Conference: MARAAS at Princeton

The conference for the Mid-Atlantic Region of the Association for Asian Studies went very well. The site was Princeton, so the facilities were very fancy indeed. The organizers did a terrific job, the food was great; it was nice to stay at the nearby hotel (the Nassau Inn) and take the train in from NYC. And the library there was so wonderful. It's the first time I've been to Princeton, and while there were annoying aspects (I frown on cyclists who ride on the sidewalk when there was no reason not to be on the road) there was a lot that was nice about it also. I hope I have another chance to visit when I can spend more time in the library, at least.



Insiders and Outsiders

I was the discussant for an excellent panel called "Insiders and Outsiders in Literature." The panelists and their papers were:

• Just Deserts or Just Dessert?:The Trickster and the Border of Buraku/Black Literature by William Bridges IV of Princeton
• Kasai Zenzō’s Stories About Sasaki Kurakichi: Justice for a Cousin? by Masako Nakagawa of Villanova
•  The Fiction in Fact: The Shaky Common Ground Between Yu Dafu and Kasai Zenzō by Hailin Zhou, also of Villanova
•  Chicago and the Banished Overseas Chinese: Bai Xianyong's A Death in Chicago by Xiaoling Shi of Allegheny College

Mr. Bridges's paper looked at Nakagami Kenji's reading of Ôe Kenzaburô's 1957 short story Shiiku 飼育 (Prize stock) using aspects of Henry Louis Gates's theory, especially the figure of the Trickster. It was great. I don't have a very deep understanding of Gates's work but Mr. Bridges's argument was very clear and persuasive, and he made an impressive case for both parallels and distinctions between Gates's and Nakagami's views. I especially liked how Mr. Bridges began his presentation with an example of the haiku of Richard Wright, and that he did it in a playful way that was very haikai-esque.

Dr. Nakagawa and Dr. Zhou both discussed Kasai Zenzô's work, but from different perspectives. Dr. Nakagawa talked about Kasai's autobiographical fiction based on a very tragic case of a relative's trial for embezzlement and its sad aftermath. Dr. Zhou's topic was Chinese writer Yu Dafu's admiration for Zenzô. I didn't know anything about Yu Dafu and he sounds at once incredibly idealistic and yet well-acquainted with sorrow; worst of all, his interest in Japan ended up contributing to his execution at the end of the Pacific War.

Dr. Shi's paper discussed the Bai Xianyong (Pai Hsien-yung) story "Death in Chicago," about a Chinese student who goes to the US to study and has a very bad time. I was impressed by the way that Dr. Shi talked about the subject of exile and exclusion, and the complicated status of Taiwanese as Overseas Chinese.


My panel: Literature, Music, Censorship

In my panel, all the presenters except myself were from the University of Maryland. Eleanor Kerkham talked about Bashô's illustrated version of Nozarashi kikô, Miyuki Yoshikami talked about how the lyrics of ha-uta songs had a cathartic value for their singers and audiences. Marlene Mayo's paper made use of materials in the Prange Collection; she works on recovering the original contents of documents censored during the post-war occupation period in Japan. This paper focused on the topic of the poetry of lamentation.


Justice in Premodern Japan

I'll mention just one more panel; it was really thought-provoking. The theme of the conference was human rights, and this panel explored how this modern concept fit into the premodern world view--obviously not very well. The stories told were pretty violent and awful, actually, but the scholars who told them presented them in such an interesting way I look forward to hearing more from them about these topics:

• The Unravelling of Justice in Medieval Japan: Punishments and Other Top-­Down Violence, by Suzanne Gay of Oberlin
• Swearing Oaths to Kami, Hotoke, and Deus in Sengoku Japan, by Christopher Mayo of Princeton
• Objectification and Human Trafficking in Japan's Long Sixteenth Century by Morgan Pitelka of University of North Carolina
• A Woman's Revenge? The Gender of Justice in the Vendetta Tales of Ihara Saikaku, by David Atherton of Columbia University

All the papers, as well as the comment by David Eason of the University at Albany, were excellent and meticulously presented.