The changing landscape of Japanese people’s English learning practices is a factor keeping Japanese students out of ESL classrooms in the UK, reports Kyodo News:

(Kyodo) _ The number of Japanese learning English in Britain has slowed in recent years, amid signs that growing numbers of young people from East Asia are opting to study in their home country rather than venture overseas.

Experts put the tailing off down to many factors, including the state of the Japanese economy, falling birthrate, the popularity of Chinese and the increasing provision of English language teaching in the region.
...
According to figures provided by the Council, the number of weeks spent in Britain by Japanese studying English fell between 1997 and 2001, and has plateaued out in recent years. In 1997, Japanese spent 170,100 weeks in Britain. By 2001, this had fallen to 123,626 weeks.

In 2002, the figures picked up again and in 2004 Japanese spent 135,347 weeks in the United Kingdom. However, numbers are expected to be down for 2005.
...
Emma Parker, education promotion officer at the British Council in Japan, said all of the large English-speaking countries—Britain, the United States and Australia—had seen reductions in Japanese students. She added that the number of Japanese going to overseas universities appeared to be falling, and this inevitably impacted on applications for English courses. (many students take English language courses before studying at a foreign university).

As well as the simple fact that there are fewer younger Japanese people, Parker put the decline down to “more and more potential study destinations, and so increased competition.”

She said there were several Japanese-owned English language schools located in nearby Asian countries and, “although English skills remain very important in Japan, people’s interests and employers’ requirements are diversifying.

Essentially, if this article’s assertion that people are choosing to study at home is to be believed (though why they chose to measure that in hours as opposed to people escapes me), that would mean Japan’s domestic ESL market (for Japanese adults, anyway) has become so developed (to the point of saturation) that people may be taking seriously the idea expressed in top English conversation firm NOVA’s slogan of “study abroad near your local train station.” That would be a sad development—the peculiar nature of the still-flourishing interest in the English language in Japan has now been officially blamed as a factor keeping Japanese people from studying abroad, which ironically means less overseas exposure for the average Japanese. The pros and cons of eikaiwa-style English education aside, it simply cannot serve as an effective replacement for studying abroad if one’s goal is to learn how a language is used and the culture it comes from.

That said, it would take more study to see how true that claim is (I wish I could get my hands on that report for one). And it seems like this story is talking about ESL students only, not undergraduate or graduate degree programs. I’m having trouble locating more recent statistics, but as of 2000, the number of Japanese people studying abroad (including all 3 categories and more, and most of them going to English-speaking countries, presumably) continued to rise, though at a much lower rate than in years past. My guess is it’s a combination of factors: families who are facing lower incomes (and shrinking disposable incomes) may be forced to see eikaiwa as a second best option since they can’t afford to send their kids to study abroad. Or there may be other factors at play: Japanese universities are becoming easier to get into (fewer kids, same number of universities) meaning that studying abroad isn’t being used as Plan B for kids who had trouble on the entrance exams; or perhaps parents/students are getting wise to the fact that ESL programs often aren’t what they are cracked up to be. One explanation mentioned in the report that I don’t buy is the competition from other languages. English is still king in Japan and will be for the foreseeable future.

I’ll try and keep an eye on things, but in the meantime: what do you think?

A couple of months ago I picked up The History of Zainichi Koreans, a Japanese language middle school text book intended for use either by ethnic Korean Japanese residents at Mindan (South Korean) affiliated schools, or as a supplemental text for history teachers in Japanese schools. It was published by Akashi Shoten in February 2006, and written by the history textbook creation sub-committee of Mindan and can be bought through Amazon Japan.

Looking at how history is presented in textbooks is, as readers may know, something that I find rather fascinating and so I would like to translate some small sections of interest in this text for everyone. Today I will start with the timeline of key events in Zainichi history. It is divided into two parts, Pre Liberation and Post Liberation, with the respective timeline being placed at the beginning of that half of the book. Notice which events, some of which are probably unknown to over 99% of Japanese citizens (i.e. the details of foreigner registration) are selected as key to Zainichi history.

View the entire post to see the timeline.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t normally like to just cut and paste news articles (translation is of course a different story) because it’s just a lame way to blog without having any ideas, but The Yomiuri does not keep their stories accessible online for an indefinite period, and this one from today’s edition is a critical followup to my little essay of two days ago. Ask yourself, what would these men consider “conclusive evidence”? About a month ago I attended a lecture at which three old women from Taiwan came to speak about their experiences as sex slaves to the Japanese army, which I personally found extremely convincing. (I have been meaning to write a long blog entry about that lecture, so someone people remind me to do so.)

LDP split over ‘comfort women’ / Lawmakers plan to seek revision of 1993 statement on culpability
Read the rest of this entry »

Glancing at today’s top stories at The Japan Times, I am struck by how thematically linked many of them are. Now, of course it is a slow-news Sunday with few actual current events to report on, which leads the news people to slot the historical stories into the front page, but we can still see an interesting congruence of themes in four of today’s top stories.

The big story is that the New ‘patriotism’ education law takes effect. All readers of this blog already know that this law has been in the news for some time, it has been debated by everyone, protested against by citizens groups, teachers unions, parents and students, and contested by a coalition of the DPJ and other minor opposition political parties, who in the end failed to stop its passage by the eternally ruling LDP. While I haven’t read the actual text of the law [available here] yet (which I really should do soon), we do all know that the controversy stems from one particular section of the comprehensive education law-containing many provisions on reforms generally accepted as necessary-in which it states that “an attitude that respects tradition and culture and loves the nation and homeland that have fostered them” should be promoted by throughout compulsory education, which incidentally I believe has also been extended to include high school for the first time, in one of the less politically charged provisions of the law.

This rather innocuous sounding passage sounds like part of the basic curriculum of lower education in pretty much any country, and one could argue does not even sound any different from what is already taught in classrooms throughout Japan, but many people think of the recent case of teachers being disciplined for not singing the national anthem and feel a worry that the actual implementation of these newly mandatory provisions is another stage in the resuscitation of a particular pre-war style of nationalism. In reality, the debate is not over whether patriotism and shared national values should be taught to children, but what meaning that patriotism has, and what those values are.

The worry among the opposition camp is that the official patriotism will be a doctrine of subservience to the state, which could someday lead to a return to the military days of the past. The fact that the education law was passed in the same parliamentary session as the bill elevating the head of the Self Defense Forces to a cabinet level minister does not appear to them to be a coincidence. But the opposition has their own narrative of patriotism, primarily based on the doctrine of pacifism and anti-militarism that was embraced throughout Japan after the multifaceted disaster of Japanese Imperialism and the Second World War. The relentless defense of these principles, primarily in the guise of Article 9 of the American imposed postwar Constitution-the protection of which seems to be invoked in virtually every campaign poster of a politician campaigning against the LDP-represents a particular vision of Japan, which they are proud of and want to protect. This is an attitude that I think should be considered a form of patriotism.

While statements by the reigning Emperor tend to be somewhat bland and cryptic, this seems to be the attitude expressed by Akihito, the Heisei Emperor, in remarks made on his birthday-which was also a top story today. Although I mentioned above that it was The Japan Times in which these four stories were placed next to each other, I’m going to present the somewhat longer quote from the BBC article (also the front page of that site).

“Now that the number of those who were born after the war increases as years pass by, the practice of mourning the war dead will help them to understand what kind of world and society those in the previous generations lived in,” Emperor Akihito said, in remarks made on Wednesday, but only made public on Saturday.

“I sincerely hope that the facts about the war and the war dead will continue to be correctly conveyed to those of the generations that do not have direct knowledge of the war so the kind of ravage of war that we experienced in the past will never be repeated,” he added.

However, the emperor avoided touching on how people should honour those who died in World War II.

(The original Japanese statements can be found here at the Yomiuri)
Somewhat limp statements like these are a result of how it is generally considered inappropriate for the Emperor to engage in any political activity, or suggest or endorse any particular thing or action, lest it remind us of the bad old days. If you read the entire statement of the”symbol of the State and of the unity of the people,” you can see that he is very careful only to specifically reference the deaths of Japanese soldiers and civilians and the general horror of war, but he also hopes that the “history of both Japan and the world” should be “properly conveyed to the generation of people who have not directly experienced war” so that “the horrors of war like those of the past shall not be repeated.” Right wing supporters of the new education law may argue that children will be upset by learning about evil things done by their own country in the past, but it is difficult to believe that this sort of education encourages the strong anti-war sentiment in present day Japan. Could anyone really say that the Emperor’s desire for the history of war to be taught in such a way that it helps encourage students to be anti-war is unpatriotic?

The concept of “patriotic” education is not inherently nationalistic or jingoistic. I believe that growing up I was taught about American history in a way that was intended to strongly foster patriotism, but not by entirely white-washing the past. Among the things I specifically recall studying in American History class at some point over elementary school, middle school and high school classes are: slavery and segregation (lesson plans inspired in no small part by the fact that the public schools of Montclair, New Jersey were in the twelve years I spent there roughly 50% black/white), smallpox blankets, the Salem Witch Trials, Manifest Destiny, industrial revolution child labor, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the Wounded Knee Massacre, the Trail of Tears. And this is not even a complete list of the various injustices committed by the United States of America that I was taught about in history class.

A Kobayashi Yoshinori or Shintaro Ishihara might think that I went through a history curriculum written by anti-American rabid communists or something, but as I already said these were actually patriotic lessons. How could that be? Well, slavery had Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad and the abolitionist movement-lessons of heroism and virtue. Segregation brought us Brown Vs. Board of Education-a lesson that our system of law is eventually a system of justice and the civil rights movement, with Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and other heroes, and of course the eventual end of legalized segregation. The Salem Witch Trials lead to separation of church and state, a fundamental principle of American society. The dark side of the industrial revolution eventually led to the labor movement and various legislation and a significant improvement in worker’s rights. And so on. I do not recall if it was ever spelled out, but in retrospect the basic narrative is clear. Not “America is perfect,” but “America’s founding principles are good, and if we work at it, someday they can be fully realized.” How similar my education was to the national average I have no idea, but I expect that this core narrative is standard. And today’s third article, telling us that President Bush has signed a law providing for the preservation and restoration of all the Japanese internment camps from World War II. “The objective of the law is to help preserve the camps as reminders of how the United States turned on some of its citizens in a time of fear.”

Right wingers in Japan deride the teaching of things such as comfort women, war crimes and colonialism as anti-patriotic, saying that it will make children feel bad about their country. But it is all about the approach. Certainly teaching children about the mistakes and excesses of the colonial decades makes them feel bad about that time, but presented correctly it makes them feel good about living in today’s Japan: a nation which has moved past that stage. Perhaps by being over-reactionary about terms such as “patriotism” and “nationalism,” peace activists, politicians and teachers in favor of actually teaching kids about the past are in fact making a serious strategic error. By saying patriotism=right wing makes it all too easy for the rightists to label them as unpatriotic, when many of them are actually very patriotic.

And now the fourth and final article, Sex slave exhibition exposes darkness in East Timor, which describes the findings of a Truth Commission by the East Timor government on the systematic rape of East Timorese woman by Japanese soldiers in so-called “comfort stations” during Japanese occupation of the then Portuguese colony, as well as the far less organized rape of East Timorese women by Indonesian soldiers during their occupation of the now independent country. While all of this is very interesting, particularly how characteristics of the local society led to different recruiting practices of comfort women from certain other colonies, the following passage is the one relevant to the current essay. [Emphasis added]

Citizen groups concerned about the lack of accountability for the wartime sex-slave atrocities convened a people’s tribunal in Tokyo in 2000 that found the late Emperor Hirohito and high-ranking Japanese military officers guilty of crimes against humanity. The verdict was later censored from an NHK documentary on the trial amid allegations by a major daily newspaper that two heavyweight Liberal Democratic Party politicians—Shoichi Nakagawa and Shinzo Abe—paid a less than comfortable visit to the public broadcaster before it was aired. [Detailed article on this case here at Japan Media Review]

Charges of government censorship of NHK, which seemed sensational and cynical at the time, are now quite believable in the wake of news that now Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has ordered NHK to focus on the North Korean abductee case. Fears that Japan is returning to 1930’s style thought control are both premature and somewhat hysterical, but increasing interference with NHK and education is inarguably more of a step in that direction than away from it. However, while the LDP did manage to pass this bill, opposition to it was fairly strong, and the Abe administration is not looking particularly popular, so it is always possible that we have another amendment of the education law by a future administration to look forward to. Yet, I think the return of education that teaches Japanese kids to take pride in their country is here to stay. The big question is, what will teach them to be proud of? German style guilt based education is entirely off the table, but that does not mean that history class has to be sanitized. There is a big difference between teaching children to be ashamed of the past and teaching them to be proud of having surpassed it.

Since it turns out that all of my books on the Philippines are back home in the US and I’m not going to hit the library for a blog entry, I’m relying on a combination of memory and internet sources. I apologize for any errors, tell me if you spot any, and don’t quote this in your schoolwork.

Continued from Part 1: The “Nicole” Rape Case.

The fact is barely remembered in the US, but The Philippines was a colonial possession of the United States from approximately 1900-1946. The exact date at which The Philippines became a US colony is open to debate. The US purchased the Philippines from Spain in 1898 after winning the Spanish-American war, but since The Philippines had already declared an independent republic earlier that year, after years of resistance against Spanish colonial rule, and with neither the nascent first Republic of the Philippines nor the United States recognizing each other’s legitimacy as administrator of the country, the Philippine-American war broke out. The US defeated the Philippine military and established a colonial government in 1901, headed by Governor General William Howard Taft, whose experience in this job led to his later role as President of the United States.

Although The Philippines was a colony of the US, administration of the colony was markedly different from the colonies of European nations that still existed, or the colonies that Japan was busily establishing to the north. United States rule was particularly different from the earlier Spanish rule that it replaced. “From the very beginning, United States presidents and their representatives in the islands defined their colonial mission as tutelage: preparing the Philippines for eventual independence.” (source) In many ways, US colonial administration of The Philippines, with its mission of “tutelage” in preparation for independence, was more similar to US led occupation missions in post-war Japan and Germany, or present day Iraq than to traditional concepts of colonial rule. Keep in mind that Douglas MacArthur, the leader of occupation era Japan, had been in the Philippines before the Japanese invasion of World War II.

Compared to Spanish rule, whose policy was to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the Spanish and mixed-blood colonial elite, spread the Catholic faith, exploit the land for resources that could benefit the home country, and keep the populace illiterate and unorganized, US rule was an improvement. Governor General Taft’s administrative philosophy was “the Philippines for the Filipinos . . . that every measure, whether in the form of a law or an executive order, before its adoption, should be weighed in the light of this question: Does it make for the welfare of the Filipino people, or does it not?”

To this end, and with the eventual goal of independence, the colonial administration promoted economic development, building political structures and instituted compulsory education for all citizens, using English as the primary language of instruction-in contrast to Spanish times, when very few Filipinos ever became proficient in Spanish. The Catholic Church had been the official religion of the colony and actually conducted much of the local governance throughout the islands, with the Spanish colonial government primarily sticking to urban strongholds. The Church had thus accumulated massive holdings, and priests had been known to run isolated parishes in the manner of medieval fiefdoms. The act establishing the colonial administration also revoked the Church’s official status, and the United States bought the majority of Church land, reselling it to private citizens and businesses.

But even though American colonial rule of the Philippines was relatively benign when compared with most European administered colonies over the previous centuries, it was still colonial rule. Like any colony, the colonizers imposed their language and culture on the colonized. English was the official language throughout the American colonial period, a constant reminder of who was really in charge, and in the early years also an impediment against participation in the civil service by Filipinos. Today, English remains one of the two national languages of the Republic of the Philippines, along with Tagalog, the native language of the region of Luzon island surrounding Manila, the country’s capital and economic center. While citizens throughout the country are supposed to be educated in both national languages, many Filipinos with a native regional dialect besides Tagalog are actually more comfortable with English, which they consider a supplement to their native language, as opposed to Tagalog, which is sometimes seen as threatening regional dialect. The various dialects and languages are all strongly influenced by the language of their colonizers, with a large part of everyday vocabulary consisting of Spanish and English words. Interestingly, speakers of Philippine languages will sometimes use entire grammatically correct phrases or even clauses of English in ordinary conversation in their native language. I have heard that speakers of the Tagalog (Manila region) dialect use the most English words, but the more provincial Visayas dialects contains a higher proportion of Spanish words. However, Spanish derived words are used only as vocabulary in all dialects, and never as complete grammatical structures, which is reflective of the rarity of actual Spanish fluency in the Spanish ruled Philippines.

All governments have some level of corruption, and those which are not answerable to the people they administer, such as colonial governments, tend to be worse. The American colonial government in the Philippines was described in a 1921 letter from Dean C. Worcester as one in which graft was “generally, openly and insolently demanded as a prerequisite to the performance of their duties by government officers and employees.” (Worcester was an author of several books on the Philippines. One can currently be found at Project Gutenberg.) Aside from corruption, there was also contempt for the natives from many colonial administrators, even including at least one Governor General. In 1905, Taft’s secretary wrote “the trouble with Governor-General Wright and some others was that they came from the South and that they could not get rid of the race-prejudice which the man from the South of the United States has.”

Some prominent figures such as Mark Twain and William Jennings Bryan had opposed on anti-imperialist and anti-racist grounds the colonization of of the Philippines in the first place, but during the early years of the colonial period there was little support for granting them independence in the near term. There had been a promise by the US government from the beginning that the Philippines would be granted independence someday, when it was ready, but the primary debate was between those who wanted to establish a local Philippine civilian government subordinate to the US administration, and those who wanted to continue direct rule. Representing the first opinion, former Governor General Taft, now Secretary of War, wrote in 1907 that “the partial control of the government which is now in the hands of the Filipinos has itself developed both conservatism and an interest in the existing government which will have a healthful tendency to delay the pressure for immediate independence on the part of those who are actually exercising influence in the Assembly.” On the other side, an American teacher working in the Philippines wrote in 1908 that a “mistake was made in introducing civil government quite so soon, but on the other hand the military people exaggerate very much the danger of an insurrection and the need of an army—it is for their interest to do so.”

Next, part 3: Through Independence.

According to this report by Debito, new Education Minister Bunmei Ibuki is opposed to English in the elementary school curriculum.

The reasoning is that Ibuki (as do many conservatives) believe that students’ Japanese language abilities are going down. They should work on their native language, hone that to a good level, then work on English. Studying a foreign language at such an early age a) apparently confuses the kids, and b) takes class time away from good, honest study of our language.

Now, check out this translated quote from the Japan Times:

“I wonder if (schools) teach children (the) social rules they should know as Japanese,” Ibuki said. “Students’ academic abilities have been declining, and there are (many) children who do not write and speak decent Japanese. (Schools) should not teach a foreign language.”

No wonder he hates English—he wants kids to speak nice hazy traditional Japanese, where sentences have no subjects. It’s very handy for imperial mind control when you never have to say who’s doing something!

Anyway, everyone should have to study a foreign language, even if they never plan to actually use it. Learning another language changes the way you view your own language. Every time you have to translate a sentence, you gain a deeper understanding of the grammar and vocabulary of your own language. Of course, it might also dilute your language with random foreign jargon, but what’s the real harm in that?

(Fun fact: The name “Bunmei” means “civilization.” You know this guy must have had some weird parents.)

Welcome to the 7th installment of the Asian History Carnival, a project of Jonathan Dresner and the Asian History blog Frog In A Well. For this installment I have decided to, instead of using the usual geographic classification, separate posts into three broad thematic categories. First “History Wars,” for posts and articles about attempts by contemporary people and nations to control the memory of the past. This title comes from the excellent book of the same name, which I read recently. Next are History Finds, posts in which the author presents his or her own research or discovery of some not commonly known piece of history. Finally we have History Lessons-posts which are, in some form, teaching history. Of course this overlaps with the other two categories, so this section includes only posts which do not fit the criteria of either of the other two. That is, they are presenting history which is, if not necessarily well known, something which can be discovered from conventional sources, and not based on the personal discovery of the previous category.

History wars

With all the controversy over the ABC Road to 9.11 miniseries, the US public is finally getting a taste of the history wars that East Asians are continually waging.

There’s always some sort of territorial dispute going on in East Asia. If it isn’t Russians arresting Japanese fishermen over islands nobody really cares about, it’s Japan arresting Taiwanese fisherman over other islands nobody cares about. Or maybe a Korean guy engaging in an awesome protest stunt for obscure reasons.

While there was a miniscule controversy over a poorly drawn map on the Okinwana prefectural website showing Tsushima, an island which is actually part of Nagasaki prefecture, as foreign territory, the current major fad in East Asian territorial disputes has to be over Koguryo, an ancient kingdom on the Korean penninsula that ceased existing in the year 668, after being defeated and absorbed by the rival Silla kingdom, with plenty of help from Tang China. One might think that disputes over the borders of Koguryo would have ended back then, but sadly things are not that simple.

What do you need to know to understand this? Well, it might not hurt to read up on Koguryo history a little. (And it might not hurt to check out Tang China, Silla, and so on while you’re there.) Then try The Korea-China Textbook War—What’s It All About? from History News Network. This article is from back in March and may have been in a previous edition of this history carnival, but it’s good background. Next try this article on The “history war” Between China and SK, which while published in the Asia Times Online, is written by the blogger Andrei Lankov, of North Korea Zonesome comments in response to this article, as well as links to some Korean coverage of the battle. There are of course plenty of other bloggers discussing this issue as well.

As speculation mounts (again) that the Kim dynasy of North Korea may be weakening, a post-collapse scenario by Robert Kaplan has been making the rounds. This is where the academic debate over ancient territorial borders starts to have a practical result. After the DPRK collapses, does China get to grab part of the former North Korea to protect their territorial integrity from ethnic Koreans in China who want to rejoin their distant relatives? Does the newly Unified Korea get to grab nearby territory in China because of the significant Korean minority? Time to bust out the historical precedent-no matter how flimsy or dusty. You can find discussion of this article by bloggers at DPRK Studies, GI Korea, or in the comments thread at the Robert Kaplan fan-blog Cominganarchy.com. Yes, in the end it’s just speculation about the future. But in the end this is exactly what the History Wars discussed just above are really all about.

Antti Leppänen, a Finn who blogs on Korea, reports on the possible rehabilitation of Pak Hôn-yông , “Southern-born communist leader who went over to the North before the establishment of separate states, was a member of the early DPRK leadership and was given the responsibility for the failures of the Korean War and executed in 1955 for having been a ‘spy for the American imperialists.’” Does this amount to an admittance of fault by the Kim dynasty? Is the initial report even true? Like most developments in North Korea, we have more speculation than hard fact.

Is it already 30 years since Mao’s death? Try comparing this Apply Daily article with this one from Canada.

Is Taiwan “China”? The debate has raged for decades, if not centuries, and shows no sign of calming. Jonathan Dresner gives his opinion on Michael Turton’s argument “China has never owned Taiwan” largely because Taiwan was “never the possession of any ethnic Chinese emperor.” This is one of the many arguments that Taiwanese pro-independence forces use in their ongoing battle. Of course, however sympathetic one may be to the cause of Taiwanese independence/autonomy, it does seem unlikely that they will achieve formal recognition by the PRC as a separate state through superior rhetoric.

Noja, of Frog In A Well Korea, has an article questioning the difference between “resistant collaborators” and “collaborative resistors.” Since Noja is actually trying to puzzle out the answer for inclusion in a Russian textbook on Korea’s history (being written in Kyushu University!) this could almost have gone in the Lessons section below, but Noja is grappling with definitions of some issues touchy enough to have gotten many of the original actors executed, so I’ll leave it here.

History finds

Michael D. Manning of The Opposite End of China finally discovers the original location from which an “ancient” 1998 photo of Korla, Xinjiang, was taken and snaps his own photo for comparison, at the exact same angle. There is probably less difference between the two photos than you would find in most Chinese city centers over the same period.

In a similar vein, Richard Barrow shows an interesting contrast between a photograph of the Royal Tonsure Ceremony for the boy who would late become King Chulalongkorn (King Rama V) and a line drawing made for reproduction in the book”The English Governess at the Siamese Court,” (photographs could not be printed with the day’s technology) which I will assume is the basis for The King and I. The editor made a mistake which I imagine even under Thailand’s modern lese majesty statute could get him in trouble. Shortly below this you can see some photographs and description of what slightly less regal Thais were wearing in the mid-19th century.

It may seem premature, so let’s call this preemptive history. The statistics and survey in Japan blog What Japan Thinks has a survey on what will be Koizumi’s legacy as Prime Minister. It’s an interesting list, particularly since it shows the massive contrast between issues that the foreign-language press pays attention to, and what Japanese people actually care about themselves.

The absolutely essential China blog EastSouthWestNorth has posted translations of a couple of dozen passages from “Extraordinary Sayings” (非常道) by Yu Shicun (余世存), an unstructured collection of, well, extraordinary sayings gleaned by the author from hundreds of books, covering China’s history from 1840-1999. A two part post, you can find Part 1 here – Part 2 here.

Roland Soong, the now famous and formerly semi-anonymous ESWN blogger has also been doing some historical research of his own, into his own family roots. The first installment of his findings, in which he tracks the fate of his grandfather’s once-famous library, makes for fascinating reading.

This is where I would like to plug one of my own postings. After several weeks of minimal posting I stumbled across a reference to an important but largely unknown American-born engineer by the name of William R. Gorham, who emigrated to Japan in the early 20th century, helped build their early aeronatics and automobile industries, and finally towards the end of his life became a Japanese citizen on the eve of World War II. A man with an important history, but just on the edge of total obscurity, I spent some time tracking down everything I could find out about him using only conventional and free online resources, and wrote up my findings in this article here.

History lessons

When I went to Xinjiang, China a few years ago I was surprised to find that Turpan is full of Japanese speaking Uyghur guides, to accomodate the steady stream of Japanese tourists that have been heading there ever since the famous Silk Road documentary aired on NHK in 1980. In looking through the archives of various blogs for this Carnival, I found that earlier this year Our Silk Road had reported that this highly influential travel/history documentary is being updated with recent scholarship, and even better, higher resolution imagery.

The Central Asia and Caucasus themed blog collective Neweurasia.net has an excellent special feature looking back at the Soviet breakup on its 15 year anniversary. There are posts at each country blog – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – as well as an editorial and a “special guest post” by Dr. Johannes Linn, Brookings scholar and former Vice President of the World Bank for Europe & Central Asia. No, I haven’t had time to read all of them yet.

This August was also the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Cultural Revolution in China. In honor of that, the Chinese Media blog Danwei has one long post with “two first person accounts beginning of the decade of chaos, translated and with an introduction by Geremie R. Barmé.” They also put up a companion post with links to several cultural revolution resources, including a recording of the original radio announcement. Jottings from the Granite Studio also has a post with some thoughts on History and Memory and the Cultural Revolution.

I wasn’t sure whether to put this one in the History Wars or the History Lessons section. And I’m still not sure. I may even change my mind before I finish editing. The Taiwan based Betelnut Blogger is ticked off by historical revisionism in the Taipei Times editorial page, and he’s decided to set the facts straight on the history of the KMT/CCP civil war in China. Does the politicized introduction make this a History War post, or is the content neutral enough to leave it here? In a sense, this is the question of authorial viewpoint that one has to consider in any historical document being consulted,cited or referenced, whether primary or secondary source. Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

Blogging… Walk The Talk is a Hong Kong based blog maintained by two men involved in the tour guiding industry in some fashion. Naturally, it often contains posts on interesting history, and last month included two worth noting. First is the story of The Colonial Flag of Hong Kong, which like the symbols of many ambiguous territories never really reached the level of popularity that such things achieve in more nationalistic populations. Second is an interesting piece on Japan’s Heroin Habit in the Roaring Twenties. The thing I like about this post is that it is not referencing Japanese sources, but an exerpt from a 1923 Hong Kong Imports and Exports Office document. Maybe someone else can find some confirmation from the Japanese end that the heroin actually got to where it was supposed to?

In addition to just articles that teach history, we also have one about teaching history. Jonathan Dresner has a post introducing his syllabi for a class on Japanese Women.

Other contributors to Frog In A Well brings us two reproductions of original documents. First is an illustration from an article on smoking in an early 20th century Shanghai newspaper, which seems to show an army of premature Elvis clones out to destroy traditional Asian value. Finally we have an extraordinarily specific contract spelling out just exactly what it was like as a slave in Han China.

• * *

And that’s it for this installment of the Asian History Carnival. I apologize for the delays and lateness. I blame the anonymous neighbor from whom I had been borrowing wifi service from, who seems to have changed their settings to make the connection just barely on this side of semi-usable for me. The DSL installer is coming in one week…

Here are a few announcements for related events:

Carnivalesque (Ancient/Medieval and Early Modern) coming up sometime soon.

The History Carnival coming up 10/1 at Rob Macdougal’s place (most recent edition at Cliopatria.)

Carnival of Bad History, coming up at World History Blog.

And of course, the next edition of the Asian History Carnival to be hosted by Nathanael Robinson.

The following is an op-ed piece from yesterday’s edition of the Taipei Times that considering I myself went to Taiwan instead of China to study Chinese makes a very good point. Time Magazine’s goddawful article on learning Mandarin can be found at their web site here.

Taiwan still a good place to learn Mandarin
By Dan Bloom

Tuesday, Jul 25, 2006,Page 8

“Time” magazine published a long feature in its June 19 edition about the benefits of studying Mandarin—in China. Not once did the magazine’s 10-page report mention that Taiwan is also a good place to study, learn and live the Chinese language. How could such a reputable, international magazine, with many readers in Taiwan miss the boat on this?

When a reporter in Taiwan queried a Time editor in Hong Kong about the cover story, which was titled “Get Ahead, Learn Mandarin,” he received the following note: “The story did not discuss Taiwan because the subject of our cover story that issue was the rising interest in studying Chinese. That phenomenon is directly related to the growth of the Chinese economy, hence the focus on China. People study Mandarin in Taiwan, of course, but that has long been the case and isn’t really news.”

Good answer, but it didn’t really answer my question. When an international news magazine devotes its cover story to “learning Mandarin” in Asian nations such as Japan and South Korea and does not once mention the country of Taiwan as a place to learn Chinese, something is very wrong in the biased way the editors perceive things. Perhaps Time’s editors in Hong Kong believe that Taiwan is a mere province of China and therefore not worth a mention in the article in question?

Mark Caltonhill, a longtime resident of Taiwan, recently wrote an online commentary in the Taiwan Journal about his own learning curve in acquiring Mandarin. He noted that Taiwan was a very good place to learn and live the Chinese language, and is not in any way inferior to China.

Caltonhill wrote: “Whatever [a] student’s interests and specialties—art or history, religion or philosophy, literature, martial arts or Chinese cuisine—Taiwan has as much or more to offer [than China].”

Taipei, of course, is a very good place to study Chinese. Time’s editors know that. Time even has reporters who work for the magazine here. And there are many schools here that offer Mandarin classes, such as National Taiwan Normal University’s Center for Chinese Language and Culture, the National Taiwan University Language Center and the Tamkang University Language Center.

The Time article stressed that “while English may be the only truly international language, millions of tongues are wagging over what is rapidly becoming the world’s other lingua franca: Mandarin.”

Quoting a statement by British linguist David Gaddol, the magazine added: “In many Asian countries, in Europe and the US, Mandarin has emerged as the new must-have language.”

Time even quoted a professor in China, who said: “Promoting the use of Chinese among overseas people has gone beyond purely cultural issues. It can help build up our national strength and should be taken as a way to develop our country’s `soft power.’” That was Hu Youqing, a Chinese-language professor at Nanjing University talking.

Time mentioned that China has sent more than 2,000 volunteers to teach Mandarin overseas, mostly in Asian nations such as Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea. Why didn’t it also mention that Taiwan also has sent volunteer teachers to several Asian countries? China’s goal is to have 100 million foreigners studying Mandarin by the end of the decade. Well, won’t some of them be studying Mandarin in Taipei or Kaohsiung? Time missed the boat again.

Will Mandarin ever overtake English as the world’s common language? Probably not, but as Time notes, “just as knowing English proved a key to getting ahead in the 20th century, learning Chinese will provide an edge in the 21st.” This was a good point and was an important theme of the entire cover story. But by ignoring Taiwan—not mentioning Taiwan even once in the entire feature—the magazine’s editors showed their ignorance and bias against Taiwan, even though they work and live in Asia.

Taipei is a very good place to learn and live the Chinese language, and Time magazine did a huge disservice to its readers around the world by ignoring Taiwan completely in its June 19 cover story.

Wake up, Time magazine, China does not have a monopoly on Chinese-language centers and Mandarin schools. Wake up and smell the coffee—in Taiwan, too.

Dan Bloom is a freelance writer based in Chiayi.