The Waiting Game

A couple months ago I sent a manuscript off to a journal for consideration. The usually process is that the editor takes a look and decides if it's worth sending to outside readers. In the past I've sent manuscripts to this journal only to have them summarily rejected for some inconsequential reason ("not the length we expect" or some such thing). The rejection comes fast, within a couple weeks, and straight from the editor.

This time is different. I haven't been rejected (yet), which means that they actually deigned to send it off to outside readers. This could take months. The next step depends on those peer reviewers, who will either accept or reject it. If the former happens, there will probably be suggested revisions, etc. If the latter happens there will be withering comments about why the article doesn't deserve to be published. (If you think the comments I write on student papers are critical, you should see what peer reviewers write.)

All this is to say that we professors have our parallel experience to the students' experience of submitting a paper. But, in our world, the process is drawn out with exquisite anticipation of a sound mental pommeling. Sometimes I miss the day of turning in a term paper and getting it back a couple weeks later with a final grade. End of story.

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?

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.