Already?

Wow--the school year went fast. It was great to see everyone at Commencement, meet your families, etc. Professor DeBlasi was serious, you know, when he said that we'll miss you. If you're not signed up for the listserv, you should be! For you graduates, the networking through the listserv and connected EAS alumni just seems to grow continuously. Someday, perhaps, as Joe predicted, we'll take over the world. But, until then, I guess we'll have to settle for geeky research and course prep...

Annual Speech Contest

This coming Friday we'll hold our annual speech contest. As veterans know, its a chance to meet classmates and faculty, and hear some Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. We've been doing this for upwards of fifteen years now, but to be honest I haven't heard much feedback from students. This might just be a function of me not teaching a 100-300 level language class. Or, it might be that there just isn't that much feedback to be had. I'm curious to know the case, regardless. Comment, please, on what you think of speech contests in general and/or ours in particular.

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.

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