A short interview with Professor Hargett

Professor Hargett published a book recently, titled "Riding the River Home"--I thought it would be interesting to ask him a little bit about his project and post it on the blog:

Q. What got you interested in the topic of "Riding the River Home"?

A. Well, since my graduate school days I have been interested in the prose works of the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279) official and writer Fan Chengda (1126-1193). My first book, titled On the Road in Twelfth Century Century China: The Travel Diaries of Fan Chengda (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1989) presents a critical study of Fan Chengda's three surviving travel diaries. I had hoped to include English translations of all three diaries in the book. But there wasn't enough room, so I had to leave out my translation the longest and best written of the three diaries. I swore at the time that "someday" I would publish an annotated, English translation of that third diary. Well, it took me almost twenty years, but my translation appears in Riding the River Home: A Complete and Annotated Translation of Fan Chengda's (1126-1193) Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu (Wuchuan lu).This book was published in Hong Kong by The Chinese University Press in 2008. The original title of the work translated in this book is Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu, but this title is a bit boring and probably means nothing to most readers. So, I myself devised the title Riding the River Home to give readers at least a hint that the book is about a long, boat trip down the Changjiang (or Yangzi River), which took the author (Fan Chengda) home.

Q. What was the biggest hurdle/challenge in translating Record of a Boat Trip to Wu"?

A: The biggest challenge is translating twelfth-century Classical Chinese into literate, readable English. This is difficult because there is no gender, number, tense, case, person, aspect, and so on, in Classical Chinese. Another challenge is technical terms (special words indicating linear, area, and weight measures, for instance) and local/colloquial terms (Fan Chengda sometimes employs colloquial terms gathered during visits to local sites). Needless to say, most of these terms are not found in any dictionary. Thus, a lot of "sinological detective work" is necessary to figure out what these terms mean.

Q. Was there anything in the original book that surprised you? If so, what was it, and why was it surprising?

A: Many things surprised me, but what made the biggest impression was this: Fan Chengda was intimately familiar with the history and earlier literature written about the places he visited during his journeys. This reveals an important characteristic of all travel literature in traditional China. To write something intelligent and meaningful about a particular place required thorough knowledge of that place's history and the literature (poems, travel diaries, and so on) written by earlier authors, especially the famous ones.

Q. How did Riding the River Home lead you to your current project?

A: Well, after finishing the Riding the River Home, I prepared an annotated English translation of another work by Fan Chengda. This one is titled Guihai yuheng zhi,which in English translates as "Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea." This text is essentially a gazetteer or local history of Guangxi, Hainan Island, and north Vietnam in the twelfth century.Translating this work into English was extremely difficult, mainly because there are tons of specialized and local vocabulary on everything from birds, quadrapeds, fish, flowers, trees, and the customs of non-Chinese tribes in the south. I'm still not sure that I got everything right in my translation! This book will be published by University of Washington Press in 2009.

Majors for Advanced Language Students

In keeping with one of the purposes of this blog, I’d like to introduce a new curricular development.

We in the East Asian Studies Department feel strongly that our job is to enable students to pursue their interests in East Asian Studies and to find ways for students to push themselves further in their academic work. The process of Program Review that we engaged in last year provided us an excellent opportunity to consider the current state of our programs systematically. We have been fortunate over the last several years, and that good fortune has allowed us to grow. With the increase in the size of the Department faculty, we offer more courses on a wider variety of subjects. This has enabled us to make some important changes in our program.

Those of you who have been majors or minors in the Department for a while are probably aware that we have long had a rule in the Department that banned near-native and native speakers of one of the languages we teach from majoring in that language. For example, native speakers of Chinese were not able to major in Chinese Studies. The reasons for this were very practical. The Chinese Studies and Japanese Studies majors require 16 credits of language via completion of the second and third-year language courses. In the earlier history of the Department, we simply did not offer enough advanced language courses or non-language culture courses that could serve as substitutes for the major language requirement. That has now changed.

Beginning immediately, students with advanced language skills in Chinese or Japanese may major in Chinese Studies or Japanese Studies respectively. To do so, you will have to meet the following criteria. You must demonstrate language competence equivalent to the second semester of third-year (EAC 302 or EAJ 302, respectively). You will then arrange with your advisor appropriate course substitutions for the language requirement. One of the substituted courses must be a course in a relevant Classical language. For Chinese Studies that would be either EAC 310 or EAC 311. For Japanese, EAC 310, EAC 311, or a course in Classical Japanese would count. Classical Chinese counts in the Japanese Studies major because of the historical fact that Japanese used Classical Chinese (known in Japanese as Kanbun) as an educated language through most of Japan’s imperial history. The balance of the 16 credit language requirement would be made up by substituting other appropriate intermediate and upper level courses.

All of these substitutions need to be approved by your East Asian Studies academic advisor. If you are in this category, I encourage you to discuss this either with your advisor (if you have one) or any professor in the Department.

Prof. DeBlasi

Electronic toys...er....tools

Apropros of the recent discussion on kanji, no kanji, and word processing, I thought I might comment on the recent proliferation of electronic Chinese and Japanese tools. For Japanese there is Rikai and Rikai-chan, for Chinese there is Wenlin. The two do similar things, but with limitations. Rikai and Rikai-chan are web tools that only work with Mozilla. They give you the reading of kanji as you move your cursor over a word, but only in an .html environment. Wenlin does the same thing, but in more environments, notably Microsoft Word among others. Prof. Hargett has been heard to say superlative things about Wenlin, such as "it has changed everything!" (he can correct me if I'm wrong).

Here are the differences: right now, Wenlin must be purchased for a dear price. Rikai-chan is share-ware, but because it must be used with an .html platform one must have all one's files in that format. With MSWord files it isn't that hard to convert to .html then use Mozilla to read them, but, for example, with .pdf files one must do two conversions (assuming one has an upgrade of Adobe Acrobat in the first place) to use the software.

Still, in either case, Prof. Hargett is right: WHAT A DIFFERENCE! I myself have become so very spoiled with this sort of technology. Add to this the ability to add furigana to a MSWord text very easily (and, for that matter, to add pinyin gloss to Chinese text) and we live in very good times.

Internet searches, led by Google, have also changed the research world. I just finished a translation from Meiji Japanese to English that would have taken me years more without the ability to "Google" obscure terms, people, places, names, etc. I remember vividly going to a graduate school seminar meeting at which my advisor, Edwin McClellan, asked the three students there if we recognized some obscure terms he had come across in a recent translation of a Japanese text he had been working on. Surprisingly, we did recognize two of the three off the tops of our heads. But that was lucky for him. If we hadn't, he would have been relegated to hours if not days in the library. Today, one would simply "Google" the terms and within seconds (probably) find the answers.

So, rejoice all ye who enter East Asian Studies today. And, never, never, forget what wonders the electronic age has brought us.

To kanji or not to kanji, that is the question

Brendan wrote a comment on the "Hiragana and Katakana" post that I thought deserved a more considered response in the form of a separate post. He writes, "I was wondering if someone might be able to answer why so many Japanese words are [not?] written in Kanji? I understand about タバコ、but it seems to me that certain other words, like ニンジン, are never written with kanji, and I can't figure out where they might be from. Are these just more loan words, or are the kanji so obscure they go unused, or is there another explanation?" Assuming I got the omission of "not" correct, let me try to answer this.

First, don't fool yourself--I see the kanji 人参(にんじん) written in grocery stores all the time. You may not have noticed because, as often happens, those kanji you don't know blend into a blurry background and are in effect invisible. I was amused in Kyoto two years ago to see one grocer label his potatoes 馬鈴薯(ばれいしょ) instead of じゃがいも. I'm sure I had seen that 20 years ago when I was a college student in Kyoto, but then I only knew the word じゃがいも, and ignored the sign with 馬鈴薯 on it. But, I digress.

The real question is, why do some words for which there are perfectly good kanji get written in kana? It doesn't have to do with whether a word is a loan or not, even if we consider Chinese words loans. Rather, it has to do with who is writing and when. As I wrote earlier, women in the classical era (Heian) wrote mostly in kana with a little bit of kanji sprinkled in. If you look, for example, at the Tale of Genji you'll see a good example of this. But, some men of the time, such as Ki no Tsurayuki who was composing waka and of course Tosa nikki was using a similar style. So, to make a broad generalization (never a safe thing in academe!), at that time if one were writing in Japanese then the amount of kanji was relatively small. Why? Well, to be entirely academically irresponsible and write off the top of my head, I'll conjecture that part of the reason was that composing in Japanese (not Classical Chinese) was only a few centuries old, and it took a while to blend kanji into the fold. The problem with this guess is that, of course, the first texts in Japanese were written in man'yogana, which was, in effect, kanji that was proto-kana. Man'yogana--named for the Man'yoshu--were kanji used for their phonetic value, not their semantic value. Eventually the cursive form of those kanji evolved into kana, et voila!, a phonetic system was born. Man'yogana was/is notoriously difficult to navigate, and mere mortals don't do it. Maybe the swing to mostly kana usage (once kana were established) was a psychological reaction to the torture of reading Man'yogana. Just kidding. Sort of.

Moving forward, we see that over the next nine or ten centuries kanji became more common in Japanese writing, for more reasons than I can list, including the education of the author and the audience to whom he/she was writing. Perhaps the pinnacle of kanji (although, again, I have not studied this properly) comes in the Meiji Period, when people were using kanji for words like kore and sore, and even for exclamatory particles at the end of a sentence like ya. Perhaps they thought it made their writing look more sophisticated, perhaps it was just what everyone else was doing, perhaps it is what they were taught in school (none of these are mutually exclusive). This was also the period when the common practice for printers was to provide a phonetic gloss (furigana) on all words in a text, almost in a nod to the difficulty of reading it, but not really. For example, I have a volume of the Natsume Soseki complete works that has every single word glossed. It was certainly not a book printed and marketed to an illiterate audience! Rather, there is some arcane beauty to the printed word in this form, and Soseki (and his contemporaries) recognized that. For those of you taking EAJ411 next term, we'll be reading some of these texts so hang on to your hats.

Then, as we progressed through the 20th century that trend was reversed and slowly kanji usage diminished, although it has never gone to the "extreme" of Korean, where kanji (hanja)have been eliminated almost all together. The cynic in me wants to say that the culture is being dumbed down, thus less kanji, but that seems a bit harsh. But, the truth is, often writers will choose kana over kanji for their own inexplicable reasons. In EAJ410, we recently read an excerpt of a Mishima novel in which he uses kanji for a word in one sentence, and then in the next paragraph opts for kana for the same word. In these cases, all we can do is chalk it up to artistic license.

With the advent of text messaging, keitai shosetsu, etc., maybe we'll see even more changes in the near future. I can't hazard to guess what those will be, though. I mean, typing in Microsoft Word which handily and quickly finds the right kanji for me when all I have to do is enter the kana has made me more likely to use the kanji than in the "bad old days" when I would have had to pull out my (non-electronic) dictionary. The downside is that my calligraphy has suffered; really, my handwriting was much better 15 years ago than it is now. Maybe I should take Kaya-sensei's summer course on calligraphy as a refresher!

A Very Brief History of Tobacco

Judging by the direction taken in the responses posted to Professor Fessler's recent blog entry concerning katakana, there appears to be a related interest that has arisen concerning the history of tobacco.  Or, more accurately, how the word "tobacco" made its way into the Japanese language and when it was first used - in hiragana, katakana, or any of the numerous incarnations out there which involve kanji.

Thus, to chime in for a moment as the resident Japanese historian in the department, I want to make clear that the word "tobacco" does indeed date back to the late sixteenth/early seventeenth centuries in terms of its usage in Japan.  It is not found among the words listed in the first major Japanese-Portuguese dictionary published around 1600, the Vocabulario Da Lingoa De Iapam, probably because it was not a "foreign" word to the Jesuit missionaries who compiled this text.  But the word "tobacco" is attested to elsewhere.

One good example comes from an early seventeenth-century law code issued by the Uesugi family (上杉氏), the daimyo in charge of Yonezawa domain (米沢藩).  The code, promulgated in the eighth month of 1612, contains an article that states the following:

"It is strictly prohibited for those serving under a lord to smoke tobacco in the courtyard of his residence." (たばこ．．．主人の供仕、門庭において飲候事、一切停止之事)

A couple of points about this passage and the larger code:

1) "Tobacco" is written in hiragana.

2) The verb that is used together with tobacco here is nomu (飲む).

3) The remainder of the law code also makes clear that one is additionally to refrain from smoking around both the sick (病者) and the elderly (老人).

It therefore seems likely that it was indeed the sound of the word "tabaco" in Spanish and Portuguese that was first converted into hiragana before various ateji (当て字), or variants, using kanji were assigned/invented thereafter.

It is also probably worth noting that, back in 1612, there were already lawmakers who realized that tobacco is bad for your health...

Hiragana and Katakana

There has been some confusion in Japanese classes recently about the use of hiragana and katakana over the centuries. Wikipedia is not a big help on this--the description for hiragana simply implies that it is a cursive form of Chinese (which, in an extreme derivation, it is, but that in itself is an entire lecture unbefitting of a blog post).

O.K., let's get this straight. Although hiragana (one of the Japanese phonetic scripts) looks rounder and softer than katakana (the other of the phonetic scripts) does, that does not really give credence to the idea of one being exclusively for women and the other being exclusively for men. What was important was what people were writing, not which sex they were. It so happens that, in the Heian period, women wrote almost exclusively diaries, and men wrote almost exclusively government and official texts, hence the difference in how they wrote. Men were writing in kanbun (classical Chinese) and women were writing in hiragana, mixed with a few kanji. Katakana was developed at the same time as hiragana, but it was largely used for glossing kanbun texts.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, katakana continued to be used for official documents, but it also came to be used in the same way that we use italics in English--for emphasis, and for foreign words. So, it is always important to ask yourself what you are reading before you assume that some odd term in katakana is a foreign loan word.

What's missing?

A recent topic at faculty meetings has been what component(s) is/are missing from our curriculum. As many of you know, we underwent an outside program review last year and part of that process was interviewing students about what they wanted out of the department. We got some really useful information from that process, but the sample size was small (that is, we only heard from current students who could make the interview sessions). I'm sure there are plenty of you out there who couldn't be part of the process but have useful input for us. So, here is the question: if we were to add courses to the department, what area of specialty (e.g., Sociology, Economics, Psychology, Political Science, etc.) would you most like to see? How likely would you (and your fellow majors) be (or have been) to sign up for classes in that area?

The proliferation of knowledge, and all that brings

After five years, the time has come for us to split the East Asian Research and Bibliographic Methods course. It's come a long way since I first taught it solo--not only has our number of majors and minors doubled, but the material we need to cover, thanks to the digital age, has also increased exponentially. This past year it became downright unruly, as those of you who took it know, even without trying to squeeze in Korean studies. So, we've decided to bid good-bye to an era and split EAS205 into EAC205 and EAJ205.

Bibliography is something usually taught at the graduate level, so structuring the undergraduate curriculum is tricky. In addition to the linguistic limitations, we also face library limitations. That is to say, we don't want to flood the curricula with information about materials that are not readily available to UAlbany students.

A final consideration is that the materials are increasingly dynamic because they are largely electronic, not on paper. Whereas "methods" courses in graduate schools were relatively static for decades, now the materials change so rapidly that the curricula have to be reviewed and revised on a constant basis.

Personally, I think that it is important to include both the "old" paper materials and the new electronic resources. Both are important to master if one is to be truly proficient in East Asian Studies. I know that there is some resistance on students' parts to learning some of the more arcane aspects of bibliographic method, that they think those skills are obsolete (or soon will be). But in the same way that knowing the multiplication tables is important in a world of pocket calculators, knowing how to find a character in a paper dictionary is important.

So although students should stay tuned for some big changes on the horizon, the fundamentals will live on.

Meiji Japanese

It's summer and time to focus on the wonderful minutiae that professors love. My own work is currently pointed at a scholar of religious studies, Anesaki Masaharu 姉崎正治. I'm looking at a series of open letters that he published in the Meiji journal Taiyō 太陽 in 1902. The content is a dissertation in itself, but as an aside I've been musing about the language that he uses. Those of you studying modern Japanese would not recognize it. Sure, it is in classical Japanese, but besides that, the punctuation is anomalous and the diction is entirely different from the prose that the same writer produced in the same decade.

All this has led me to wonder about linguistic "rules" (as such) of the Meiji period. Did this essay seem unusual to the readership? It certainly seems odd now. And other material written at the turn of the century didn't necessary use the same conventions. Don't get me wrong--it isn't just a difference between classical and modern grammar--there is a qualitative difference beyond that which I find odd.

Thoughts, anyone?

Refurbishing the Web Site

The University at Albany has decided to entirely re-vamp its website, beginning this summer. You might not have noticed any changes at all if you've been surfing because they're making the changes gradually and in many cases the appearance of the page will be the same. In any event, I will also be changing the EAS website over to the new system (for those of you in the know about web servers, we're moving from an independent DreamWeaver based system to a "content management" system, RedDot) sometime next academic year. At least, that's what the administration has told me to expect.

What does this mean? Well, among other things, it means that I'll be revisiting the content of the department site and thinking about how it might be improved. Imput from students would be a big help--are there features you use all the time and don't want to see changed? Is there something you think could be done better? Is there anything superfluous on the page that we could get rid of?

Ultimately, I'd like the page to serve BOTH the "outside" community (prospective students, etc.) and the "inside" community (current students, faculty, staff) well. And--here's the rub--I don't want to spend every waking moment webmastering. Whatever we do should be relatively low-maintenance. The "content management" system prevents me from making any changes to the graphics (colors, fonts, layout, etc.) of a basic university web site, so there's no point in thinking about that. Really all we have control over is the actual text.

Please send me your comments, either by e-mail if you want them to remain private (fessler@albany.edu) or here on this blog.