[clay dube]

The library at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee has created a wonderful resource for those interested in photographs and maps from Tibet. The photographs date from the first four decades of the twentieth century. The collection is searchable and you can also browse by location or topic (e.g., automobiles, art, and so on). There was amazingly detailed information about the images I checked. Copying the images is tricky, but you could use them in a presentation simply by linking to the specific pages. You can zoom in to focus on particular parts of an image.

http://www4.uwm.edu/libraries/digilib/tibet/index.cfm

[clay dube]

How many know about the Korean Bell of Friendship and Bell Pavilion. It's in San Pedro. Here's info:

http://www.sanpedro.com/sp_point/korenbel.htm

Which gets me wondering -- perhaps it would be a good adventure for students to do an LAsia hunt. What landmarks can they find?

[clay dube]

Hi Folks,

It was my privilege to visit the BYD plant in Xi'an with a group of Palos Verdes teachers a few years ago. The factory was a bit sleepy, far from the humming place we'd expected or that I saw with another group of teachers in 2008 at Toyota City near Nagoya, Japan. BYD, though, made a big splash at the Detroit auto show last year and has received a large investment ($232 million) from über-investor Warren Buffet. Here's an article about some of what's going on at BYD:

http://english.caing.com/2010/byd/

Wang Chuanfu, BYD's chairman, is now China's richest man.

[clay dube]

Hi Folks,

Just a reminder that the Chinese and many other people celebrate the lunar new year. Vietnamese, Koreans, Japanese, Thai, and others mark the lunar new year. And, of course, significant minorities in the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia celebrate the lunar new year. This is one reason they all issue lunar new year stamps. Want to see this year's crop:

http://china.usc.edu/ShowArticle.aspx?articleID=1999

We also have a collection of last year's stamps at:
http://china.usc.edu/ShowArticle.aspx?articleID=1343

I hope everyone's year of the tiger is off to a great start.

[clay dube]

One of the most astute observers of revolutionary China was a diplomat who used the pen name Simon Leys. I highly recommend his book Chinese Shadows. In 1989 he published an essay, "The Chinese attitude toward the past." It was reprinted in 2008 by the web journal China Heritage Quarterly. The journal itself is a great resource. This is a wonderful essay. Let me share two paragraphs from it:

"The presence of the past is constantly felt in China. Sometimes it is found in the most unexpected places, where it hits the visitor with added intensity: movie-theatre posters, advertisements for washing machines, televisions or toothpaste displayed along the streets are expressed in a written language that has remained practically unchanged for the last two thousand years. In kindergarten, toddlers chant Tang poems that were written some twelve hundred years ago. In railway stations the mere consultation of a train timetable can be an intoxicating experience for any cultural historian: the imagination is stirred by these long lists of city names to which are still attached the vivid glories of past dynasties. Or again, in a typical and recent occurrence, archaeologists discovered in a two thousand year old tomb, among the foodstuff that had been buried with the deceased, ravioli which were in any respect identical to those that can be bought today in any street-corner shop. Similar examples could be multiplied endlessly.

"Yet, at the same time, the paradox is that the very past which seems to penetrate everything, and to manifest itself with such surprising vigour, is also strangely evading our physical grasp. This same China which is loaded with so much history and so many memories is also oddly deprived of ancient monuments. In the Chinese landscape, there is a material absence of the past that can be most disconcerting for cultivated Western travellers.... In China, on the contrary, if we except a very small number of famous ensembles (the antiquity of which is quite relative), what strikes the educated visitor is the monumental absence of the past. Most Chinese cities - including, and especially those which were ancient capital cities or prestigious cultural centres - present today an aspect that may not look exactly new or modern (for, if modernisation is a target which China has now set for itself, there is still a long way to go before it can be reached), but appears strangely devoid of all traditional character. On the whole, they seem to be a product of late 19th century industrialisation. Thus, the past which continues to animate Chinese life in so many striking, unexpected or subtle ways, seems to inhabit the people rather than the bricks and stones. The Chinese past is both spiritually active and physically invisible."

I love the notion that the past is within people and not evident in the landscape. You can read the essay at: http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/articles.php?searchterm=014_chineseAttitude.inc&issue=014

[clay dube]

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scholars tried to put together a joint textbook.

The Associated Press reported on the results of the effort:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/01/AR2010020101131.html

The article begins:
"Japan acknowledged its wartime military caused tremendous damage to China in the "Rape of Nanking" massacre, but the two sides failed again to agree on the death toll."

Here's an LA Times opinion piece about the effort while it was still underway:

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/30/world/fg-textbook30

Here's a scholarly article in History and Memory about a 2002 effort:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/history_and_memory/v021/21.1.wang.html
53 members from the three countries. A section of the article looks at victim/victor narratives vs. reflective narratives.

Here's a 2005 Danwei report on this effort:
http://www.danwei.org/books/a_joint_approach_to_history.php
Here's a 2006 article by a Korean scholar on the China/Korea textbook battle:
http://hnn.us/articles/21617.html

Here's the Northeast Asia History Foundation's page on the Korea/Japan issues:
http://english.historyfoundation.or.kr/?sub_num=141

Here's an out of date, but still interesting Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs page on historical representation/debate.
http://www.mofa.go.jp/POLICY/postwar/index.html

Japan Times report on the release of reports in December:
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20100121f1.html

[clay dube]

Michael Kort. The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb.
Columbia Guides to American History and Cultures Series. New York Columbia University Press, 2007. 464 pp. $46.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-13016-5.

This sounds like an invaluable resource for anyone who teaches modern world or American history. Here's a review that was posted to the History of Diplomacy discussion list:

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15573

Here's a portion of the review:
Most innovative of the three is the reference work, Michael Kort's Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb. It joins at least a half-dozen other titles in the same series on a wide variety of historical topics. Other reference works and document readers of course exist, but none tries to do what the Columbia Guide does.[1] It begins with a seventy-five-page "Historical Narrative," accessible to the lay reader, which briefly describes the debate over Hiroshima and then traces events from the launching of the Manhattan Project through the Japanese surrender. Part 2 devotes thirty-five pages to ten "Key Questions and Interpretations," such as "Was the Policy of Unconditional Surrender Justified?" Part 3, "Resources," uses thirty pages to provide a chronology, glossaries of terms and names, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. The last section presents over two hundred pages of primary documents arranged in seven sections: American civilian documents; American military documents; summaries of Japanese diplomatic cable traffic obtained via MAGIC codebreaking; Japanese government and military documents and diary entries; Japanese surrender documents; key sections of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, including portions of interrogations of Japanese officials; and postwar statements by Japanese officials collected by the U.S. Army historical division.

[clay dube]

There's a surprising amount of scholarship on Christianity in Korea, but I don't think that this question, "why is Christianity so popular?" has been fully answered to the satisfaction of the scholarly community. Part of the answer lies in the timing, Christianity provided a venue beyond the control of the Japanese colonial government and provided an alternative belief system in a time of great trial. Another part lies in the fact that missionaries got busy setting up colleges - Koreans appreciated and continue to appreciate educational opportunities. But these are only partial explanations.

At the same time, remember that most Koreans are not Christian (perhaps 25-30% are). Christians, though, clearly have a higher propensity to seek to migrate. The overwhelming majority of Koreans coming to the US are Christian.

[clay dube]

Robert asked about migrants/funding and many other issues. Here, I just want to suggest looking at the work of one of our USC colleagues, Apichai Shipper. Apichai has recently published a book looking at immigration and Japanese democracy. He's now looking to compare migration politics in Japan, the US, and Sweden.

http://college.usc.edu/sir/faculty/faculty_display.cfm?person_ID=1003701

[clay dube]

[originally posted to the film festival thread - but wanted to make sure that those interested in increasing Korea's place in the curriculum know about this resource]

We recently had a great workshop which featured Trinity University's Don Clark talking about South Korean film and television. The latest issue of Education about Asia includes an interesting article by Tom Vick on film and contemporary Korea. Vick plans film screenings for the Smithsonian Institution's Freer and Sackler Galleries.

Vick, Tom. "Cinema as a Window on Contemporary Korea," Education about Asia 14.3 (Winter 2009): 37-41.

There are other articles devoted to particular films and an essay by Mary Connor (Korea Academy for Educators) on using such films in the classroom.

EAA puts some articles online (

http://www.asian-studies.org/EAA/TOC-14-3.htm), but these aren't among them.

If you're not already subscribing to EAA, you should consider doing so. The three issues each year are rich with concrete teaching suggestions, background readings, and more.

[clay dube]

We recently had a great workshop which featured Trinity University's Don Clark talking about South Korean film and television. The latest issue of Education about Asia includes an interesting article by Tom Vick on film and contemporary Korea. Vick plans film screenings for the Smithsonian Institution's Freer and Sackler Galleries.

Vick, Tom. "Cinema as a Window on Contemporary Korea," Education about Asia 14.3 (Winter 2009): 37-41.

There are other articles devoted to particular films and an essay by Mary Connor (Korea Academy for Educators) on using such films in the classroom.

EAA puts some articles online (

http://www.asian-studies.org/EAA/TOC-14-3.htm), but these aren't among them.

If you're not already subscribing to EAA, you should consider doing so. The three issues each year are rich with concrete teaching suggestions, background readings, and more.

[clay dube]

Stan's picked up on a very interesting video. I like it a lot and wrote a review of it:
abridged version: http://www.aems.uiuc.edu/downloads/Fall2008.pdf

While you're at AEMS, roam a bit -- Asia Educational Media Service is a wonderful resource for teachers.

the longer version of the review is at: http://china.usc.edu/ShowArticle.aspx?articleID=1201

I look forward to hearing what others think and how Stan's and other students react to the video.

[clay dube]

In case anyone's wondering: harmony 和 (the giant symbol of the Olympics opening ceremony):

March 8, 2008 Xinhua article:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-03/04/content_7716917.htm

"BEIJING, March 4 (Xinhua) -- The Olympic ceremonies will convey the "conception of harmony from an international perspective", Chen Weiya, deputy general director of the opening and closing ceremonies for the Beijing Games, said Tuesday. ...."

August 9, 2008 NY Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/sports/olympics/09china.html

"BEIJING — An ecstatic China finally got its Olympic moment on Friday night. And if the astonishing opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games lavished grand tribute on Chinese civilization and sought to stir an ancient nation’s pride, there was also a message for an uncertain outside world: Do not worry. We mean no harm...." (check out the fantastic slide show)

The character for tiger (and it's going to be the year of the tiger) is hu: 虎 。 The character for to eat is chi 吃。
[Edit by="Clay Dube on Jan 22, 4:42:23 PM"][/Edit]

[clay dube]

Hi Folks,

Britney Spears and many other celebrities have embraced 汉字 hanzi (Chinese for characters) or kanji (Japanese for characters) and millions of others have followed suit. My guess is that most tattoo parlors offer them as possible designs.

Not every tattoo works out quite as the buyer/wearer might hope. Hanzi Smatter is a wonderful website offering photos and translations of what problematic inscriptions actually say.

http://www.hanzismatter.com/

A post from 12/26 is great. Someone has produced an iPhone app that has assigned characters, randomly, to letters in the English alphabet. The program will allow you to "add mystery to your writing." Essentially, this is like a Captain Midnight Decoder Ring (no, I'm not actually old enough to remember that radio program, but the item was passed down as a family treasure) or any code that assigns symbols, numbers, or other letters to any letter. The app website allows you to try it out. So I typed "This is a hopelessly dumb program" and the program gave me 七升工弓 工弓 月 升口戶三心三弓弓心了 力臼冊官 戶尺口巨尺月冊. (You need to have East Asian languages enabled to see characters -- Windows users do this via start | control panel | regional and language options.)

Here's the website for you to try:

http://goodcharacters.com/alphabet/alphabetweb.php

The programmer says:
"Once you learn how to use this writing system, you no longer have to worry about others reading your diary or other secrets! Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans will recognize the characters, but the combination of characters won't make sense to them. And people who cannot read Chinese won't even try to read it. Isn't it cool?"

I think it is dumb, but I know that students think the characters are cool and mysterious and I highly recommend finding ways to introduce them. A simple way to start is with the months of the year, which are just numbers: January is 一月 or first month.

Tim Xie at Cal State Long Beach has put together a list of web resources that offer tools and ideas you may find useful. At the very least let's hope our students will know enough not to get mirror tattoos (where the characters are reversed, which is like spelling reversed this way: desrever).

[clay dube]

This is fascinating. Please do tell us what films your students are introducing to you!

[Author]

Posts