Showing papers in "The Journal of Asian Studies in 2005"

Writing Like a Man: Poetic Literacy, Textual Property, and Gender in the Tosa Diary

Abstract: Ki no Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary (Tosa nikki, ca. 934) looms large in modern Japanese literary history as the mother of the “memoir literature” (nikki bungaku) genre. Combining the daily-entry format of a diary written in classical Chinese (kanbun nikki) with a predominantly native script, the text relates the impressions of a female attendant over a span of fifty-five days, as she sails back to the capital in the entourage of a former provincial governor of Tosa. Despite the diary’s varied content, treatment of it has almost entirely been limited to discussions of how and why its author’s gender differs from that of its narrator. So universal are the commonplaces surrounding this discussion that to read the Tosa Diary otherwise entails revising several longstanding assumptions about gender and writing in early Japan. Contrary to most such formulations, this article will argue that the relations between femininity and diary writing within the Tosa Diary comment on the diary’s social status as a form of property rather than its linguistic status as a vernacular text. Reading gender in the Tosa Diary thus entails a more general consideration of the ways in which the circulation of texts affirmed social, economic, and political distinctions in Heian Japan. The variable ways that writing structures relations among social classes informs both the historical context surrounding the Tosa Diary and its content. An investigation of the former suggests that literacy in the Heian court (794–1185) was primarily determined by social background rather than gender. Literacy was not simply an attribute of social class but also a means to distinguish one’s place within

Tracing origins : Ilustrado nationalism and the racial science of migration waves

Abstract: History was the key to identity for the pioneers of Filipino nationhood in the late nineteenth century. John Schumacher has recounted the struggle by which the youthful Europeanized originators of Filipino nationhood—the ilustrados, literally “enlightened”—reacted to the “chauvinism common to members of governing races” (1973, 191–220). Amid the onslaught of Spanish colonial racism, these educated youths

Gender Transgression in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia

Abstract: THE PRACTICE OF “RITUAL TRANSVESTISM” appears to have been widespread throughout island Southeast Asia from pre-Islamic times. Accounts of ritual transvestic figures appear in colonial and court documents; mythological literature; and ethnohistoric records produced by colonial officials, missionaries, and anthropologists. These accounts draw portraits of individuals who in the course of priestly or shamanic functions “switched” genders or took on “gender-ambiguous” roles as they interceded with spiritual beings on behalf of human subjects. Western observers stated that many of these individuals were males who “dressed as women,” but a few were identified as females who “acted like men.” In the late twentieth century, a burgeoning lesbian and gay movement in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia brought into view a range of genders and sexualities, some of which seem to draw on older models of the ritual transvestite who “switched” genders. Male transgendered individuals, called banci or waria, are prominent in urban areas in Indonesia and figure in theatrical and television performances. Transgendered females are much less obvious in the media or in public spaces; the most publicly recognized figure is the tomboi, the female who identifies as and acts like a man. Are the tomboi/waria identities the contemporary manifestation of the ritual transvestites of early modern times? Or put another way, why are contemporary transgendered individuals, such as the tomboi and waria, framed in the same terms as their colonial “predecessors,” as acting and dressing like the other gender? In reviewing

From Colonialism to Postcolonial Colonialism: Changing Modes of Domination in the Northern Areas of Pakistan

Abstract: When was “the postcolonial”? This apparently simple question contains a number of difficulties relating to concepts, epistemology, and temporality (Hall 1996). These problems emerge from the fact that systems of colonization inscribe their marks so deeply upon the societies of both the colonized and the colonizers that they cannot simply be eradicated by the political act of declaring independence. Even after independence, such societies remain heavily under the influence of the “gravity,” to use Edward Said’s term, of colonial history (1994, 367). Arguably, decolonization begins before independence with freedom struggles against colonial hegemony and domination. And, it certainly continues after colonization has formally ended, as much time is needed to free social institutions and discourses from often subtle kinds of determination by the colonizing power—if that can ever be achieved. There is no simple dichotomy of the colonial and the postcolonial. Problems of periodization proliferate if “postcolonial” is taken to label a global process of transition. Yet when we take dates of independence not as “definite” but as “decisive” points of transition

Sanitizing Empire: Japanese Articulations of Korean Otherness and the Construction of Early Colonial Seoul, 1905–1919

Abstract: Todd A. Henry (htodd98@yahoo.com) is a PhD candidate in modern Japanese and Korean history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently completing a dissertation on the spatial (re)construction of Japanese colonial Seoul (Keijō) and the history of its “public” sites, including shrines, expositions, and neighborhoods. I wish to thank the Center for Japanese Studies at UCLA and the Korea Foundation for their generous financial support of my research in Japan and Korea. This article began as a paper for Miriam Silverberg’s graduate seminar on race and ethnicity in modern Japan and was rewritten in Wendy Belcher’s academic writing workshop. I am indebted to the participants of both forums for their intellectual stimulation, critical advice, and emotional support. I thank Micah Auerback for being a particularly generous reader and intimate champion of my ongoing intellectual work. A final and stimulating discussion with Miriam Silverberg inspired me to strengthen the language of my argument and thus clarify the position of my scholarship. Journal of Asian Studies editor Ann Waltner, her diligent staff, and three anonymous reviewers helped me greatly in crafting the present version, the limitations of which are, of course, my own. All non-English terms are Japanese unless otherwise indicated.

Cultural Brokerage and Interethnic Marriage in Colonial Taiwan: Japanese Subalterns and Their Aborigine Wives, 1895–1930

Abstract: Scholars have long recognized the importance of interethnic marriage to European commercial expansion into the Americas, Africa, and Asia. George Brooks Jr. has chronicled the evolution of French-Senegalese marriages in eighteenth-century West Africa under the rubric of “Signareship” to demonstrate how ambitious Wolof and Lebou women “provided [European merchants] access to African commercial networks . . . and proved indispensable as interpreters of African languages and cultures” (1976, 40). Theda Perdue has analyzed a similar pattern of opportunistic intermarriage between British merchants and daughters of Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Creek chiefs in eighteenth-century North America (2003, 9–24). For late nineteenthcentury northern Sumatra, Ann Stoler writes of “an extensive system of concubinage”

Pirates, Pelts, and Promises: The Sino-Dutch Colony of Seventeenth-Century Taiwan and the Aboriginal Village of Favorolang

Abstract: THOMAS PEDEL WAS LOOKING FOR PIRATES. The year was 1640, and he was deep in the wilds of central Taiwan, an area not yet fully controlled by his employer, the Dutch East India Company (VOC). He found no pirates, but he did meet another company employee, who said he was searching for an arsonist named “Captain Favorolang.” Having failed with the pirates, Pedel decided to help. Together, the two men captured Captain Favorolang, but when they began marching back toward headquarters, they ran into trouble. Across their path lay their captive’s hometown: Favorolang, one of the largest and most powerful aboriginal villages in Taiwan (see

Sex in the Inner city : The fidelity between sex and politics in siam

Abstract: I will not introduce a caocom [to a potential lover] or be an accomplice to any caocom who affiliates with a man as an adulterer, nor [will I be an accomplice to] any silvertongued go-between, nor will I be an accomplice to any caocom engaging in samesex erotics (len phüan) or join them in committing wrongful sexual intercourse. If I observe or know of anything aversive involving a caocom, whether it is adultery or same-sex erotics—even if [I am unable to obtain a] solid case initially—I will bring the matter to Your Majesty’s attention according to the facts, without supplementing the matter with falsities out of envy toward a caocom I hate. Also I will not cover up a blunder for a caocom I love. (National Library of Thailand, Cotmaihet Rama 4, doc. 239, “Khamsaban Khangnai rüang khamsaban Khangnai” [Inner Palace Oath: About the Inner Palace Oath], lines 48–55)

Objects, Models, and Exemplary Works: Educating Sentiment in Colonial India

Abstract: In 1918, NEAR THE CONCLUSION of the First World War, a British official in the Punjab provincial government suggested the use of "ocular demonstrations" in Lahore (the province's capital) to demonstrate the tangible benefits of British rule to the city's Indian residents. This measure was necessary, he argued, since Lahore's Indian pop ulation had grown increasingly skeptical of British intentions during the war. Accordingly, J. P. Thompson, chief secretary to the Government of Punjab, urged that a large group of journalists, students, and other "public men" in Lahore convene for a walk-through "ocular demonstration of the veterinary college,. . . the North West Railway workshops and stores, . . . the Flying Ground at Lahore Cantonment, the [canal] weir, the Physics and Biology laboratories at Government College, and the Indian Pictures [exhibition} in the Lahore Museum" (Government of Punjab, Proceedings of the Home Department [General], 118/1918, 35). Suitable explanatory lectures would be arranged at each stop. Thompson's rationale for the tour was that "at present there is no method to which Government can have recourse to directly [combat] a hostile press" and that "our deeds which ought to speak for us, are not made to speak" (Government of Punjab, Proceedings of the Home Department [General], 118/1918, 35; emphasis added). What Thompson proposed, in other words, was a walk through Lahore's colonial landscape organized in such a way as to "speak," and speak eloquently, of the benefits of British rule. Less than a year later, in April 1919, Indian protestors in Lahore gave an entirely different set of meanings to the landscape that Thompson promoted. Following the massacre of several hundred unarmed Indian civilians by General Reginald E. H. Dyer

The New Woman Commits Suicide: The Press, Cultural Memory, and the New Republic

Abstract: This article examines a controversy that took place in Shanghai print culture in 1922 concerning the suicide of an individual identified, according to categories promoted by the early Republican press, as a “new woman.” This was the suicide of Xi Shangzhen, who hanged herself in the office of her employer, Tang Jiezhi, a wellknown May Fourth activist in business and journalistic circles. In the widening public culture of the early Republican era, particularly in Shanghai, the preeminent location of the commercial press, press-driven “public opinion” became an important arbiter of both interest and value. The interest of public opinion was inflamed, unsurprisingly, by the commercial profitability and literary appeal of poignant spectacle as well as the news value of what was novel. By following the print traces of one notorious suicide, it is possible to map the interplay among diverse dynamic elements in the efflorescent bourgeois press that characterized the era. As readers perused the news

Tears That Crumbled the Great Wall: The Archaeology of Feeling in the May Fourth Folklore Movement

Abstract: MODERN FOLKLORE STUDIES, AS IS WIDELY recognized, owes its origins to the Romantic movement in Europe, particularly Germany. Romanticism ushered in an expressive theory of language that privileged the spoken over the written and motivated the discovery of the timeless folk as a site of authenticity. It canonized the belief that poetry was the most natural expression of feeling and that the folk spoke an eminently poetic language because they spoke directly from the heart. The ontological and epistemological burden borne by poetry was a product of the long process of internalizing moral sources that Charles Taylor (1989) chronicles in his magisterial study of the origins of the modern identity. The most significant transformations of modernity for Taylor were the affirmation of the individual as the locus of moral agency and the identification of Nature as moral source. Romanticism gave these transformations the most powerful articulation in its valorization of our inner nature as the fount of moral and spiritual truth and as the authorizing source of our values and choices. We are moral subjects insofar as we realize ourselves by each treading an original path of life, a path which we must define for ourselves by articulating, or making manifest, what is hidden and inarticulate: our inner nature. To realize ourselves is therefore to come in touch with the moral source within us, which is necessarily a creative process, for “what the voice of nature calls us to cannot be fully known outside of and prior to our articulation/definition of it” (Taylor 1989, 376). In other words, language invents us as autonomous, deep, and unique selves even as it purports merely to “express” our inner voice. The expressive theory of language supplied the conceptual foundation for the rise of German nationalism and the German folklore movement. Johann Gottfried Herder

Taiwan: A Periphery in Search of a Narrative

Abstract: Those of us who teach about East Asia and try to explain the Sino-Japanese War often confront a version of "the question": if China and Japan fought a war in Korea, then why did Japan colonize Taiwan as a result? The question resists easy answers, but it often implies another, more difficult question: Why study Taiwan at all?1 Although we might be tempted to trivialize these questions, engaging them directly may be more fruitful. Taiwan, as a territory at the periphery of the dominant powers in nineteenth-century East Asia, disrupts the most important historical narratives? nationalism and imperialism?that have been used to explain the modern history of the region, and for that reason its history is quite illuminating. By way of introducing the articles in this special issue, I would like to consider how their microlevel analyses of the history of Taiwan illuminate macrolevel questions about the place that Taiwan

The Japanese Colonial State and the Dissolution of the Late Imperial Frontier Economy in Taiwan, 1886–1909

Abstract: In the first few days of July 1902, camphor workers in the mountains around the town of Nanzhuang (Nansh?) abandoned their stills and joined a growing exodus of settlers and townspeople who, fearing rumors of an impending indigene attack, had packed up their belongings and were fleeing the town. Japanese colonial officials on the spot requested a dispatch of troops from the Xinzhu garrison to restore order and project the state's authority in this thriving center of camphor production on the edge of Japan's colonial empire (1895-1945). The company arrived on July 6, just in time to thwart a direct strike on the town. The so-called savage insurgents?in reality a motley crew of over eight hundred disgruntled frontiersmen, displaced camphor workers, and indigenes led by the Hakka settler-cum-indigene chief Ri Aguai? nevertheless surrounded and destroyed several frontier guard stations and camphor stills in the mountains. Faced with a disturbance reaching critical proportions and threatening to spill into neighboring mountain districts and paralyze the thriving camphor industry, colonial officials called for more reinforcements. Three days later, the army deployed Xinzhu's second infantry company and first artillery platoon to the scene for action.

The west and the anthropology of other people's colonialism : Frederick starr in Korea, 1911-1930

Abstract: -Frederick starr (1858-1933) was the first anthropologist to hold a position at the University of Chicago, where he taught from the foundation of the institution in 1892 until his retirement in 1923. He had wide research interests and was an avid fieldworker, making numerous study trips to Mexico, Liberia, the Congo, the Phil ippines, and in the United States. Starr first traveled to Japan in 1904, where he arranged for the exhibition of several "hairy Ainu" at the St. Louis Exposition, and over roughly twenty-five years before and after his formal retirement increasingly turned his attention to work in Japan and Korea. Although he never undertook concentrated, long-term fieldwork in a single location of the sort that would become standard practice after Franz Boas in the United States and Bronislaw Malinowski in Britain, Starr's six trips to colonial Korea1 between 1911 and 1930 (three others were aborted) totaled some nine months in duration. His experience in Japan was even more extensive; he died in Tokyo on his fourteenth visit. Starr taught Japanese topics from his earliest days at the University of Chicago, and the Chicago Annual Register for 1922?23 lists also what was probably the first course on "Korean ethnography" to be offered in an American university. He was, finally, a public intellectual?and

Governmentality and Its Consequences in Colonial Taiwan: A Case Study of the Ta-pa-ni Incident of 1915

Abstract: In postcolonial Taiwan, the colonial past does not rest in peace. As Taiwan struggles to survive in the present and chart a stable course for the future, all attempts to impose interpretations on the past have come to be viewed as parts of an ongoing endeavor to construct a sense of identity. In particular, attempts to address events that took place during the period of time when Taiwan was a colony of Japan (1895– 1945) frequently spark controversies between scholars and politicians embracing vastly different ideologies and historical perspectives. Leo Ching has shed further light on this problem in the second chapter of his recent book, entitled Becoming “Japanese,” by showing that Taiwanese intellectuals’ discourse about Japanese colonialism is in fact often linked to tensions between those who favor reunification with

Representing the worker : The worker-intellectual alliance of the 1980s in South Korea

Abstract: VyN JULY 6, 1986, THE Korea Daily {Choson ilbo) carried a one-sentence item at the bottom of its social page: a twenty-three-year-old female student from Seoul National University by the name of Kw?n had sued a detective of the Puch on Police, charging him with sexual torture during her recent detention ("Susagwan 6 my?ng kobal" [Six Detectives Sued], July 6, 1986, 11). This small news item was to rock Korean society for months. It was shocking that a young woman would go public with an accusation that was more likely to damage her own reputation than that of the accused.1 Fur thermore, she had voluntarily quit a prestigious university to work in a factory. While the mass media and the government provided the public with mostly tantalizing and "subversive" elements of her case, alternative narratives began to cir culate almost immediately from court proceedings, statements of defense lawyers, and the newsletters of a citizen support group that was organized soon after the suit ("'Urid?l ?i ttal,' Kw?n-yang ?i chhikkin ch?lm?m" 1987, 567-81). What gradually emerged from these accounts was a composite portrait of a South Korean undongkwon of the 1980s. Literally meaning "those who are in the [democratization] movement sphere," the term undongkwon applied both to individual activists and to the democ ratization movement as a whole, whose articulated goal was to bring democracy, justice, and reunification to Korea. The term was often used outside the democrati zation movement to indicate disapproval; the state used it to emphasize its undesir ability, equating the undongkwon with antistate and procommunist elements. Indi vidual activists rarely used the term without a mixture of self-deprecation and irony,

“We Will Become Jijabai”: Historical Tales of Hindu Nationalist Women in India

Abstract: Vv HO LIT THE fire?" asked THE prime minister of India Atal Behari Vajpayee at a speech delivered in Goa while entire families of Muslims in Gujarat were being killed by angry Hindus avenging an attack on a train allegedly carrying workers of the Hindu nationalist movement ("Who Are These People Accusing Us, India Was Secular Even before Muslims and Christians," Indian Express, April 24, 2002).1 In his speech, Vajpayee asserts that although the carnage in Gujarat was regrettable, "[w]e should not forget how the tragedy of Gujarat started. The subsequent developments were no doubt condemnable, but who lit the fire?"2 As one reads the full text of his speech, it becomes clear that the attack on the train was not the only incident that

The Sufi Shrines of Gwalior City: Communal Sensibilities and the Accessible Exotic under Hindu Rule

Abstract: O rashly, as if asserting its claims on the place, the unpretentious shrine to Mir Badshah abuts the side of an imposing bank building in the main bazaar of Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, a predominantly Hindu city of about nine hundred thousand?the former capital of an important princely state.1 Mir Badshah seems to have been a local Muslim saint of the nineteenth century, but he has left little historical record, either written or oral. Nevertheless, despite the historical ephemerality of the saint himself, his shrine is very active?visited by local merchants before they open their shops, crowded during weekly performances of the rhythmic Sufi devotional music called qawwali, and taking over much of the bazaar during a five-day annual festival with invited qawwals of national reputation. And crucially for the shrine's success?since only 6 or 7 percent of Gwalior's population is Muslim?the vast majority of its visitors are Hindu.

Presidential Address—Samurai Trouble: Thoughts on War and Loyalty

Abstract: M, Lany of you MAY BE FAMILIAR with the book The Face of Battle (something of a cult classic among Berkeley undergraduates), which was written by the distinguished historian John Keegan, long a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy at Sand hurst. Keegan concludes the book with an astonishing sentence: "[T}he suspicion grows that battle has already abolished itself (1978, 343). This speculation arises from his remorseless appraisal of the conditions of modern warfare.

The Korean Economy: Post-Crisis Policies, Issues, and Prospects . Edited by Charles Harvie, Hyun-Hoon Lee, and Junggun Oh. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2004. xii, 324 pp. $110.00/£65.00 (cloth).

Abstract: Currently, Kim Jong Il is most infamous for his nuclear programs. French’s analysis of the North Korean nuclear crisis seems fairly controversial. According to his view, North Korea’s “desire for the [nuclear] bomb was defensive rather than offensive and designed to ensure regime survival at a time when the US was antagonistic toward Pyongyang” (p. 225). On another page, he suggests that “the restart of the nuclear program is caused by the US that hasn’t stuck to the 1994 Agreed Framework” (p. 209). While there is some truth to this analysis, the view contradicts some important testimonies of high-ranking North Korean defectors, including Hwang Jang Yeop. French writes that even at the time of the agreement’s signing, Kim Jong Il told insiders that North Korea was not going to stop developing nuclear weapons and that someday in the future it would publicly declare the possession of the weapons. In fact, that is what ended up happening after North Korea broke out of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons regime in 2003. Moreover, the animosity between Pyongyang and Washington cannot be entirely attributed to U.S. policy. North Korea has viewed the United States as the main obstacle to the reunification led by the “Dear Leader.” That is one big reason why North Korea has brainwashed all its people since birth with strong anti-American sentiments—so Kim Jong Il does not have to give up all of his nuclear arsenal, even if the United States withdrew all its troops stationed in South Korea. French’s view on the North Korean economy is very accurate and well thought out. He does an excellent job of explaining how the economy has been mismanaged there and why its collapse may be inevitable. The case study of Sinuiju is a valuable asset to his argument and to the book. Nobody else has done as in depth a study of the failed attempt at full-scale economic reform and liberalization as he has. Despite a few different ideas from my own, French’s new book on North Korea should help educate and entertain anyone interested in this subject. YOUNG HOWARD National Endowment for Democracy