JLPT

We're in the season again, in more ways than one. Some of you who took the JLPT (Japanese Langauge Proficiency Exam) a few months ago are just getting your scores now. Others who have signed up for the JLPT this December are anxiously waiting. It's a new test this year, with an added level. This test is a big deal for many, because it means credentials on your resume (or not). I'd like to know, from those who have taken the "new" tests, what your impressions are.

Graduate Study in East Asia

More and more I'm being asked by current and former students about the feasibility of doing a graduate degree in Japan. When I was a graduate student in the late 80s and early 90s, it was not advisable--U.S. schools didn't want to give foreign institutions' degrees much respect, and I knew that eventually I wanted to do a PhD in the States. But now I think things are much different; Japanese graduate schools are courting foreign applicants, and even offering them fellowships. And, I know of at least a couple people who did a master's in Japan and later got into very reputable PhD programs in the States.

This is all probably for the better--more opportunities, more depth in one's education, etc. But I'm left without having much in the way of "advice" for my students who ask about it. I'd like to know about other experiences--comments, anyone?

Spring 2010

Yup, Advance Registration is just around the corner--October 20th, to be exact. What's new this time around? Well, you can see our department schedule off the homepage--http://www.albany.edu/eas/courses.shtml. There are many of the usual suspects, and a few new courses. Of note are that Professor Byon will be offering EAK301 in the spring (usually he teaches it in the fall) because he's returning from leave. I'll be offering an introduction to Classical Japanese, with a prerequisite of EAJ301 or permission of the instructor. I haven't made up the syllabus yet, but if you're interested and have questions please do send me an e-mail or come to office hours. Professor Blum will be offering "The Language of Buddhist Texts" for the first time, too. And Professor Hartman will be offering his course on Tibet for the first time in a number of semesters--if you're interested, take it now because we're not sure when it will next be offered.

As always, departmental majors should make appointments with their advisors now to plan for the spring semester (unless you're graduating, in which case, congratulations!)

Koreans in Japan Circa 1600

Well, the secret is out.

As Professor Fessler wrote in her most recent post, starting next semester I will begin to offer a 300-level EAS course (also cross-listed in History) entitled "Japan-Korean Relations: 1592 to the Present." Unsurprisingly, the class will proceed in a generally chronological fashion and take an approach that weaves together elements of diplomatic, social, and cultural history in order to attempt to discover precisely what kinds of relationships have been forged among people living in Korea and Japan over the past few centuries and how these relationships have changed over time. What may be less clear, however, is why one would specifically choose to make 1592 the starting point for such a course.

A variety of answers are possible to this question and many will become readily apparent once the syllabus for the class is made available online after the Fall Schedule of Classes is officially released. But in the meantime, let me provide you with one clue courtesy of a single person and a single historical source: Wakita Naokata (脇田直賢) and his autobiographical Kaden (家伝).

In recent times in Japan resident Koreans, most often referred to by the labels "zainichi kankokujin" and "zainichi chōsenjin," have often been singled out for discrimination once their identities have been uncovered, resulting in name-calling, ostracism, and worse. It is therefore easy to assume that this has always been the case, and that the only way for Koreans to gain acceptance into mainstream society has been for them to hide their family backgrounds and renounce any and all connections with Korea.

Which is what makes Wakita Naokata's account so remarkable. Naokata, along with at least 50,000 of his countrymen, was imprisoned and brought back to Japan as a result of the two invasions of Korea commanded by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1592 and 1597. Famously, a number of potters were captured during these campaigns and put to work crafting many fine ceramic wares highly valued by practitioners of the tea ceremony. Naokata, however, was not a potter or a craftsman of any sort. Rather, at the time of his abduction, Naokata was a young boy only seven years old.

Even so, he was more fortunate in his circumstances than many. For instead of ending up sold into slavery, he was taken into a well-to-do warrior household and raised as an adopted son. He records that he was brought up with compassion and that, in later years, acquired the connections necessary to gain employment under the Maeda daimyo family of Kaga. He served initially as a page but, as time went on, gradually rose in status until he was ultimately issued a 1,000 koku stipend and appointed as a town magistrate for Kanazawa, one of the five largest cities in Japan during the Edo period. 

We should note here that Naokata was a samurai, and a remarkably successful one at that. At the same time, however, he did not deny his background or hide his family origins. Instead, in the Kaden he proclaimed them openly, declaring in the very first sentence of the text that "I was born in the capital city of Korea" (生國朝鮮帝都) and noting that his father's family name was Kim (金) and his mother's Yeom (念). He also indicated that his father - who was killed as a result of the fighting - had been a noted scholar, no doubt a point to which he was also justifiably proud. 

So what can we take away from this largely unknown and admittedly isolated story, and why is it particularly relevant to the course that will be offered for the first time this upcoming fall? This account involves a number of larger military and political developments but, as is the case with the vast majority history, it is also a story of the thoughts and actions of real human beings who are at times all too easy to overlook in the rush among historians to discuss larger issues and trends.  To be sure, the experiences of Wakita Naokata were hardly the norm, and many of the Koreans who found themselves living in Japan during the Edo period were not nearly so well off. Yet, while their lifestyles varied greatly depending on the social class to which they belonged (samurai, peasant, artisan, merchant), there is little to no evidence to suggest that they were singled out for special treatment because they were from Korea, or that they were obligated to hide this fact in order to survive. Moreover, a similar situation prevailed for "outsiders" - including persons from Japan - in Chosǒn Dynasty Korea as well. 

This is a point all too easy to miss when one focuses solely on the largely antagonistic relationship between the governments of Japan and Korea during the twentieth century or, even more problematically, when one simply assumes that the two countries - and their peoples - have been perpetual and unyielding adversaries for simply too many centuries to count. Instead, I would argue that setting out to take a closer look at the history of the changing relationship between Japan and Korea - not only in terms of diplomacy, but also in terms of people and ideas - allows us to arrive at a much more complicated and meaningful understanding not only of the past, but also the present.   

So, who's up for the journey?

Fall 2009

Ohmigod...we're already well into the Spring semester! Anyone thinking about the Fall 2009 yet? Well, as you know from the previous post, we are. There are some new courses slated for the department: first, I'll be offering a new language course aimed at 3rd and 4th year language students. It may appear as EAJ389, or EAJ405, but it should appear. This course could be taken in conjunction 301, or for those who have completed 302, taken in place of 410. This course will focus on building a robust contemporary vocabulary, with special emphasis on reading and listening comprehension. The idea is to bring students to the point where they might be brave enough to take the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, Level 2. It will differ from 410, in which we read selections from literature, because the grammar points and vocabulary will be the sort that one needs for the job market, not academia.

Second, Prof. Eason will be offering a course on Japanese-Korean relations in the past few centuries. I'll let him post about the content.

The full schedule should be available on our website (www.albany.edu/eas/) sometime in the end of February. Advance registration begins in the end of March. It is never too early to talk to your advisor about your academic plans.

Online Learning

The new semester is in full swing, and already we're working on the schedule for Fall 2009. It's true--we faculty live a double life. One is in the now, the current semester. The other is in the upcoming semester. Thinking about what we'll offer (and yes, it is very close to being finalized already) next semester made me re-visit a question I've dabbled with in the past. To wit, when will we enter the age of more "online learning"? Some courses, like seminars, do not lend themselves to this. Other courses do. And, with the addition of software like Blackboard (which, I admit I do not use, but which Kaya-sensei raves about), perhaps the age of more online learning is at hand.

So, I have a question for you all out there: does the concept of online learning, at least to some extent, appeal to you? If you've done an online learning course (yes, that means you, Alexandra), what feedback can you give us? What are the pros and cons?

I realize that there is little substitute for being drilled in a language class, and there is little substitute for the interaction you get in a small group of motivated students discussing a particular reading. But what about the material we cover in EAS/EAJ/EAC205? Could that not be done online effectively?

Inquiring minds want to know.

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

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.