak hotel fire, and an interesting a discussion of the history of Noraebang in Korea.
Matt of the blog ‘Gusts of Popular Feeling‘ has produced two excellent posts in a row on apologist views of Japan’s colonisation of Korea. The latest one specifically concerns Japan’s ‘cultivation of foreign apologists’ during its bid to gain control over the Korean peninsula, using what one contemporary commentator called a “carefully organized [...] claque in Europe and America, especially in America.”
It’s a fascinating look at what the Japanese government were up to that raises one particular question in my mind: how did they learn so quickly to be masters of spin and successfully develop an influential lobby in the ‘West’. (Arguably, Japan still manages to benefit from a certain sort of untouchable ‘cool’ status among many people in Europe and the US, although not so much the generation that remembers WWII). I guess that one answer to this question is that the arguments used by the Japanese government and promoted by their foreign friends were the exact same ones being used by European governments about their colonial possessions or by the US about the Philippines (ie the natives can’t look after themselves and must be saved by us). It wasn’t hard to find a model for propaganda and it wasn’t hard to convince people in other parts of the world of its rightfulness as they already believed it.
I will be hosting the third edition of the Asian History Carnival on Sunday, March 5. Deadline for nominations of posts — anything about Asian history written since the last edition in mid-December — is Saturday, March 4th.
You can send nominations to me (jonathan at froginawell dot net) or use the handy Blog Carnival Submission Form.
Spread the word!
The third edition of the Asian History Carnival will be on March 3rd (3/3), but we still don’t have a volunteer for host! So, if you’re an Asian History Blogger, or some relevant combination of those three things, and would like to host, let me know; the fun/work ratio is good, and the result is a permanent place in the blogging history (not to mention traffic and links!).
Until we have a volunteer, articles can be submitted to me: jonathan[at]froginawell[dot]net
The Cliopatria Awards for best history blogging have been announced and the three Frog in a Well blogs have been selected the Best Group Blog
“After much thought, the judges chose the Frog in a Well project as a whole, rather than singling out any one of its constituent parts: not only do they feature overlapping personnel and a considerable degree of shared identity and purpose, all have been characterized by diverse contributors, strong historical content and consistently high quality writing. Both individually and as a whole, they represent a great achievement and a model to inspire and challenge in the future.”
Thanks, both to the judges and to all the bloggers who have made this such a great project to be part of. Special thanks, of course, to the creator and technical master (and a damn fine blogger) Konrad Lawson.
I’m really looking forward to the next year of Asian history blogging here!
Welcome to History Carnival #22, the final edition of 2005. I’m deeply grateful to Sharon Howard for starting this whole thing off eleven months ago, and take some pride in the only other person (besides herself, for the time being) to host this carnival twice. (oops. see comments)
In the past I’ve inflicted some odd arrangements on carnivals which I’ve hosted. This time I’ll try to be reasonably clear and straightforward, not least because I, like so many of you, am still in the middle of grading final exams and papers. Since we can all use some comic relief and light reading at this point…
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