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Here's a Word version of the assignments.

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Click on the icon below to download a copy of the seminar assignments.

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Hi Folks,

Morgan's provided us with a copy of his annotated bibliography. You may find it useful and can download it by clicking on the icon below.

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Hi Folks,

Morgan's provided us with his annotated bibliography on women in East Asian history. You can download it by clicking on the icon below.

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Morgan's sent his bibliography along and you can download it by clicking on the icon below.

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North Korea is among the least understood places. Some may be interested in having students visit and comment on the images at the following websites:

Time photo essay by Christopher Morris (2005)
http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/north_korea_morris/
This flash presentation includes helpful captions.

The Art of Propaganda: Nationalistic Themes in the Art of North Korea
http://www.dprkstudies.org/documents/nkpics/picgal.html
Part of an interesting blog focused on North Korea. The images are mostly from 1982 and 1984 books.

Miguel Torres - Travel Images
http://www.travel-images.com/korean.html
Torres is a freelance photographer, the images on these pages are for sale.

Boris Kester
http://www.traveladventures.org/continents/asia/northkorea.shtml
Kester, like Torres, is a freelance photographer. He's provided an essay to accompany his photos.

Peter Langer Associated Media Group
http://www.peterlanger.com/Countries/Asia/Koreanorth/pages/KPPYO027BW.htm
A commercial photo site, each image carries the owner's bold name, but the collection is extensive. Also, students may find it useful to examine the copyright/prices page which includes a special note for students. The captions are short and not as helpful as they might be.

2003 Propaganda Posters -- UCLA Asia Institute
http://international.ucla.edu/asia/nk/nkpindex.asp
This collection of posters were published following North Korea's inclusion as part of the "axis of evil" in Pres. Bush's State of the Union address. The site also includes transcripts from a conference on Nuclear North Korea and other resources.

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Time correspondent Jim Frederick has posted a dispatch on the Time website discussing how China's rise is causing consternation in Japan and has fueled nationalist sentiments. Frederick discusses how PM Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni shrine address domestic political concerns while angering many of Japan's neighbors.

An excerpt from the article:

***
Although the name Yasukuni means "Peaceful Nation," the Shine's controversial history has been anything but peaceful. Built in 1869, Yasukuni Shrine commemorates the souls of more than 2.5 million of Japan's war dead. During Japan's colonial era, military and political leaders made the shrine a focal point of Japan's native religion, which they used to help justify Tokyo's drive to conquer Asia. Nationalist propaganda proclaimed that the souls of those who sacrificed their lives at war for Japan would live on forever, venerated as heroes, at Yasukuni. Soldiers, pilots and seamen heading into battle would frequently bid farewell to each other by saying, "See you at Yasukuni."
***

Shrines and symbols are potent subjects for class discussions. How might we help students to discuss and understand the power and uses of such places/signs?

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Matt Forney (previously reporting for NPR and the Far Eastern Economic Review, now writing for Time) has just posted an article discussing "Why China Loves to Hate Japan." The complete entry is at:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1139759,00.html

An excerpt:
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Chinese kids can be forgiven for thinking Japan is a nation of "devils," a slur used without embarrassment in polite Chinese society. They were raised to feel that way, and not just through cartoons. Starting in elementary school children learn reading, writing and the "Education in National Humiliation." This last curriculum teaches that Japanese "bandits" brutalized China throughout the 1930s and would do so today given half a chance. Although European colonial powers receive their share of censure, the main goal is keeping memories of Japanese conquest fresh. Thousands of students each day, for instance, take class trips to the Anti-Japanese War Museum in Beijing to view grainy photos of war atrocities — women raped and disemboweled, corpses of children stacked like cordwood. As one 15-year-old girl in a blue and yellow school uniform, Ji Jilan, emerged from a recent visit to the gallery, she told a TIME correspondent: "After seeing this, I hate Japanese more than ever."
***

Of course, Japanese soldiers and others did commit atrocities during the invasion and occupation of China (beginning with the effective seizure of Manchuria in 1931 through Japan's surrender in 1945). Forgetting this would be an injustice, just as forgetting the cruelty of segregation would be an American tragedy. But is it proper to systematically stir hatred of people who were not responsible (in fact, most Japanese were not alive in 1945) for what happened then? How should we teach about these issues?

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The Chinese practice of footbinding is one of those things that capture people's attention. This can lead to a distorted picture of the social position of women. Let's discuss it in the Asia in My Classroom forum. Here I wanted to remind you of the Pitelka readings (see above) and to provide some additional resources:

Footbinding is one of the topics that every teacher needs to discuss when looking at the varying experiences of Chinese women. It emerges about a thousand years ago and survived into the last century.

Not all women had their feet bound. Many non-Han ethnic groups such as the Hakka and Manchus did not bind their women's feet and it was much less common among ordinary people in the South than it was in the North, probably because women in the South usually joined in agricultural labor.

How are we to understand this custom and role men and women played in perpetuating it? How should we raise the topic with children? Is it enough to note that our own culture imposes standards of beauty that cause some to endure suffering, surgery, or psychological damage?

Below are some web resources on footbinding that you may find interesting.

California resident Beverly Jackson is a longtime collector of the shoes worn by Chinese women with bound feet. She traveled to China and interviewed women who had their feet bound and produced a lavishly illustrated volume Splendid Slippers. Her website offers short excerpts from the book, reviews of it, and -- of course -- a link to buy the volume. Combined with works by Howard Levy and Dorothy Ko, this is a good resource to draw upon in introducing the practice to students.

http://www.silcom.com/~bevjack/

Levy, Howard S. Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom, Foreword by Arthur Waley. Introd. by Wolfram Eberhard. New York, W. Rawls, 1966.

Ko, Dorothy. Every Step a Lotus : Shoes for Bound Feet. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2001. Click here to see the UC Press webpage on the book. You can download and read chapter 2. It includes terrific images. Prof. Ko has also written "The Body as Attire: The Shifting Meanings of Footbinding in Seventeenth-Century China," The Journal of Women's History 8.4.
http://iupjournals.org/jwh/jwh8-4.html

Feng Jicai, one of China's most popular writers, authored an interesting novel on the custom and its place in family and social life. Three Inch Golden Lotus. It was translated by David Wakefield and published by the University of Hawaii press. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0824816064/103-0017646-1395814?v=glance

Yue-qing Yang's recent film Footbinding: The Search for the Three-Inch Golden Lotus is available and includes interviews with Chinese about the custom. In the film, Dorothy Ko argues that footbinding is routinely misunderstood. http://www.movingimages.bc.ca/catalogue/Cultdiverse/footbinding.html

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The Chinese practice of footbinding is one of those things that capture people's attention. This can lead to a distorted picture of the social position of women. Let's discuss it in the Asia in My Classroom forum. Here I wanted to remind you of the Pitelka readings (see above) and to provide some additional resources:

Footbinding is one of the topics that every teacher needs to discuss when looking at the varying experiences of Chinese women. It emerges about a thousand years ago and survived into the last century.

Not all women had their feet bound. Many non-Han ethnic groups such as the Hakka and Manchus did not bind their women's feet and it was much less common among ordinary people in the South than it was in the North, probably because women in the South usually joined in agricultural labor.

How are we to understand this custom and role men and women played in perpetuating it? How should we raise the topic with children? Is it enough to note that our own culture imposes standards of beauty that cause some to endure suffering, surgery, or psychological damage?

Below are some web resources on footbinding that you may find interesting.

California resident Beverly Jackson is a longtime collector of the shoes worn by Chinese women with bound feet. She traveled to China and interviewed women who had their feet bound and produced a lavishly illustrated volume Splendid Slippers. Her website offers short excerpts from the book, reviews of it, and -- of course -- a link to buy the volume. Combined with works by Howard Levy and Dorothy Ko, this is a good resource to draw upon in introducing the practice to students.

http://www.silcom.com/~bevjack/

Levy, Howard S. Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom, Foreword by Arthur Waley. Introd. by Wolfram Eberhard. New York, W. Rawls, 1966.

Ko, Dorothy. Every Step a Lotus : Shoes for Bound Feet. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2001. Click here to see the UC Press webpage on the book. You can download and read chapter 2. It includes terrific images. Prof. Ko has also written "The Body as Attire: The Shifting Meanings of Footbinding in Seventeenth-Century China," The Journal of Women's History 8.4.
http://iupjournals.org/jwh/jwh8-4.html

Feng Jicai, one of China's most popular writers, authored an interesting novel on the custom and its place in family and social life. Three Inch Golden Lotus. It was translated by David Wakefield and published by the University of Hawaii press. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0824816064/103-0017646-1395814?v=glance

Yue-qing Yang's recent film Footbinding: The Search for the Three-Inch Golden Lotus is available and includes interviews with Chinese about the custom. In the film, Dorothy Ko argues that footbinding is routinely misunderstood. http://www.movingimages.bc.ca/catalogue/Cultdiverse/footbinding.html

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For the most part, it's probably best to discuss footbinding in the Asia in My Classroom forum. But here I wanted to provide some resources:

Footbinding is one of the topics that every teacher needs to discuss when looking at the varying experiences of Chinese women. It emerges about a thousand years ago and survived into the last century.

Not all women had their feet bound. Many non-Han ethnic groups such as the Hakka and Manchus did not bind their women's feet and it was much less common among ordinary people in the South than it was in the North, probably because women in the South usually joined in agricultural labor.

How are we to understand this custom and role men and women played in perpetuating it? How should we raise the topic with children? Is it enough to note that our own culture imposes standards of beauty that cause some to endure suffering, surgery, or psychological damage?

Below are some web resources on footbinding that you may find interesting.

California resident Beverly Jackson is a longtime collector of the shoes worn by Chinese women with bound feet. She traveled to China and interviewed women who had their feet bound and produced a lavishly illustrated volume Splendid Slippers. Her website offers short excerpts from the book, reviews of it, and -- of course -- a link to buy the volume. Combined with works by Howard Levy and Dorothy Ko, this is a good resource to draw upon in introducing the practice to students.

http://www.silcom.com/~bevjack/

Levy, Howard S. Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom, Foreword by Arthur Waley. Introd. by Wolfram Eberhard. New York, W. Rawls, 1966.

Ko, Dorothy. Every Step a Lotus : Shoes for Bound Feet. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2001. Click here to see the UC Press webpage on the book. You can download and read chapter 2. It includes terrific images. Prof. Ko has also written "The Body as Attire: The Shifting Meanings of Footbinding in Seventeenth-Century China," The Journal of Women's History 8.4.
http://iupjournals.org/jwh/jwh8-4.html

Feng Jicai, one of China's most popular writers, authored an interesting novel on the custom and its place in family and social life. Three Inch Golden Lotus. It was translated by David Wakefield and published by the University of Hawaii press. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0824816064/103-0017646-1395814?v=glance

Yue-qing Yang's recent film Footbinding: The Search for the Three-Inch Golden Lotus is available and includes interviews with Chinese about the custom. In the film, Dorothy Ko argues that footbinding is routinely misunderstood. http://www.movingimages.bc.ca/catalogue/Cultdiverse/footbinding.html

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Some may find the Amazon.com customer reviews of this work of interest:

> 180 reviews

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The tragic poisoning of the Songhua River in NE China (see Yahoo/Reuters for one summary, click here for a Yahoo slide show) raises again the challenges of balancing economic development with protecting the environment. It also raises questions of governmental openness and responsiveness. The Chinese government was slow to acknowledge and address the hazards (a reminder of the SARS debacle in 2003 and, some would argue, the US government's failures to respond to Hurricane Katrina in 2005).

Before jumping to condemn the procedures that made this tragedy possible and the criminal addiction to secrecy, the corruption or the ineptitude that followed, we might remember that the US has been shipping our own pollution challenges to China in the form of electronic garbage. (See this Sept. 2005 Xinhua report on such dumping. A People's Daily [Renmin Ribao] story from 2002 notes an incident where the Chinese government blocked the import of such waste. Here's an Oct. 24, 2005 NY Times story on the export of such waste to the third world.)

Click here for the latest Google News index of Songhua River stories.

How can the desire to rapidly industrialize and raise living standards be done satisfied while also protecting the environment so that health risks and degradation are minimized?

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Teachers in the Torrance 2005 forum have been talking about the film The King and I. It's a popular film and one that we might take up here as well. It seems to me that (ignoring its historical accuracy for a moment), there are a few topics stimulated by the film that teachers and students might find interesting.

1. The interesting role played by Western tutors in Asia the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are books and films that might be drawn upon, not only The King and I, but also The Last Emperor for China (Reginald Johnston). Another interesting story is that of Elizabeth Gray Vining who died in 1999 at 97. She tutored the current emperor of Japan for 4 years and wrote Windows for the Crown Prince about it.

What does it mean that these countries imported teachers for future rulers? Of our own future presidents, what international training have they received? [Remember how Bill Clinton's time at Oxford actually made some suspicious of him -- in part because of his anti-war activities and in part because of his "not inhaling" while there. Clearly the candidate who speaks fluent Spanish will be attractive to a growing segment of the electorate. Some see Russian-speaking Condi Rice as a potential candidate, though only a few folks have been able to successfully run for the presidency without having been elected to others offices - think Hoover and Eisenhower, both wartime heroes.] In an increasingly global age, can we be content with monolingual and monocultural leaders? Or is it possible that only leaders such as those can be trusted to put American interests first?

2. The King and I offers cultural clash, gender issues, and the hint of romance. One might also compare the Yul Brenner/Deborah Kerr version (1956) with the more recent Chow Yun Fat/Jodie Foster version (Anna and the King of Siam (1999). One could also track down the Rex Harrison version (1946) and a Warner Brothers cartoon version.

Why has the story of Anna Leonowens so interested movie makers?

Here are a few links that may be helpful:
Dialogworks - ideas for teachers
http://www.dialogueworks.co.uk/newswise/months/nov/siamj.html

World Royalty - outline history of King Mongkut
http://www.royalty.nu/Asia/Thailand/Mongkut.html

Amazon - take a look at the customer reviews of the Chow/Foster version.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00003CWLF/002-6441553-5048814?v=glance&n=130&v=glance

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Shannon's turkey-fueled evaluation of The King and I and Michael's response reminds me to raise several topics that teachers and students might be interested in.

1. The interesting role played by Western tutors in Asia the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are books and films that might be drawn upon, not only The King and I, but also The Last Emperor for China (Reginald Johnston). Another interesting story is that of Elizabeth Gray Vining who died in 1999 at 97. She tutored the current emperor of Japan for 4 years and wrote Windows for the Crown Prince about it.

What does it mean that these countries imported teachers for future rulers? Of our own future presidents, what international training have they received? [Remember how Bill Clinton's time at Oxford actually made some suspicious of him -- in part because of his anti-war activities and in part because of his "not inhaling" while there. Clearly the candidate who speaks fluent Spanish will be attractive to a growing segment of the electorate. Some see Russian-speaking Condi Rice as a potential candidate, though only a few folks have been able to successfully run for the presidency without having been elected to others offices - think Hoover and Eisenhower, both wartime heroes.] In an increasingly global age, can we be content with monolingual and monocultural leaders? Or is it possible that only leaders such as those can be trusted to put American interests first?

2. The King and I offers cultural clash, gender issues, and the hint of romance. One might also compare the Yul Brenner/Deborah Kerr version (1956) with the more recent Chow Yun Fat/Jodie Foster version (Anna and the King of Siam (1999). One could also track down the Rex Harrison version (1946) and a Warner Brothers cartoon version.

Why has the story of Anna Leonowens so interested movie makers?

This is a discussion that should probably move to the film festival section of the Asia in My Classroom forum where other teachers can participate as well. I'll copy this post there as well.

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