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| Route map, BRAG 2012; click to embiggen |
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Bike Ride Across Georgia 2012
This weekend I start an epic adventure, the 33rd annual Bike Ride Across Georgia. I -- and about 1,200 other people -- will travel about 350 miles (560 km) during the course of a week. I've never done anything like this before, so I'm pretty intimidated; on the other hand, I'm looking forward to what I hope will be a beautiful ride. We average about 55 miles a day, eat cafeteria-style from a mobile catering service, shower in a truck, and sleep en-masse in school gymnasiums. I'm also bringing plenty of reading to catch up on; however, considering how totally unathletic I am, maybe I should just be content to live through it.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
David Slater on Volunteering in Tôhoku
The Asia-Pacific recently published a short article by David Slater of Sophia University on volunteer opportunities to help survivors of the 3.11 disaster in Tôhoku.
Volunteering in Tôhoku 東北で奉仕活動をするには
If you're planning a visit to Japan soon, here's a way to do something to help people who need it.
Volunteering in Tôhoku 東北で奉仕活動をするには
If you're planning a visit to Japan soon, here's a way to do something to help people who need it.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Asian Heritage at Dekalb County Public Library I
May is Asian-Pacific Heritage Month in the US. The US government site announcing it has a lot of great materials. Their page on education (link follows) includes a link to a nice page on teaching haiku in English:
Asian-Pacific Heritage Month for Teachers
Can You Haiku?
On Saturday I went to the Decatur branch of Dekalb Public Library to to a reading of folktales from East Asia. It was a lot of fun and I hope to do something similar again. The event was sponsored by Laura Hauser of Literacy Services. Here's the program. The call numbers are specific to the Dekalb Public Library Catalogue. Complete bibliographic information is available through the catalogue.
(Event program and finding list below the cut.)
Asian-Pacific Heritage Month for Teachers
Can You Haiku?
On Saturday I went to the Decatur branch of Dekalb Public Library to to a reading of folktales from East Asia. It was a lot of fun and I hope to do something similar again. The event was sponsored by Laura Hauser of Literacy Services. Here's the program. The call numbers are specific to the Dekalb Public Library Catalogue. Complete bibliographic information is available through the catalogue.
(Event program and finding list below the cut.)
Monday, April 23, 2012
Kentucky Foreign Language Conference
This past weekend Yumiko Nishi and I went to present our paper on the fourth-year Japanese class at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, held at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. I'd been to Kentucky before, once for the Southeast Council Association for Asian Studies conference when it was held in Louisville, and once for the fabulous Bluegrass in the Park/Pickin' & Pedalin' Bicycle Tour in Henderson, but I'd never been to Lexington. Lexington is really beautiful and the surrounding area is fabulously green and peaceful-looking. I had a very nice time.
The conference itself was in its 65th year. The majority of the presentations were related to European Languages, but there were a sizable number of papers related to East Asia also, thanks to the work of Doug Slaymaker and Masamichi (Marro) Inoue (info here).
The paper Dr. Nishi and I gave was "Teaching The Japanese Environment: 3.11 and After." It was great to work with her in writing it, because I got a lot of insight into all the planning that went into the class. I also got to hear about the amazing projects the students worked on -- 10-page papers in Japanese on some very difficult and challenging topics. All in all, Dr. Nishi's work sounded very impressive.
All the papers I heard were very interesting. I particularly want to follow up on the work of Dr. Inoue (who talked about his work on campus policing at UK and how it suggested directions for future research on Japan), Jianjun He of Western Kentucky University (who talked about literary trope of the "immortal" -- 神 or 仙 -- in Wei-Jin and Tang era Chinese poetry) and Matthew Wells of UK, who works on Taoism.
I was also fortunate to have a chance to briefly chat with Sharalyn Orbaugh of the University of British Columbia. Dr. Orbaugh's talk was "Japanese Pop Culture Tackles the Big Questions: Gender, Race and Posthumanity in Anime."
The conference itself was in its 65th year. The majority of the presentations were related to European Languages, but there were a sizable number of papers related to East Asia also, thanks to the work of Doug Slaymaker and Masamichi (Marro) Inoue (info here).
The paper Dr. Nishi and I gave was "Teaching The Japanese Environment: 3.11 and After." It was great to work with her in writing it, because I got a lot of insight into all the planning that went into the class. I also got to hear about the amazing projects the students worked on -- 10-page papers in Japanese on some very difficult and challenging topics. All in all, Dr. Nishi's work sounded very impressive.
All the papers I heard were very interesting. I particularly want to follow up on the work of Dr. Inoue (who talked about his work on campus policing at UK and how it suggested directions for future research on Japan), Jianjun He of Western Kentucky University (who talked about literary trope of the "immortal" -- 神 or 仙 -- in Wei-Jin and Tang era Chinese poetry) and Matthew Wells of UK, who works on Taoism.
I was also fortunate to have a chance to briefly chat with Sharalyn Orbaugh of the University of British Columbia. Dr. Orbaugh's talk was "Japanese Pop Culture Tackles the Big Questions: Gender, Race and Posthumanity in Anime."
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Elegance, virtue, and poetry: Fûgaron
Still working on Haikai to kanbungaku. However, this time the chapter is Fûgaron 風雅論 (Theories of fûga [poetic elegance]) by Ibi Takashi 揖斐高.
Fûga is a word that comes up a lot in discussions of haikai, especially when it comes to Bashô, so it makes sense to figure out where it comes from. Ibi tells us that it originates in Shijing (Classic of poetry, or Book of odes) 詩經, the collection of poems dated 10th-7th BCE that is one of the major books of the Chinese literary canon. Its contents break down into feng 風 (airs), xiaoya (lesser odes, maybe?) 小雅, daya 大雅 (grand odes?) and song 頌 (hymns). "Fûga" comes from the first three types, feng and ya, and thus is more or less synonymous with "poetry." In the early modern period, under the influence of Confucian thought, poetry = shi 詩 = kanshi, waka, and haikai = fûga.
Ibi notes that in the modern period, accounts of the history of Confucianism in early modern Japan go this way: the bakufu underpinned its social system with neo-Confucianism, which focused on the development of personal morality through self-cultivation. In the Genroku period Itô Jinsai 伊藤仁斎 advanced a kind of humanism-tinged school of thought that came to be called kogaku ("antiquarian studies"); he took a dim view of Zhu Xi's addition of Da Xue and Zhong Yong to the Confucian canon, and advocated that greater attention be paid to recapturing an "authentic" understanding of the Analects and Mencius without recourse to commentary. Later, Ogyû Sorai 荻生徂徠 picked up on a lot of the ideas put forth by Jinsai, adding in an emphasis on the appreciation and composition of music and art, which eventually resulted in the study of literature gaining independence from inquiry into ethics and politics. However, he says that this version of the story needs some more exploration.
Fûga is a word that comes up a lot in discussions of haikai, especially when it comes to Bashô, so it makes sense to figure out where it comes from. Ibi tells us that it originates in Shijing (Classic of poetry, or Book of odes) 詩經, the collection of poems dated 10th-7th BCE that is one of the major books of the Chinese literary canon. Its contents break down into feng 風 (airs), xiaoya (lesser odes, maybe?) 小雅, daya 大雅 (grand odes?) and song 頌 (hymns). "Fûga" comes from the first three types, feng and ya, and thus is more or less synonymous with "poetry." In the early modern period, under the influence of Confucian thought, poetry = shi 詩 = kanshi, waka, and haikai = fûga.
Ibi notes that in the modern period, accounts of the history of Confucianism in early modern Japan go this way: the bakufu underpinned its social system with neo-Confucianism, which focused on the development of personal morality through self-cultivation. In the Genroku period Itô Jinsai 伊藤仁斎 advanced a kind of humanism-tinged school of thought that came to be called kogaku ("antiquarian studies"); he took a dim view of Zhu Xi's addition of Da Xue and Zhong Yong to the Confucian canon, and advocated that greater attention be paid to recapturing an "authentic" understanding of the Analects and Mencius without recourse to commentary. Later, Ogyû Sorai 荻生徂徠 picked up on a lot of the ideas put forth by Jinsai, adding in an emphasis on the appreciation and composition of music and art, which eventually resulted in the study of literature gaining independence from inquiry into ethics and politics. However, he says that this version of the story needs some more exploration.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Theory in Premodern Japanese Literature
There is an interesting thread going on at PMJS (Premodern Japanese Studies), a network and listserv for scholars in a variety of humanities-related fields. The thread was started by Chris Kern of Ohio State/Waseda.
Lots of good comments there. Here are three things it mentions that I'm adding to my library:
We have a problem - in theory
Paula Curtis
on the blog "What can I do with a BA in Japanese Studies?" (its URL tells it all: shimpaideshou: "bit of a worry, you know")
"Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World"
Sheldon Pollock
Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009): 931-96
The link goes to JSTOR.
"Theory and the Early Modern: Some Notes on a Difficult Relationship,"
Michael Moriarty
Paragraph, 29:1 (Mar 2006), pp. 1-11
The link goes to Project Muse.
Lots of good comments there. Here are three things it mentions that I'm adding to my library:
We have a problem - in theory
Paula Curtis
on the blog "What can I do with a BA in Japanese Studies?" (its URL tells it all: shimpaideshou: "bit of a worry, you know")
"Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World"
Sheldon Pollock
Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009): 931-96
The link goes to JSTOR.
"Theory and the Early Modern: Some Notes on a Difficult Relationship,"
Michael Moriarty
Paragraph, 29:1 (Mar 2006), pp. 1-11
The link goes to Project Muse.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
For Valentines Day: Vulgarity, Poverty, and Poetry
Here are some notes on the first chapter of Haikai to kanbungaku 俳諧と漢文学 (Haikai and kanbun [literature in Chinese written in Japan]), Wakan Comparative Literature Association, eds. 和漢比較文学会編, 1994. (和漢比較文学叢書第16巻). The chapter is called Haikai to kanshi 俳諧と漢詩 (Haikai and kanshi [poetry in Chinese written in Japan]), and is by Hino Tatsuo 日野龍夫.
The chapter starts with a proverb, 貧の盗みに恋の歌 "Poverty makes larceny; love makes poems"; That is to say, given enough desperation, even law-abiding people might steal; likewise, smitten by romance, the most unpoetic people can be inspired to versify. Having said that, though, Hino reminds us that classical uta (歌) don't include references to poverty; uta concern themselves with elegance--nature, love etc., not matters of everyday life.
On the other hand, the classical poetry of China is full of references to poverty. Hino cites Mei Yaochen 梅堯臣 as an example, of whom Ouyang Xiu 歐陽脩 wrote, "The poorer one is the more skillful one's poetry gets. Having said that, it is not skill in poetry that makes people poor. It is probably that having become poor, afterward one develops skill." Viewed in the light of the proverb, this tells us something about the essential natures of classical waka and of kanshi.
Hino gives us this part of a famous Mei Yaochen poem, "Looking Back in Sorrow" 懷悲 :
(That's just the first half of the poem. The poor lady dies after putting up with all that.)
Hino points out that this kind of poem would never had been written by a waka poet. While poverty wasn't always a theme in Chinese poetry (not in Shi jing, anyway) it came to be included as one of the things you might write about, along with the rest of human experience, pretty much.
When Japanese haikai poets take up the theme of poverty, their stance on the matter is considerably different. Both of the following are by Buson:
The distance between haikai and kanshi is shorter than that between haikai and waka; the distance between kanshi and haikai is shorter than that between kanshi and waka, The practice of referring to poverty in haikai no doubt comes from kanshi.
Hino cites another passage from Mei Yaochen as comparison:
From "Swarm of mosquitoes" 聚蚊
Generally speaking, though, there is a big difference, between the attitude towards poverty in classical Chinese poetry and that in haikai. Chinese poets tended to write about their own experience being poor, and the main point that they're expressing is resentment for being in that state. The typical scenario is a highly educated person who either repeatedly fails the official exam and thus can't get a good job; or someone who gets a bad job (one in a remote province) and can't keep it. This isn't the sort of thing you get in Japanese poetry. Japanese poetry that mentions poverty is far more likely to present it as a form of elegant austerity -- the minimalist existence of a recluse, rather than the sad squalor of a worthy person suffering unjust deprivation.
Hino cites a very interesting passage from Gion Nankai's 祇園南海 『詩学逢原}』that I'll paraphrase:
Hino then cites this passage from the famous 20-verse series "Drinking Wine" by Tao Yuanming. This is from verse 16:
In this example from one of the Chinese poets most beloved in Japan, the speaker is poor, angry, and full of resentment.
To sum up Hino's points here, Chinese poems take on the subject of poverty; it is a "cultivated person's" 君子 own poverty expressed as a protest against an unfair government. Making such protests are the duty of a cultivated person. A cultivated person maintains his or her dignity despite reduced circumstances. Cultivated persons who were faced with hardship were supposed to complain.
In Japan, it's not that haikai poets didn't ever write about noble resentment. However, they were more interested in more subtle emotions: the pathos of the situation, rather than its injustice.
The chapter starts with a proverb, 貧の盗みに恋の歌 "Poverty makes larceny; love makes poems"; That is to say, given enough desperation, even law-abiding people might steal; likewise, smitten by romance, the most unpoetic people can be inspired to versify. Having said that, though, Hino reminds us that classical uta (歌) don't include references to poverty; uta concern themselves with elegance--nature, love etc., not matters of everyday life.
On the other hand, the classical poetry of China is full of references to poverty. Hino cites Mei Yaochen 梅堯臣 as an example, of whom Ouyang Xiu 歐陽脩 wrote, "The poorer one is the more skillful one's poetry gets. Having said that, it is not skill in poetry that makes people poor. It is probably that having become poor, afterward one develops skill." Viewed in the light of the proverb, this tells us something about the essential natures of classical waka and of kanshi.
Hino gives us this part of a famous Mei Yaochen poem, "Looking Back in Sorrow" 懷悲 :
自爾歸我家, 未嘗厭貧窶。
夜縫每至子, 朝飯輒過午。
十日九食齏, 一日儻有脯。
東西十八年, 相與同甘苦。
When you came to my home, you never resented its poverty.
Always sewing until midnight, you ate breakfast after noontime
Nine days out of ten was pickles, one day we'd have dried meat.
East and west eighteen years, together we shared the sweet and the bitter.
(That's just the first half of the poem. The poor lady dies after putting up with all that.)
Hino points out that this kind of poem would never had been written by a waka poet. While poverty wasn't always a theme in Chinese poetry (not in Shi jing, anyway) it came to be included as one of the things you might write about, along with the rest of human experience, pretty much.
When Japanese haikai poets take up the theme of poverty, their stance on the matter is considerably different. Both of the following are by Buson:
貧乏に追ひつかれけりけさの秋
overtaken
by poverty
morning in autumn
月天心貧しき町を通りけり
moon-bright heaven
all across
the slum
The distance between haikai and kanshi is shorter than that between haikai and waka; the distance between kanshi and haikai is shorter than that between kanshi and waka, The practice of referring to poverty in haikai no doubt comes from kanshi.
蚊はつらく蚊遣いぶせきうき世哉 (几董)
mosquitoes are miserable
mosquito incense a nuisance
world of sorrows (Kitô)
我にあまる罪や妻子を蚊の喰らう(大魯)
paying for my excessive sins
my wife and child
bitten by mosquitoes (Tairo)
Hino cites another passage from Mei Yaochen as comparison:
From "Swarm of mosquitoes" 聚蚊
貴人居大第，蛟綃圍枕席，
嗟爾於其中，寧誇嘴如戟。
忍哉傍窮困，曾未哀臞瘠，
利吻競相侵，飲血自求益。
Aristocrats live in big houses;
their beds are surrounded by mosquito nets;
oh, in places like that,
you'd be prouder of your piercing mouths.
Is it not cruel of you to always torment the poor?
You have no pity on those already emaciated;
You vie with one another to see who has the sharpest bite,
Drinking blood you seek to fatten yourselves.
Generally speaking, though, there is a big difference, between the attitude towards poverty in classical Chinese poetry and that in haikai. Chinese poets tended to write about their own experience being poor, and the main point that they're expressing is resentment for being in that state. The typical scenario is a highly educated person who either repeatedly fails the official exam and thus can't get a good job; or someone who gets a bad job (one in a remote province) and can't keep it. This isn't the sort of thing you get in Japanese poetry. Japanese poetry that mentions poverty is far more likely to present it as a form of elegant austerity -- the minimalist existence of a recluse, rather than the sad squalor of a worthy person suffering unjust deprivation.
Hino cites a very interesting passage from Gion Nankai's 祇園南海 『詩学逢原}』that I'll paraphrase:
Not only painting, but the koto, chess, calligraphy, and painting also all emphasize elegance. If we talk about landscape painting, when you paint the houses of people in the mountains or fields, don't include outhouses, compost piles, or cooking pots; that is bad taste. If we talk about painting people, don't include their private parts; that's obscene. Depict elegance, don't depict vulgarity.While a lot of this is similar to standards in old-style Chinese poetry, it is virtually indistinguishable from what you'd find listed as the expectations of waka. By contrast, there are plenty of poems in which haikai poets mention scatalogical topics.
Hino then cites this passage from the famous 20-verse series "Drinking Wine" by Tao Yuanming. This is from verse 16:
陶渊明飲酒二十首
敝盧交悲風, 荒草沒前庭.
披褐守長夜, 晨雞不肯鳴.
孟公不在茲, 終以翳吾情.
A mournful wind blows through the ruined house,
Wild weeds fill the garden.
Wearing old clothes, I keep watch in the long night
When dawn comes, even the rooster disdains to crow.
Duke Meng is not here,
In the end I hide away my own feelings.
In this example from one of the Chinese poets most beloved in Japan, the speaker is poor, angry, and full of resentment.
To sum up Hino's points here, Chinese poems take on the subject of poverty; it is a "cultivated person's" 君子 own poverty expressed as a protest against an unfair government. Making such protests are the duty of a cultivated person. A cultivated person maintains his or her dignity despite reduced circumstances. Cultivated persons who were faced with hardship were supposed to complain.
In Japan, it's not that haikai poets didn't ever write about noble resentment. However, they were more interested in more subtle emotions: the pathos of the situation, rather than its injustice.
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