Blogroll Addition: Jeff in Burundi

We seem to be having some sparse posting of late, but the summer travel season (including such things as vacations, business trips, weddings, moving, and preparing for new schools or jobs) is well underway, which is terribly distracting for our writers, alas. Hence, a blogroll addition to keep you distracted.

Jefferson Mok is a classmate from Grinnell who has just moved to Burundi to “establish a residential shelter for female child soldiers who need assistance to reintegrate into their communities.” Simple, yes? Especially as the sole representative of his organization. You can follow his adventures so far at his blog. He spent the last two years working with asylum seekers in Chicago, and is now going to try to help at the source. We wish him the very best of luck! I, for one, am somewhat in awe at the task he’s taking on.

More Local China-Tibet Protest News

Not to make this blog all East Asia, all the time, but hey, it’s what’s catching my attention right now. It turns out there was a lot more fallout from the local NC protest/counter-protest I mentioned last week. A Chinese undergraduate somehow ended up between the two groups, apparently trying to get them to actually talk to one another rather than just competing over who could yell slogans loudest, and, well, things went downhill for her from there.

Some people posted an account of her actions to the Chinese student and scholar listserv I mentioned before as having organized the counter-protest. Outraged messages followed calling her a traitor. Then people posted her picture… and her name, her Chinese identity card number, her US address and email, her parents home and work addresses in China, a map to their house, and pictures of their front door. One of my colleagues has friends in the student’s hometown, and they called over the weekend to ask what the student had done to get rocks thrown through her parents’ windows. News of this has now made:

• The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2008
• Global Voices Online (with translations of some of the listserv emails), April 13 & 15, 2008
• NY Times, April 17, 2008
• Washington Post, April 17, 2008

Interestingly, the two articles that came out today do not mention at all the event that took place last night, which the NY Times reporter attended sitting next to the threatened student. It was a panel discussion set up to address the contentious issues surrounding Tibet (and to some extent the Olympics as well) in a calm, rational setting. Though seven campus police officers had been arranged for security, the entire thing went very smoothly, with no heckling or interruptions of any kind during the speakers’ presentations, nor during the Q&A. The campus paper has a reasonably good report of the overall points that speakers made here: Panelists Stress Trust, Sincerity.

Secular Memorialization

My last post on the Yasukuni documentary got me looking around for other stuff on the politics of war memorials in general. While I have mostly found so far that I will need to go to the library and check out actual books, I did come across an interesting article on Sino-Japanese relations in a 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, which contained the following intriguing paragraph with a suggestion on how to handle the Yasukuni issue:

[C]onferences … involving academics from neutral countries such as Canada as well as Asian specialists from within the region, could improve relations by fostering less-politicized discussions of the war. Germany and Poland, as well as Japan and South Korea, already have joint textbook commissions that could serve as models for China and Japan. An initiative such as this could be particularly effective at de-escalating tensions in the wake of progress in the strategic dialogues outlined above. To help those dialogues along, moreover, U.S. officials should refrain from making casual pronouncements on the delicate matter of wartime commemoration in Japan. As Koizumi has noted, many personal issues are involved in such events. The Japanese people themselves, however, deserve the broadest possible range of options about how to remember the war. For several years, there has been spirited discussion about building a national secular war memorial to supplement Yasukuni, and this deserves serious consideration. Such a model has worked well in both Hiroshima and Okinawa. Apart from providing a way to commemorate the sacrifice of civilians and other heroes of past conflicts not enshrined at Yasukuni, a secular memorial would clearly help improve Japan’s relations with other countries in the region and provide foreign leaders with a way to gracefully honor the past sacrifices of the Japanese people.

-Calder, Kent E., “China and Japan’s Simmering Rivalry,” Foreign Affairs, 85(2)

(emphasis mine)

Yasukuni Documentary

I’ve written about the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan before, and all the controversy it causes, especially every year when the prime minister decides to go or not to go to pay respects. I was therefore very interested to read this article on the BBC yesterday all about a documentary that has been made about the shrine, simply called “Yasukuni,” by a Chinese director. It sounds fascinating to me, especially its attempts to understand what the shrine represents to differing groups:

In all, Li Ying has spent 10 years, on and off, making the film.

During visits to Yasukuni he says he was at times threatened, abused, and on occasion had his equipment confiscated. Newspapers here have reported that he has received death threats.

He says he set out to try to understand better what the shrine means to Japanese people.

[...]

To many it is one of the most sacred places in Japan. To others it is a place they feel glorifies war.

Local Olympic Torch Protest Follow-Up

Well, I did indeed get to come to work today and find out how the planned pro-Tibet vigil and pro-China counter-protest turned out last night. Both the campus paper and the local paper reported on it. The basic description from the campus paper:

Crowds of upset protesters flooded the Chapel Quadrangle Wednesday evening, interrupting a planned candlelight vigil supporting freedom in Tibet.

Members and supporters of the Duke Human Rights Coalition, led by juniors Daniel Cordero and Adam Weiss, marched from East Campus to West Campus, Tibetan flags in hand, to advocate for the region’s freedom from the People’s Republic of China.

In response, protesters bearing signs and Chinese flags filled the Chapel Quad, expressing patriotism and criticizing Western media through chants and song.

When the pro-Tibet faction arrived outside the Chapel, protesters swarmed them en masse with chanting and shouting.

The pro-China students had recruited compatriots from the two other large universities nearby and had them carpool over. Fortunately, yelling really loudly and in large numbers was as far as things went.

A bit more from the local paper, highlighting the frustrations of the Chinese students:

Thoughts on Olympic Torch Symbolism

At this point, I’m sure everyone has seen or heard news about the Olympic torch relay being interrupted in both London and Paris. In London, a protester even came close to grabbing the torch away from the relay runner. Today, the BBC put up this interesting feature presenting the opinions of one of the London relay runners and of the executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, who plan to protest in San Francisco.

An excerpt from the relay runner’s side:

A peaceful protest on the sidelines - fine. But don’t try to stop the torch, because the torch is about more than the Beijing Olympics. It’s about the Olympic spirit and the importance of the Olympics in teaching youth, and teaching the world, what sport can do - how sport can bring people together, how it can overcome suffering, how it has overcome even wars in the past.

It’s a very powerful thing, and trying to stop the torch was trying to stop that message, so that was wrong.

The thing that made me laugh about this is not that I don’t think that’s a fine sentiment, but I had just finished listening to Frank Deford’s somewhat scathing comments on the Olympics on NPR’s Morning Edition, and the contrast with his opening part in particular was kind of funny:

Tea Ceremony Books

Okay, I admit, I’m cheating a bit, because I’m cross-posting these book reviews from my personal blog. I thought they might have wider appeal, because I certainly enjoyed them. In any case, the topic of Japanese tea ceremony came up quite concretely this past weekend, when I had to act as the commentator for a demonstration. You can read about that experience and see some pictures in my original post. Strangely, I had actually recently read two books on tea ceremony, one non-fiction and one historical fiction.

The first one was given to me by a teacher I worked with in Japan, but I didn’t pick it up again and read it all the way through until this January. The Book of Tea, by Kakuzo Okakura, was originally written in 1906. Interestingly, it was originally written in English while Okakura was living in Boston, specifically as an effort to help Westerners understand Japanese culture. This remains an interesting perspective for such a book today, but it was pretty much unheard of in that time. Okakura’s writing is excellent and clear, and while he doesn’t delve too incredibly deeply into the history and philosophy of tea, nor really describe all the aspects of the tea ceremony itself, he does provide an overview to whet the appetite. Instead, he spends most of his time trying to give his unfamiliar readers the beginnings of an understanding of the cultural aspects of tea ceremony, including the architecture of the tea house and the particular style of ikebana flower arranging used to decorate the tokonoma.

Yo-Yo Ma on Transnationalism

Last week’s “This I Believe” essay on NPR was by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who had some interesting things to say about transnationalism: A Musician of Many Cultures. Given that I just went to a conference on international education, this seemed particularly relevant, especially since the sessions I attended focused a lot on why study abroad experiences and cultural competency skills are important for more than just foreign language majors. Some excerpts:

I believe in the infinite variety of human expression.

I grew up in three cultures: I was born in Paris, my parents were from China and I was brought up mostly in America. When I was young, this was very confusing: everyone said that their culture was best, but I knew they couldn’t all be right.

I felt that there was an expectation that I would choose to be Chinese or French or American. For many years I bounced among the three, trying on each but never being wholly comfortable. I hoped I wouldn’t have to choose, but I didn’t know what that meant and how exactly to “not choose.”

What makes a role model?

I’m reading Veronica Chambers’ Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation, and I just came to a part where Chambers describes the unexpected reaction she got when asking young Japanese college women about their role models. Coming from the US, she had clearly been thinking of it as a very standard question, along the lines of “Where do you want to be in five years?,” and so on. But instead, she ended up writing this:

The most obvious question to ask, when you are reporting on women and their changing roles in society, is: Who are your role models? Even if the answer is pat - “my mother,” “Hillary Clinton,” “Maya Angelou” - it tells you something about the woman and how she thinks of herself. Perhaps because Japan is not, by nature, a country of individualists, the role model question gets a lot of blank stares. “I don’t have any role models,” a girl named Gaga tells me at Sacred Heart [University]. “My parents taught me when I was small, you can choose your own way.” Akiko, another student, says, “I think I don’t have a certain person, but an image: someone who’s independent, strong, and caring.” I wonder, too, if it is because the national culture is so private, that it is hard to develop the kind of admiration and deep-seated affiliation that one feels for a role model: be it a senior employee at your company or someone you see on TV.

I wonder how many women at [Canon executive] Masako Nara’s company know how important it was for her to be called by her maiden name and the deal she struck with a coworker to make it happen. How many of Satako’s female coworkers know how uncomfortable she was at the late night drinking parties that were once part of her job, and how relieved she was to get more international clients who prefer lunch to dinner for work-related socializing? My sense, again and again, was that women told me stories they did not share with their colleagues, or even sometimes with their friends. It occurs to me that in order for someone to be a role model, they must reveal not only their strengths, but their vulnerabilities. It’s in the interplay between the two, and how they overcome the latter, that we find something worthy of admiring.

-Chambers, 84

With This Ring, I’m Not Sure

Every now and then a story pops up about purity rings (AKA chastity rings) - the most recent one that comes to mind is the English girl who wasn’t allowed to wear one at school and brought suit, saying it was a religious article (she lost). Different stories about the rings emphasize different aspects of them - since they’re not an “official” religious item by any means, the way they’re used seems to be fairly fragmented. Some girls buy them for themselves, some have them given to them by their parents, some receive them at creepily-overtoned father-daughter purity balls which got a lot of press a few years ago. How common the latter actually are, I have no idea, but somebody’s buying the rings - looking around various religious jewelry sites turn up a lot of designs, from the reasonable enough miniature cross to the metaphorically unfortunate heart wrapped in a ribbon. Many of them are accompanied by verses promoting purity which can only be described as dire, and they’re easy to rib. So easy, in fact, that I’m not going to talk about that angle of it.