session b: Saturday, October 10, 10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
B1 Issues in Public Health and International Aid | 203 Lawrence
Chair: TBD
CLARK CHILSON, University of Pittsburgh
Contemplation in Correctional Facilities: A History of Naikan Meditation in Japanese Prisons
In 1993 the Inspector General of Prisons in India began to offer for inmates courses on Vipassana meditation. The success of these courses became well-known through the documentary film "Doing Time, Doing Vipassana," and similar courses were introduced in US prisons in 1997. In Japan decades before this, however, in 1954 a businessman and a devout Shin Buddhist named Yoshimoto Ishin introduced to a juvenile detention center a different meditation practice called Naikan. In the 1950s and into the 1960s Naikan spread throughout the correctional world in Japan. A Taiwanese prison also adopted Naikan, and in 1963 the warden of that prison did intensive Naikan training in Nara with Yoshimoto. This paper introduces the history of Naikan meditation in prisons. It demonstrates how, similar to Vipassana in the US today, its practitioners have endeavored to show that despite Naikan's roots in Buddhism, it is a non-religious practice.
SHAWN FOSTER, University of Minnesota
Uneasy Cooperation: Rockefeller Foundation and Public Health Profession Development in Japan, 1923-1938
In the 1910s, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) extended its philanthropic effort to promote public health in Asia, first in China and then in other countries, including Japan. Manuscript records at the Rockefeller Archival Center reveal that the reception of the RF's effort in Japan was less enthusiastic than it was in China. Japan had already adopted many ideas and practices of Western medicine and even some public health practices in the 1870s. However, in 1923 the RF’s officers, who were invited to conduct survey on Japan’s public health needs after the Great Kanto earthquake, found that an independent public health profession was nowhere in sight in Japan at the time. The RF’s efforts to build a Tokyo Public Health Institute was delayed repeatedly because of political and professional reactions in that country. This paper examines the explanations for the resistance. It describes some of the cultural, political, and institutional circumstances.
AMANDA ROBINSON, University of Pittsburgh
Animal Cafes and the Japanese Healing Boom
Japanese animal cafes, businesses where customers pay to spend time relaxing in a space surrounded by animals, began to appear in Japan in the mid-2000s, as an extension of the iyashi, or healing, boom. Following the end of the economic bubble period, Japanese workers, in order to replace the emotional stability previously offered by the company, are increasingly turning to iyashi to relieve their emotional stress. Animal cafes are one type of iyashi business that allows individuals to relax and focus on positive social interaction with animals. This paper explores the changing social situation in Japan and provides an introduction to how animal cafes function as social support. The goal of this paper is to explore why animal cafes have attracted overstressed workers and how interaction with animals produces iyashi in customers, and how this relates to the commodification of sociality and desire for emotional connection.
FRAYDA COHEN, University of Pittsburgh
Tracing the Red Thread: Orphan ‘Relief’ and Contemporary NGOs in China
The 1990s witnessed a sudden, dramatic increase in the number of adoptions of Chinese children by U.S. parents. As a result, since 1999, both the United States and the Chinese governments have instituted new policies that regulate the ways in which families may be created across borders. This paper addresses the ways in which this regulated form of transnational adoption has also contributed to the proliferation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have arisen in response to China's rapid development and need for social services. In a variety of ways, these NGOs are part of an emerging 'third sector' in China, While this work can help to fill a void in a market economy that has lost much of its state mandated social services (problematic though they may have been) to a very uneven private development, nevertheless, these groups have situated the children with whom they work in a complicated salvation narrative.
B2 Challenges in Modern China | 205 Lawrence
Chair: JAMES COOK, University of Pittsburgh
YIMIN LI, The New School
Chengguan: The parapolice of China’s urban streets and the inclusion of China’s urban poor
Chengguan is a local level government agency created in the late 1990s in China to centralize the enforcement of administrative laws. Such a centralizing design was meant to guard citizens and enterprises against overlaps of administrative interferences. However, in recent years reports of Chengguan power abuse have appeared frequently in the media.
Confrontations between Chengguan and the public mostly involve the illegality hence the management of the informal economy on city streets, which predominately affects livelihoods of the least advantaged (e.g. migrant workers). The issue concerns not only the understanding of modern urban space in the Chinese society, but more importantly the political and economic rights of the urban poor. Therefore it becomes imperative to learn more about the making of this miniature Chinese Leviathan, and how those confrontations could shape China's political, economic and social landscapes, especially the inclusion of the urban minorities in policymaking.
REBECCA CLOTHEY, Drexel University
Oppositional Culture and Uyghur Language Blogs
This paper describes how one ethnic minority group in China appropriates online blogs for use as a non-formal education venue to promote cultural transmission. Although Internet use in China is officially regulated and censored by the state, China nevertheless has the world’s largest number of Internet users. Furthermore, the most subversive ideas in China can be found in Chinese cyberspace, where the Internet is frequently used for contentious purposes (McKinnon, 2013; Yang, 2009). However, while much has been written in recent years about Chinese online activism, most of the research on Chinese use of digital media to date has focused specifically on Chinese language Internet sources (e.g., Bamman, et al, 2012; Yang, 2009). Little attention has been paid to online activity among any of China’s 55 officially recognized ethnic minority groups such as the Uyghurs, a Moslem minority of some ten million people who reside mostly in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Yang (2009) asserts that all issues contested offline can also be found online. Yet despite some evidence of Uyghur offline resistance against the state (Bovingdon, 2010), very little research has been conducted which addresses the Uyghur use of online social media as a form of social activism. This paper addresses this gap by describing how Uyghurs have utilized blogs as a non-formal education venue to propagate ethnic identity and build cultural solidarity, thus serving as a means of online social activism. The paper draws from data collected over a period of eight months during which time four Uyghur language blogs were monitored daily. The paper interprets the data through Jane Mansbridge’s concept of “oppositional consciousness,” showing how interactive Uyghur blogs promote cultural transmission by facilitating the formation of oppositional consciousness, as described by Mansbridge (2001). The paper concludes that such blogs serve as a non-formal education venue with which to educate the Uyghur community about cultural issues important specifically to them. These include maintaining Uyghur language, promoting the interests of their own community, and encouraging an understanding of Islamic beliefs.
JAMES COOK, University of Pittsburgh
Rethinking “China”: Overseas Chinese and China’s Modernity
This paper analyzes the important role overseas Chinese played in the modernization of China during the Republican era. It focuses on both economic and social/cultural influences through an in-depth look at the port city of Xiamen in Fujian province.
MARCO D’AMICO, Concordia University ( Montreal)
The Sick Man’s Dream
Since November 2012, Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping has consistently mentioned the realization of the “China Dream” as his main goal. Two decades of quick paced economic reform and social change created a dilemma for the ruling elite, who sought to reassert their position as the country's political and cultural center. Coupled with the humiliation themed historical narrative of the “Road to Rejuvenation”, the “China Dream” represents a new state ideology that seeks to reassert China as one of the dominant world powers. The “China Dream” is both a personal and national realization, as the success of the individual will lead to the realization of the national “Dream.” Looking back on the last twenty years, my research will utilize sports, most notably Football, as a lens through which to understand the effects of this new historical narrative on the aspirations of the individual citizen in relation to the fate of the nation.
B3 Shaping Memory and Society in Post-War Japan | 1500 Posvar
Chair: ERIK ROPERS, Towson University
JULIA LAU, Georgetown University
Memories of Nanjing on Screen: Effects on Chinese Identity and Constraints on China’s Japan Policy
Scholars and the media have noted how Beijing has stepped up its efforts to create and sustain collective war memory in China, specifically on Japanese actions during the Nanjing Massacre. Against the backdrop of China’s rise as a great power, it is arguable that China’s war memory-making, and insistence on educating its domestic population and the overseas Chinese diaspora abroad about its suffering during World War II and its "century of humiliation" serves to increase Chinese nationalism while reinforcing the domestic national narrative of a risen, stronger China. However, there is significant potential for this formulation of war memories and consequent revival of anti-Japanese sentiments to constrain Beijing's already fraught relationship with Tokyo, and adversely affect prospects for warmer bilateral relations in the near future. Such an outcome would have adverse effects on the wider Asia-Pacific region. This paper examines how war memory in China has evolved since the discourse on "national humiliation" in China's history has begun, and argues that the narrative is slowly shifting to a more triumphant one. It details the potential impact of recently produced Chinese films and television series concerning the Nanjing Massacre on Chinese nationalism, and on Chinese citizens' perceptions of Japan.
ERIK ROPERS, Towson University
Visualizing and Representing the Hanaoka Massacre in Print
After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, one early movement that focused on non-Japanese victims of the war in Asia coalesced around Chinese and Koreans laborers massacred in the village of Hanaoka in northern Japan. This paper analyzes a series of woodblock prints entitled Hanaoka monogatari (Tale of Hanaoka) as a means of documenting Japanese human rights violations relating to its use of enforced labor during the war. I begin with the premise that the past is expressed via forms of media outside of formal venues of truth telling and truth seeking, such as truth and reconciliation commissions, trials and tribunals, and more generally forms of historical writing, testimony and oral history. Such a narrative is important for two main reasons: first, it is one of the earliest accounts critical of Japanese labor policies during the war; second, it offers another means of understanding how wartime enforced labor was remembered, thought about, and disseminated by some groups and organizations in Occupation-period Japan (1945-1952).
GEN NOGAMI, University of Tsukuba, Japan
“War Experience/Memories of War” in Modern and Contemporary Japan
This paper will explore "War Experience/War Memories" in Modern and Contemporary Japan, focusing on issues such as the forgetfulness of Japanese citizens, and war responsibility in Japanese popular culture.
I suggest four points to describe a social history of “War Memories;”
(1) Our understanding of "war" should be not only WWII, but also Sino-Japanese War (1894) and Russo-Japanese War (1904), and also the Cold War/Hot War. (And there is lack of WWI.)
(2) Through this history of war memories in Japan, the definition of “War Experience” itself has been changing in Japanese society.
(3) A distinction between the death of Showa Emperor (1989) and the end of Cold War (around 1990) is needed.
(4) We can write a history based on the form of the society, which determines its collectiveness.
The latter half of this paper examines several case studies of the above. Discussing the reason why the double standards, for example, Japanese popular culture promoting on the one hand a love of war, and on the other political pacifism, the forgetfulness of the Second Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945) and popular memories of US-Japanese war (1941-1945).
NATHANIAL GAILEY-SCHILTZ, University of Maryland, College Park
A Lyrical Glimpse into Occupation Discourse: Japanese Ryûkôka and Occupation Censorship
The Gordon W. Prange Collection at the University of Maryland, College Park, is home to many thousands of books, periodicals, and other publications that passed through the Allied censorship apparatus in Japan during the Occupation’s censorship from 1945 to 1949. Among the items in the collection are a significant amount of sheet music and hit song collections for contemporary ryûkôka popular tunes. In this paper I will discuss several specific examples of songs in the collection that had censorship actions taken, meaning that text was deleted from them before publication, or they were suppressed altogether. Placed in the context of the time, these songs connect to the film industry, current events, and classic plays. I will examine these rich connections and suggest how we can view these artifacts as products and producers of the complex power dynamics of the Occupation period.
B4 Eco-Media in China | 1501 Posvar
Chair: JINYING LI, University of Pittsburgh
HAOMIN GONG, Case Western Reserve University
Ecocinema, Place, and Modernity: Wang Jiuliang’s Documentary Films on Trash
What does ecocinema mean specifically for a Third-world country? If poetry, as Heidegger claims, "is the original admission of dwelling" and therefore is existentially ecological, then what has cinema, a dynamically new technology, to do with ecocriticism? This essay takes Wang Jiuliang's two documentary films, Beijing Besieged by Trash and Plastic China, as a point of departure, and investigates the notions of place and displacement as the central themes of ecocriticism in contemporary Chinese cinema. These two films directly confront the crises of trash disposing and international trash trade that China is currently facing in the global context. I will examine the discourse of trash, a central concern of both films, and explore the ways in which trash, as a modern product of commodity values, defines the spatial relationship between human beings, as well as the power relationship between countries in the global industrial chain of production, distribution, and consumption.
RALPH LITZINGER, Duke University
Image as Method: The Specter of China’s “Eco-Apocalypse”
This paper examines recent visual productions on what I call China’s eco-apocalypse. Images of polluted waterways and cancer villages, urban fringe spaces of decay and debris, empty, lifeless ghost cities, ghastly industrial runoff, deforming human body parts, and masked lives in Beijing’s deadly air – all of these images circulate in cyberspace, at film festivals and art shows and in the global media. What does it mean to represent urban and rural spaces and the grey zones in between as spaces of disease, ruin, devastation, and dehumanizing ecological injustice? What forms of activism, action, and hope do they offer? I reflect on Wang Jiu Liang’s documentary “Beijing Besieged by Waste,” the pollution photojournalism of Lu Guang, and Chai Jing’s virtual media sensation “Under the Dome.” Rather than approaching these three examples as revealing the hidden realities of China’s ecological crisis and frenzied development, I ask about the fantasies, hallucinations, and desires that haunt these visual interventions in the history of China’s global present.
FAN YANG, University of Maryland Baltimore County
Under the Dome: China, the Environment, and the Viral Media Event
Under the Dome, a video about air pollution in China produced by author and former television anchor Chai Jing, garnered 200 million views before disappearing from major Chinese websites within a week. It has been compared to Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, Inconvenient Truth, Rachel Carlson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, a TED talk and an Apple product launch. While its cinematic features have led many commentators to overly focus on its mode of representation, this essay argues that more attention must be paid to its temporality. Rather than dismissing the viral media event as ephemeral and therefore insignificant, I examine its aesthetics, circulation and reception in closer relation to television, a medium for which time, or “present-ness,” is a central category of analysis. This approach, I suggest, allows us to more critically engage the event as a symptom of the ideological conditions that delimit contemporary environmental discourses in and about China.
JINYING LI, University of Pittsburgh
The Grey Clouds: Eco-Apps, Elemental Media, and Mobile Collectivization
In today’s China of big data and big pollution, “clouds” are computerized and darkened simultaneously, generating socio-political crisis, anxiety and uncertainty. This essay examines the interplay between networked clouds and polluted clouds by investigating the development and usage of environment-related mobile applications. The history of portable, personal devices has often been studied as techno-social development toward “mobile privatization.” But my study of eco-apps rather focuses on the reverse direction—mobile collectivization, which is technically enabled through crowd sourcing and cloud computing. If media define our relationship with the world, how could such virtual clouds affect the ways in which we interact with natural clouds? Will mobile collectivization generate actions in shaping and re-shaping environmental discourses and practices? Or simply releasing more wastes both digitally and materially? These questions lead us to rethink the boundaries between the social and the natural, agents and elements, actors and networks, and interactions among them.
B5 Facts Refracted: Revisiting Wartime Narratives and Performances in Postwar East Asia| 1700 Posvar
Chair: LALA ZUO, United States Naval Academy
Discussant: MAN HE, Williams College
LAURA JO-HAN WEN, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Afterlives of Sayun: Transmediating a Colonial Tale in Taiwan
Sayun, a seventeenth-year-old Atayal girl in Japanese colonial Taiwan, has become a motif in transmedia representations of identity politics, historical memories, and indigenous hybridity since her fatal fall into a creek in 1938. Immediately prior to the accident, Sayun had been carrying the luggage of a male enlisted Japanese officer who was leaving her tribe for World War II. The incident has often been interpreted in a romantic light, which shapes Sayun into a patriotic heroine in Japan’s wartime narratives, a must-be-excised phrase in Mandarin lyrics in the Cold War soundscape, and a trope of indigenous negotiation in contemporary Taiwan cinema. Examining various adaptations of “Sayun”—including Shiotsuki Tōho’s oil painting (1939), Masao Koga’s melody (1941), Zhou Lanping’s lyrics (1962), and Laha Mebow’s film (2011)—this paper investigates the afterlives and transmediation of a colonial subject and the discourses it invokes in postcolonial situations.
NAN MA, Swarthmore College
Postmodernizing Cold War Sino-American Relation: Appropriation of The Red Detachment of Women in Nixon in China
The Red Detachment of Women is the most influential Chinese ballet in the Cultural Revolution, a period isolated China from the rest of the world. President Nixon’s 1972 visit to China publicized the ballet to the world through the presidential couple’s viewing of the performance. Since then, the ballet has become a symbol for the clash of Cold War ideologies. Inspired by Nixon’s visit, an American opera Nixon in China was created in 1987. Scenes of the Red Detachment are remade as a postmodernist parody in the opera. It is argued that the opera uses the ballet as the ground for a feminized deconstruction of the patriarchal Cold War politics by staging the surrealist actions of the First Ladies of the two states during watching the ballet. While both Pat Nixon and Jiang Qing are portrayed as conscious victims of patriarchy, Western femininity is romanticized as the preserve of innocence.
LALA ZUO, United States Naval Academy
Who Saved Kyoto? Understanding the Misunderstood
Kyoto, a former capital of Japan, is a treasure house of ancient art and architecture. Considered a miracle, Kyoto was the only large city on the home islands of Japan that escaped damage by US air raids, especially atomic bombing, during WWII. After the war, most Japanese believed Langdon Warner, a Harvard professor, to be the “savior” of Kyoto. Another theory emerged in China in the 1980s, attributing the miracle to Liang Sicheng, a Chinese architectural historian and a consultant of the US Air Force during the war. American post-war historians, however, commonly believe that Henry Stimson, the then Secretary of War, decided not to drop the atomic bomb on Kyoto. This paper traces the origins of these three versions of history, reveals how and why the false theories were created and accepted, and exemplifies how the interpretation of history was used as propaganda to serve a political agenda.
B6 Policy issues in Chinese education system: from basic to higher education | 5130 Posvar
Chair: YUAN ZHANG, University of Pittsburgh
WEI TANG, Washington University of Pittsburgh
Educational Policy Changes for Rural-Urban Migrant Children in China
YUAN ZHANG, University of Pittsburgh
Beyond math test scores: Student engagement, teacher positivity and instruction in Shanghai
This paper examines math teaching and learning in Shanghai, a high-achieving education system on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Comparing Shanghai with two other high-achievers, Finland and Singapore, this study explores Shanghai’s successful stories behind the PISA test scores. It focuses on educational process (e.g. student engagement, math instruction, and positive teacher-student relationship) instead of the learning outcomes, such as test scores. Such focus is consistent with the New Curriculum Reform policy in China. Results indicate that positive teacher-student relationship remains a strong predictor of student engagement in math, while math instructional approaches differ in their effects on student engagement. Unexpectedly, more supportive instruction is related to lower level of student engagement. The international comparative nature of this study implies that in addition to being subject-specific, the effect of instruction may also be sensitive to cultural context.
WEIYAN XIONG, University of Pittsburgh
Talents Policy in Chinese Higher Education: A Study of “The Recruitment Program of Global Experts”
The recruitment of overseas Chinese talents is always a significant part of Chinese talents policy. In 2008, the Chinese government put forward “The Recruitment Program of Global Experts” (hereinafter referred to as the “1000 Plan”), and in 2010, “The Recruitment of Young Global Experts” (hereinafter referred to as the “Youth 1000 Plan”) was put into practice, and thousands of young talents have returned to China. In this study, a policy analysis will be conducted to look into the external political and social contexts, content evolvement, implementation, and effects and impacts of these two policies. In addition, through a qualitative study of interviewing eight returned young talents recruited by Peking University, this study will focus on how these scholars have their repatriation adjustment after returning to China. The final goal of this study is to provide policy suggestions to the Chinese government and higher education institutions to provide a satisfactory environment for the returned experts and young talents.
B7 Workshop: How to access Asian Resources more Effectively | 5404 Posvar
Chair: HIROYUKI GOOD, University of Pittsburgh
PETER BAE, Princeton University
A Guide to Effective International Interlibrary Loan
Peter Bae is the Circulation Services Director at the Princeton University Library. Prior to Princeton, he served as Head of Delivery Services at the Columbia University Libraries. He is an active member of the International ILL community through his affiliations with IFLA (International Federation of the Library Associations) Interlending and Document Delivery Committee and ALA (American Library Association). Starting from the principles of academic libraries’ resource sharing services, he will discuss current trends and obstacles of resource sharing activities between the academic libraries. Especially he will focus on its international aspects which will be more relevant to Asian Studies researchers. Using examples from his professional work experiences in leading research libraries, he will suggest the ways to establish an effective work relations between researchers and Interlibrary staff so that the process of accessing Asian resources become less anxious and painful for both parties and ultimately benefit researchers with more available resources.