New alumni rep in Japan

It took me a while to post this, but better late than never. Patrick Murphy ('09) is our new alumni rep in the Kansai region! His name does not appear on the alumni page of the university yet, but I trust it will be there soon. Patrick's e-mail address is pm654744@albany.edu, for those of you who want to contact him. He is a JET teacher, like so many of you. Many, many thanks to Patrick for stepping up to the plate on this one. There are many of you nearby (Melissa, Ashley, Dan, Tammy, Reggie, etc.), and I encourage you to touch base. The listserv is the most likely place for announcements, but we'll try to cross-list to the blog, too.

So, now that we have a rep in Japan, is there anyone who is interested in being the rep in China or Korea?

Alumni representatives

Having heard recently from a couple students heading to Japan, I got to thinking that we must have a sort of "critical mass" of alumni there. Is anyone interested in volunteering to be a "regional alumni volunteer" either in Kansai or Kanto? Right now we do a lot of networking, but it tends to be through the listserv or even less formally (i.e., I distribute your e-mail addresses with reckless abandon). If we had a regional volunteer then maybe things might be easier. The alumni page of the university says that a regional volunteer does the following:

• Act as a central contact for alumni, parents, prospective students,new graduates, and the UAAA.
• Serve as a university ambassador at events determined by theUniversity (faculty visits, presidential visits).
• Plan the occasional informal event (book readings, viewing parties).
• Assist in determining a location for a University event in their region.
• Distribute promotional emails inviting people to attend upcomingevent in their area.
• Assist alumni relocating to their area.

Lest you think this would end up being an "expat" group, let me remind you that a lot of our alumni are/were international students. This would be a great way to meet the locals, too.

If anyone is interested, check out http://www.albany.edu/alumni/regionalvolunteers.php

And, let me know, too. Just because the Alumni Association gets involved doesn't mean the department would necessarily be copied on any correspondence.

Likewise, if there is anyone in Beijing or Shanghai (the two likely locations) who might want to volunteer that would be great. Given how many UA alumni are in China I'd think this would be easy.

I hope someone chooses to do this--right now there are only two international volunteers, which is pretty sad when you think about it. Come on, let's show them that EAS alumni are a force to be reckoned with (or, at least, a cool bunch of people)!

Translation

I recently attended the memorial service for my graduate advisor, Edwin McClellan, who passed away last month. As most such services are, it was a time of reflection. In attendance were many former students of McClellan's, and the reminiscences were largely about his guidance as a mentor and accomplishments as a scholar. (For those of you outside of Japanese studies, McClellan was one of the prominent translators of modern Japanese literature.) McClellan was one of the last of his generation of Japan scholars--those who served in World War II, and who introduced Japanese studies to the United States. It must have been a very lonely existence, in a way. Very few people in the U.S. knew anything about Japan or Japanese literature 60 years ago. To quote one of the obituaries: "In 1948, [McClellan] went to the University of St. Andrews, where he earned a degree in British history and met his future wife, Rachel Elizabeth Pott. At St. Andrews he also met the noted political theorist Russell Kirk, who took him on as his graduate student at Michigan State University. Two years later, McClellan transferred to the University of Chicago to work with economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek. McClellan appealed to Hayek to write his doctoral dissertation on the novelist Natsume Soseki, whose work was much admired in Japan but unknown in the West. To persuade Hayek of Soseki's importance as a writer and interpreter of Japanese modernity, McClellan translated Soseki's novel "Kokoro" into English. McClellan's definitive translation of "Kokoro" was published in 1957." (the full obituary is on the Yale website at http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=6691)

A translation for Hayek! We should all be so lucky to have such a readership.

I also spent time this weekend talking with Jay Rubin and Steve Snyder, both of whom have become prominent translators of Japanese literature (and both of whom were students of McClellan's). They told me something I thought I'd share with my students: often it is the editor/publisher who decides to cut a sentence or paragraph or chapter, not the translator. But, when that happens, unless one reads the colophon, the translator gets the credit/blame for it. So, before we jump down the throats of the translators for missing something, we should think twice.

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.