vol 9 | winter 2010

JOANNA Y. L. LAI A History of Tattoo Stigmatization in Japan VINCI TING Speaking Chinese GUILLAUME LAMOTHE The Evolution of Calligraphy and Writing in Mao’s China SEAN WEBB The failure of nation-building without a conscience: Khmer national identities in Democratic Kampuchea JOSHUA CADER War Memorial JOSHUA FRANK Japaneseness and the Discover Japan Campaign

IN N VO LU M E

JESSICA YILAN TSANG Minority Responses to State Development: Three Experiences of Health in “Ethnic” China

TR PE A RS NS PE CU A C LT TIO TIV U R ES A NS L :

TYLER COHEN The Poisonous Haze of the Mountains: Borderland Limitations in the Ming and Qing Southwest

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ORIENTATIONS is a journal run by students in the department of East Asian Studies at McGill University.

The content of this journal does not necessarily represent the views of McGill University..

Editorial

Joshua Cader Joanna Lai Gregoire Legault Vinci Ting

Contributors

Anne-Claire Camps Tyler Cohen Joshua Frank Guillaume Lamothe Adam K.W. Ng Jessica Tsang Sean Webb

Layout & Design Joanna Lai

With Special Thanks to:

Sophia Cho Xue-Rong Jia The McGill East Asian Studies Students’ Association Arts Undergraduate Society of McGill University

AT LEAST WE ATTEMPT TO BE SELF-AWARE: When studying Asia, we are constantly exhorted to not exoticize the subject. But why would we bother being interested in sames? If the area is not that of the student, area studies is exotic by nature: Other studies. With this in mind, in this volume are essays that deal with the constructed other, and – as we cannot have an other without a self – the constructed self.

Those that study (that is, us) are, by nature, civilized. We write, we can understand each other, we specialize. The difference between the civilized and the barbarian is seen in the ability to recognize and properly communicate. The wild barbarian is only a barbarian because he is incomprehensible. The unit of the civilized is the civilization.

In the first half of this journal, you will find descriptions of the construction of the other, characterized by those outside of whatever the constructed unit is (a nation, a people, a nation-state, a society). The first two pieces deal with the idea of near-barbarians; that is, in a world where civilization is concentric, these are the peoples to be civilized and educated by the center – in these cases, China. The third piece deals with people that begin as same and become – in most cases, voluntarily – marked as other through the medium of tattoo.

The journal is, then, split with a poem dealing with a simultaneously existing self/other, both split and fused by language, and finishes off with ruminations on the construction of insides. The desire to find a purer self is to be found in the recycling of old forms that seem like a more obvious progression, such as calligraphy put to popular use, or less so, an attempted regression to a “jungle paradise”. In the last two pieces, focusing on Japan, we have another look at attempts at capturing purity, both controversial (war memorialization) and benign (picking radishes).

Perhaps the following pages are simply one long excuse: yes, we exoticize and invent selves and others, but everybody else – that is, the other – does the same for themselves. Without categorization and degrees of otherness, we would be but lost without much to say, and with no way to discern the similar.

The Editors

The Poisonous Haze of the Mountains: Borderland Limitations in the Ming and Qing Southwest

Tyler Cohen

The Poisonous Haze of the Mountains: Borderland Limitations in the Ming and Qing Southwest Tyler Cohen

In July of 2009, Ross Walker along and his two friends summitted the tallest peak in the cangshan mountain range near Dali, Yunnan. Along the way, they wandered off-trail and found themselves atop a ten meter waterfall unsure of how to continue. One friend descended safely, while the other fell some seven meters, landing on his hip before being stopped by a head-first crash into a rock. Ross moved quickly to the aid of his friend, but fell into the same rock, slicing open his hand in the process. The friend who had descended safely left shortly thereafter promising to alert authorities and return with medical help.

Ross and his friend were now stranded and soaking wet, lost without food or fire.

They ripped grass from the ground and covered themselves in moss and leaves. For eleven hours of darkness, they lay holding each other to conserve heat, while hoping that the rain visible in the distance would not reach their small plateau. Ross would later recall the two of them occasionally spotting a light in the distance – most likely lightning – and hoping that helicopters would soon arrive. No help came.

The following morning, Ross , with only one functional hand, and his friend , whose hip was badly injured, deliberated the best course of action in such a dire circumstances.

Since his friend was barely able to walk and was under obvious pain, Ross considered building a better shelter for the coming night. Initial hope that the third member of their group would return with help had slowly dwindled. If help had been sent, it would have already arrived. Without food, fire or warm clothing they both came to believe they were likely to feel worse as time passed. With each of their options holding potentially disastrous consequences, they opted to ignore all pain and difficulty and continue their descent. Some six hours later they reached solid ground, exhausted but elated.

The owner of the mountainside lodge where they had eventually stayed been staying later scolded them for their audacity and stupidity in attempting to follow a river down a mountain. When Ross asked him why help had not been sent, he told them that local policy was to wait four days. If after four days someone had still not returned, 500 soldiers would be sent up to find them[1]. The owner related that such a happening was rare, as most people would call his cell phone if they were lost.

Orientations Volume Nine : Transcultural Perspectives on Asia

When Ross asked what usually happened to people who didn’t have cell phones, the owner responded; “Well, usually they die.”

The story of Ross and his friend is not unusual. One often hears of such situations about traveling in western Guangxi province or northern Yunnan. That same month, further north in Yunnan a Canadian climber was reported to have fallen roughly ten meters before splitting open his head and being forced to climb two more hours to a road near a small village. Local Tibetan villagers carried him over the next mountain range before reaching the nearest ambulance. Such stories go a long way in expressing the sheer vastness of southwestern China’s frontier. Standing atop these mountain ranges, one is struck with a sense of the difficulty former Chinese states must have faced in governing such areas. I can recall Ross once wondering out loud how many years it would have taken villagers to even find out an emperor had died.

This essay focuses on the difficulties faced by the last two Chinese dynasties, the Ming and the Qing, in subjugating and governing such areas. As the various Chinese dynasties expanded their territories, new difficulties and attempted solutions arose with the strains of governing such a vast realm. In northwest China the beg system was introduced, whereas in the southwest the tusi (土司 ) system was frequently employed. In this essay I illustrate a number of the major troubles the central state confronted when attempting to govern the tusi areas in China’s southwest and evaluate the success of some of the proposed solutions The Origin and Composition of the Tusi System During the Yuan dynasty[5] (1279 – 1368) many areas of modern-day China’s southwest first came under the rule of the central Chinese state. The Mongols were extremely successful warriors and managed to conquer vast areas that had previously only had minimal relations with any Chinese state. Many of these areas in the southwest were in fact large kingdoms before the arrival of the Ming. Prior to their defeat at Mongol hands, kingdoms such as the Dali kingdom were fully independent and dominated the area’s political arena[6]. After the consolidation of the Yuan empire in 1279, many of these areas officially became part of the Chinese political body for the first time. Whereas beforehand relations between these kingdoms and the Chinese state had usually been one of negotiated alliance in the past, the Yuan gave local leaders positions and titles inside within the Chinese administrative system, calling them tusi (native chieftaincy[7]), relying and relied on them to govern the areas as part of their empire[8]. This transition may have been impossible for a dynasty more dependent on Chinese traditions of statecraft, Aas the areas in question were seen as savage, uncivilized and generally outside the proper reaches of the central state, this transition may have been impossible for a dynasty more dependent on Chinese traditions of statecraft. . The methods of governing employed by these local leaders were in many cases radically different from standard Chinese modes of administration[9]. The Yuan, unrestrained by such traditional Chinese evaluation, were content to give normal titles like ‘military commissioner’ to local leaders.

The Poisonous Haze of the Mountains: Borderland Limitations in the Ming and Qing Southwest

Tyler Cohen

After the fall of the Yuan dynasty and the rise of the Ming (1368 – 1644), the Hongwu emperor (r. 1368 – 1398), the first emperor of the Ming, and court administrators had obvious reason to retain this system. Many of these southern frontier areas bordered more dangerous enemies, such as Annam[10], and the Hongwu emperor was happy to let the native chieftaincy areas act as a sort of buffer zone between the two and even provide military assistance in the case that Ming China was attacked[11].

Moreover, as with many previous Chinese dynasties and due in no small measure to the phenomenal ability the Mongols had shown in their earlier conquests in China[12], the Ming were justifiably more worried about the threats facing the dynasty from the north[13]. The state had only limited resources and it was judged that it was wiser to focus military might on the northern frontier while managing the southern borderlands through extending administrative control[14]. As if the threat of Mongol invasion from the north was not enough to disturb the emperor’s sleep, there still existed a “lingering Mongol presence”[15] in southwestern officialdom, which the Hongwu emperor and some officials believed could be brought more fully under Ming supervision.

What exactly was the tusi system and how did it differ from regular Chinese governance?

For the Ming dynasty it was largely a continuation of Yuan-era policies adopted for the sake of convenience. A given area would be marked off by Ming officials as under the jurisdiction of either a military-rank native chieftainship or a civilian-rank native chieftainship[16], though these distinctions often indicated only minimal differences. In theory, military-rank native chieftaincies held greater legal autonomy and were “allowed to rule their domains in accordance with their own laws and customs”[17], though for reasons often beyond Ming control, many civilian-rank native chieftaincies acted in much the same way[18]. Civilian-rank native chieftaincies were more thoroughly incorporated into Ming administrative structure and tended to lie within established provincial boundaries. Many of the positions inside the officialdom of these areas mirrored those of the central state. For example, civilian-rank native chieftaincies often had either a native prefecture magistrate, a native department magistrate, or a native county magistrate--, positions with similar in name and function to those found within the boundaries of regular Ming control[19]. Of the differences between civilian-rank native chieftaincies and regular administrative areas, one major distinction was in found in the process of leadership selection. Though Ming, and later Qing, policies regarding exactly how chieftains were to be selected fluctuated, it was generally an inheritance process. This, of course, stands in great contrast to regular Ming procedure, through which officials are selected and appointed based on their success in examinations and experience in other areas of governance. As we will see later, the inheritance of titles became a point of tension between the Chinese state and native chieftains. Due to the sheer size of southwest China and the variance of local conditions, it is nearly impossible to characterize all native chieftaincies by any one definition. Later on we will see some examples of tusi systems and their inner workings in greater detail.

So what difficulties did the Ming and Qing dynasties face in their relations with the tusi areas? In this paper we will look at three specific difficulties: problems in implementing administrative structure, the difficulties posed by the natural conditions

Orientations Volume Nine : Transcultural Perspectives on Asia

of the areas, and difficulties establishing an education system in native chieftaincy areas.

Following an exposition of the problems associated with these aspects of imperial rule, we will take a brief look at the modern sense of “autonomy” granted to areas largely populated by ethnic-minorities within the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Though there are great differences in the objectives and means available for the Ming/Qing and the PRC, it will be interesting to see the modern Chinese standards for “autonomy” as compared to late imperial standards of rule.

The Implementation of Administrative Control and Its Discontents Faced with great expanses of distant and often difficult to manage lands, the Ming naturally sought to expand administrative control over much of their newfound territory. In the course of their 276-year reign the Ming bestowed over 1,600 tusi titles, most of which (960) were military-rank[20]. Most of these military-rank titles were handed out in Sichuan and Guizhou. In Sichuan, for example, 95 percent (326) of the 343 titles handed out were military-rank. By In contrast, in Yunnan alone they conferred 434 tusi titles, only 41 percent (178) of which were military-rank. In Guangxi province to Yunnan’s east there were 337 tusi titles handed out, 92 percent (309) of which were civilian-rank. The factors involved in determining whether an area was categorized as a military-rank or civilian-rank native chieftainship were threefold: proximity to “China proper”; the size of the Han Chinese community nearby; and the natural resources potentially available for the central state. This does not, however, indicate that Guangxi and Yunnan were more under Ming control than were Sichuan or Guizhou. One factor that complicates the reading of these statistics is that while the Ming established greater control in these two provinces they broke up many Yuan-era tusi domains into smaller domains[21]. One possible reason they did so was to make administration convenient, however it seems the desire to discourage anti-Han rebellion may also have been a factor.

As this paper focuses more on Yunnan and Guangxi than Sichuan or Guizhou, most of the tusi areas it discusses were of civilian-rank.

Though the Ming did indeed exert greater control over these areas than the Yuan had or even wanted to, it was not without difficulty. One problem they faced was the quality of officials who were sent to work in these areas. The environment and , political structure and along with the standard of living in many of these areas meant that for Ming-era officials, being sent to a tusi was far from a pleasure, and for many was seen even seen as something like aof a death sentence. Consequently, being sent to Guangxi or Yunnan was not a highly sought after job and the quality of magistrates in these provinces was often reflective of this fact. The combination of environmental factors – which we look at in greater depth below – and political difficulties meant that of the officials who did make it to these areas, many “would avoid either traveling to or staying long in the border regions.”[22] Even those talented officials who did make it down to the south often reported feeling “their lives [were put] in jeopardy just by performing their duties.”[23] One assistant administration commissioner of Guangxi, Tian Rucheng (田汝成), noted in the mid-sixteenth century that most of the officials in Guangxi were, “either dejected officials who had been demoted or bookish scholars who lacked practical

The Poisonous Haze of the Mountains: Borderland Limitations in the Ming and Qing Southwest

Tyler Cohen

experiences.”[24] Another official, the investigating censor Shi Wanxiang (史万祥), reported that in the 1490s most of the administrators in the southern border provinces (specifically Guangxi and Yunnan) were individuals who had long ago obtained their jinshi degree and had “by the time of their appointments probably given up hopes for more desirable positions.”[25] Another set of difficulties faced by the Ming, specifically in Guangxi, revolved around tax revenues and collection. Guangxi had a much smaller tax base than most of the Ming state’s other territories and over the course of their reign they were forced to cut close many offices simply because of budget constraints[26]. Aside from the relatively smaller tax base other factors contributed to budget problems in Ming Guangxi. For example, the imperial court was often required to grant tax exemptions to areas hit by natural disasters[27]. As well, due to minor wars between native chieftaincies, the boundaries between the various tusi frequently shifted, thereby complicating the tax collection process. As these more volatile tusi areas were gradually brought under Ming control, borders ceased shifting quite so quickly. However, that did not mean that tax collection became a simple process or that order was created. It seems that many of these areas would not deliver their taxes directly, rather relying on Han -Chinese or more fully integrated subjects of the Chinese state to deliver their taxes for them[28]. Many of these middlemen were reported by Ming officials to have concealed more than half of what had been given to them, or simply to have told the local leaders that they owed more than they in fact did. While the Ming state encouraged tusi areas to deliver their own taxes, it appears they were “afraid of dealing with Ming officials”[29] and the campaign was unsuccessful.

Moving from the Ming to the Qing, another set of problems that were faced in the administration of the southwestern frontier lands were those of Han settlers and Hanjian (漢 奸), or Han traitors. Largely Ffor largely economic reasons, the Ming dynasty had often encouraged settlers to move into Yunnan[30], and by the time the Qing (1644 – 1912) took over, Yunnan had a large Han population. Shi Shangxian (施尚賢)[31], born in Yunnan province in the mid-eighteenth century, was the descendant of one such settler.

In 1748 he left his Han wife and never returned to his hometown, heading southwestward toward the border with Burma. At this time there were up to one hundred thousand Han already living near the border region, most of them engaged in mining operations.

Though Qing officials were worried about the political ramifications of intermarriage between Han men and indigenous women, it apparently was quite common, and Shi eventually remarried with a woman of one of the local Tai (Dai) or upland tribes. In 1765 when the Qing state launched its campaign against Burma – which would become one of the most disastrous of all Qing campaigns - Shi Shangxian, along with his father-in-law, opted to side with the Burmese and attack the Qing. Though he was eventually captured by, ironically enough, a tusi official patrolling the border, Shi’s story was important to Qing officials because it confirmed the worst fears of the state in frontier lands; “a Han had migrated to a remote region and turned on the imperial state”[32].

Even when Han settlers did not take up arms for the enemy they were problematic for

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the Qing state. Many officials argued that Han settlement would in fact be a positive, ostensibly because it could encourage the sinicization – or, more precisely, the “civilizing” – of the frontier peoples. In fact, this policy seems to have had the exact opposite effect in many areas. In 1666, one Qing official in Guangxi noted that Han migrants from Jiangxi and Guangdong province had begun “to occupy native chieftain lands, confiscate and rechannel vital water resources away from non-Han villages, and kill wildlife and plant life crucial to the indigene way of life.”[33] To a Qing state determined to create an ordered and peaceful frontier, this was obviously problematic. Difficulties with Han settlers were not confined to Han mistreatment of non-Han, however, and the hoped for sinicization of the non-Han communities rarely occurred. On the contrary, many officials dismayed that Han migrants to tusi areas tended to adopt local customs. Officials in both Ming[34] and Qing[35] Guangxi complained that it was often nearly impossible to distinguish between regular subjects of the empire (mentioned as min – citizens – in the Ming and Han in the Qing) and tusi subjects. One Qing official reported that when he stumbled upon a town that he believed to be part of a Miao[36] tusi, he was shocked to find out they were actually descendants of Ming military officials. Having discovered that they came from a line of regular state subjects, the official ordered them to cut their hair in the Manchu style and grow queues, as all regular subjects were supposed to do. He was met with firm resistance and reportedly was nearly killed by the locals. Many other officials noted that Han settlers living around tusi and other non-Han areas were, like Shi Shangxian had in his marriage, adopting non-Han marriage and funeral customs, and even “instilling among the non-Han people a sense of hostility toward Qing local officials.”[37] The last administrative issue I would’d like to mention is the problem of the inheritance of native chieftaincy titles. In 1672 the Kangxi (r. 1661 - 1722) emperor, the third Qing dynasty emperor, issued guidelines for the native chieftaincy inheritance process[38].

The guidelines indicated that the Qing state strongly favoured the title moving from father to son[39], though the Kangxi emperor was willing to acknowledge a title being passed to a brother. The guidelines further stipulated that it was no longer acceptable to pass titles onto wives, son-in-laws or any other relation. Moreover, the title could not be transferred to anyone under the age of fifteen. This meant that when a native chieftain passed away with his oldest son still under the age of fifteen, his wife or some trusted retainer would take on the job until the son was ready[40]. Modifications to these guidelines in 1680 complicated the issue further as stipulations were added for situations in which the native chieftain’s wife had not produced a male heir but one of his concubines had, or if he had a daughter who had borne a grandson but no son himself. Illustrating all of the complexities of these guidelines is not within the scope of this paper, but we can take a look at how it operated in practice.

In 1706 in Hubei’s Rongmei tusi region a complicated inheritance scandal nearly led to inter- and intra-chieftainship violence[41]. Shortly before his own death, the Rongmei native chieftain, Tian Shunnian (田舜年), told local authorities that his oldest son, Tian Changru[42], had passed away. Qing law stipulated that Tian Changru’s son, Tian Yinan (田宜男), was the next legitimate heir. Shortly thereafter, Tian Yinan also died. Having been quite fond of the young boy, Tian Shunian opted to give Tian Yinan’s younger

The Poisonous Haze of the Mountains: Borderland Limitations in the Ming and Qing Southwest

Tyler Cohen

brother the same name. Tian Shunian died shortly thereafter and Tian Yinan became the native chieftain with Tian Bingru (田昺如), the second son of Tian Shunian, acting as regent.

Problems began to emerge when Tian Bingru openly referred to himself as the native chieftain. He eventually asked Qing officials if it wasn’t possible that his own son, being older than (the 2nd and still living) Tian Yinan, become Rongmei’s chieftain. This led supporters of Tian Yinan to suspect Tian Bingru would of launch launching a power struggle and they in turn asked Qing officials to name Tian Shunian’s third son, Tian Yaoru (田曜如) as the new chieftain. A provincial investigation committee was sent – probably just as confused as the reader - to Rongmei to investigate the situation. and Tian Bingru, fearing the worst, fled to a neighboring chieftainship. When this area in turn threatened war unless Tian Bingru was re-instated as native chieftain, the Qing informed them that unless Tian Bingru was handed over immediately they would become militarily involved as well. The hand-over was eventually made and Tian Yaoru succeeded as the new head of Rongmei. One can imagine the nuisance this would have caused for the Qing officials sent to handle the matter.

Inheritance issues were not always, or even often, as bloodless and funny humourous as the story of Rongmei. In Ming dynasty Guangxi violence frequently occurred as a result of inheritance struggles. One of the major causes of this was that large chieftainship families would often use marriages to strengthen family power, a relationship that Ming dynasty officials did not accept. Often times the death of a tusi leader would “lead to open warfare as powerful families and factions used kinship ties to the deceased tusi to stake a claim to the tusi post.”[43] The Foul Air and the Many Tigers: Environmental Limitations While both the Ming and the Qing were able to greatly expand on military control over the southwestern frontier areas, they encountered a number of difficulties along the way.

Many of these difficulties were never fully resolved by either dynasty, while a number of them were actually exacerbated by imperial policies. One example of the latter is the increase in violence in Ming-era Guangxi resulting from military policies laid down by the central state. It was a common policy at the time for soldiers to be compensated based on the number of enemies they killed. Many officials would come to blame this system for the increase in banditry in late fifteenth century Guangxi[44].

One set of problems the central government was simply unable to resolve were those caused by environmental factors. Ming-era Guangxi was a terrifying environment for many officials and non-natives. The diversity in wildlife and vastness of territory proved daunting for many immigrants to the area, as well the state itself. More important for most immigrants was that Ming Guangxi had a reputation for being a bastion of disease and death[45]. The main fear was that one would contact miasma (zhang – 瘴), a disease Ming subjects believed formed when the “poisonous haze of mountains coalesced with the foul air of forests.”[46] Ming observers believed there to be varying strands and

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degrees of zhang-induced sickness, the most severe of which would render victims unable to speak or control bodily movement. Contact with this strongest form of zhang was believed to lead to certain death[47].

Disease was not the only fear for immigrants to Guangxi province. Though modern day visitors to the PRC’s southern provinces may find it impossible to believe, Guangxi was once home to a wide array of large and dangerous animals. There Although there exists no few reliable statistics on just how manythe number of tigers populated that populated Guangxi during the Ming dynasty[48], but officials traveling through the province often recorded having seen “many tigers”[49] during their journey. Officials from the latter half of the Ming dynasty often focus on the difficulties presented by large populations of tigers. In the 1599 edition of the General Gazetteer of Guangxi, we learn that one prefectural seat experienced constant attacks during three years in the early-sixteenth century[50]. The same gazetteer relays an account from a small village in Guangxi where a single tiger managed to kill and eat more than thirty of the forty-eight residents in one night. Some immigrants even took to keeping tigers as pets, though for at least one unfortunate individual this resulted in the tiger fighting back against his drunken and angry master[51]. The tiger,tiger “could later be seen lingering around Ma’s grave looking longingly for its former master.”[52] Returning to disease but moving further west, Yunnan province presented Ming and Qing citizens with the difficulties resulting from widespread malaria. During the Qing dynasty a campaign was launched aimed at bringing tusi areas under greater central control. The idea was to eliminate the position of native chieftains in as many places as possible and bring normal administrative structure to the regions[53]. At least in Yunnan, the implementation of this policy was restricted by the inability or unwillingness of Han Chinese to venture far into the malaria-ridden regions of the province’s south. One private secretary/local historian writing in Yunnan province between 1716 and 1737 strongly opposed the tusi system, decrying it for being too far outside normal Qing administrative structure. Though he wished to see the central government exert full administrative control over the province, he did note that in areas with high frequency of malaria, “it would be difficult to establish a regular officialdom unfamiliar with the lay of the land, and malaria would also be unavoidable when deploying garrison troops.”[54] One example of the reprucussions of malaria being “unavoidable” in many areas can be seen in Mianning subprefecture, an area roughly 30 kilometers west of the Mekong. Though it had been converted from a native chieftaincy into a regular administrative subprefecture in 1746, by 1812 there still remained at least 20 large areas where Qing troops wished to garrison but were unable to because of malaria[55]. Thus despite Mianning being under regular Qing control on paper, for at least 70 years provincial leaders and the military still had to rely on native chieftains to govern and protect the border.

Loosely Enforced: Confucian Education and the Barbarian Both the Ming and Qing dynasties viewed the introduction of a Confucian education system into the southwestern frontier lands as a necessary step in solving some of the existing

The Poisonous Haze of the Mountains: Borderland Limitations in the Ming and Qing Southwest

Tyler Cohen

problems. For the Ming in Guangxi province the aim was principally to “civilize” the people under tusi rule and bring them further under central control. The state experimented first with encouraging native people to send their sons to the Imperial Academy (Guo zi jian), though in 1395 decided instead to open local Confucian schools in hopes of reaching more students. The main goal of education in these areas was to teach students “the proper relations between rulers and subjects, fathers and sons.”[56] In 1444 and later in 1503 the Ming state attempted to enforce requirements that at least all designated heirs to native chieftaincy positions, and preferably all young males, must study at Confucian schools. According to the available records, this policy was “at best only loosely enforced.”[57] Perhaps due to a lack of funds, or perhaps because of the reluctance of native leaders to send their children to central state schools, by 1605 there were still reportedly very few schools in Guangxi and few native students at any given school[58].

In Ming Yunnan one of the great difficulties associated with constructing Confucian schools was the at of teaching of the Chinese language to the native students to speak Chinese[59]. Like in Guangxi the goal was for the education system to help transform the “barbarians” into civilized subjects of the central state[60]. In the mid-sixteenth century the Jiajiang emperor (r. 1522 – 1566) decreed that all administrative units in the southwest build at least one community school. In Guizhou a lack of funds and a general lack of enthusiasm on the part of the tusi meant that local administrators built some schools in areas only populated by Han subjects and simply renamed other schools already in operation. This gave the impression that Guizhou had created a large number of new community schools aimed at transforming the “barbarian” people, when in fact all that had happened was an increase in availability to education for Han subjects and a minimal increase in the number of educational institutes. The reasoning expressed by some officials for this decision was that it would simply be a waste of resources to bring more tusi students into the fold as they couldn’t keep up with Chinese -language instruction.

Aside from financial difficulties and lack of interest on the part of native chieftains, at least one other factor may be helpful in explaining the failure of Ming dynasty attempts at instituting Confucian education in tusi areas. As John E. Herman explains in Amid the Clouds and Mist; “non-Han societies were by and large hostile toward Chinese institutions on their territory, and the non-Han peoples in the southwest were unconvinced of the efficacy of a Chinese education.”[61] Similarly, Qing-era officials complained that Confucian schools often incited interethnic tension and violence. As was briefly mentioned earlier, for many of these schools the main goal was simply to teach Chinese to the new students[62]. School administrators, however, apparently worried that they “might create an undue burden for the teachers and distract Han students from their studies.”[63] Teachers often found they were required to split their class time into two sections. One half of the class would be used for preparing Han-Chinese students to take part in the imperial exam, as was normally the function of schools, while the other half would be spent simply explaining basic Chinese to tusi students. Han parents complained that their children were only getting half of an education and would be unable to pass

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the exams. The parents of children from tusi regions complained that their children were learning nothing of value while they could have been at home helping the family.

Reshaping the Peasantry: “Autonomy” in the PRC Having explored some of the larger difficulties the late imperial Chinese states experienced with expanding into and governing the southwestern frontier lands, I would like to now turn towards the People’s Republic of China and briefly look at the status of local rule in the so-called “autonomous regions” (zizhi qu – 自治区). Many areas in modernday Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan and southern Sichuan that once fell under the category of tusi have been incorporated into today’s “autonomous regions”. However, due to the popularity of the ‘Tibet issue’ in international politics and the recent violence and struggle within Xinjiang, most of the research available on measuring actual autonomy in the “autonomous regions” of the PRC is aimed at these two places. Though they clearly represent the most un-autonomous aspects of modern PRC “autonomy”, this paper is not focused on Tibet or Xinjiang.

In his article Cultural Life and Cultural Control in Rural China: Where is the Party? Stig Thorgersen explored the issue of Communist Party control over local culture in the town of Xuanwei, an area largely populated by members of ethnic minorities in western Yunnan[64]. Though centralized control has obviously declined since the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976), the Party still attempts to control the local culture in a variety of ways. At least since the late 1990s the buzz word of ideology ‘ideology’ has been “civilization” (wenming) and a number of government policies have been aimed at creating a more “civilized” people[65]. Following the general restoration of local culture after the 1980s opening and reform period, Xuanwei residents began practicing local customs that had been abandoned during the Cultural Revolution. Officials complained that popular religion was making a comeback and, using the term “feudal superstition”[66], expressed worry that Xuanwei would return to its pre-revolutionary habits. One of the major efforts launched to combat this shift was the “Ten Stars of Civilization” campaign (Shi xing ji wenminghua). This campaign was aimed at “evaluating and controlling the moral performance of each individual household and its members”[67] through a series of guidelines. These ten pseudo-rules include: using birth control, breeding animals in a scientific way and earning profits in excess of 10,000 yuan in a year from live stock, avoiding “feudal superstitions” and not partaking in “extravagant weddings”, respecting ones teachers, and making sure to wash toilet facilities and one’s own house. There is no stated reward for attaining some number of stars, however it is clear that households rewarded a greater number will be favoured by the local government. As Thorgersen says in his article, the idea for the Party is to “reshape this peasantry into an image of social harmony and material affluence.”[68] Though this may seem like little more than a humorous anecdote, it does reflect both the ability and want of the state to extend its control into to the moral, religious, financial and even hygienic habits of its people.

Religion and the role of religious institutions in people’s daily lives is one area the Communist Party has taken great measures to extend state control over since the fall of complete

The Poisonous Haze of the Mountains: Borderland Limitations in the Ming and Qing Southwest

Tyler Cohen

central control in the 1980s. Ben Hillman describes in one article the relationship between the Communist Party and a local monastery in an ethnically Tibetan village[69].

One issue of concern to the monastery was the divide within Tibetan Buddhism between those who recognized and worshiped the deity Dorje Shugden[70], and those who opposed its inclusion in worship[71]. Shugden worship was banned by the current Dalai Lama in 1996, but because of its nearly 400 year long history in certain areas of Tibet, it has hardly died out. The Communist Party has since seen a natural ally in current Shugden worshippers and has used this rift to its own advantage. Since 1996 the Communist Party has allocated a greater percentage of funds for Shugden supporters, even going so far as to make it a near requirement for any monks wishing to obtain a visa to study in India. The majority of monks at the monastery Hillman studied were anti-Shugden, yet of the thirteen selected to go to India in 2003, twelve were pro-Shugden. In this same vein, one of the only areas of the monastery to receive funds for a new prayer room was that occupied by the pro-Shugden group.

Focusing now on the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), I would like to speak briefly about the status of language in Tibet. Efforts have begun in recent years to preserve the Tibetan language through recording indigenous music, oral histories and story-telling[72]. That being said, Mandarin Chinese still remains the standard language for any education above the second or third grade level in the TAR[73]. While Tibet University, the largest higher educational institute in Tibet, is reputed to have excellent Tibetan language and Tibetan literature programs, one point worth mentioning is that because any classes not focused on such subjects are taught in Mandarin Chinese[74], Tibetan students are not provided with any no opportunities outside of the household to learn political or other terminology. This has obvious benefits for a central state intent on destroying Tibetan nationalism.

Evidence of the central state’s intent to limit use of the Tibetan language and control the autonomy of the Tibetan people can also be seen in my own experience in China. In March of 2008 I volunteered to teach English to a group of Tibetan youth who had been sent to Guangdong province in order to receive a better education[75]. After a wonderful afternoon spent with a group of very enthusiastic children I was briefly interviewed for a local newspaper[76] and asked if I would continue teaching them on a weekly basis.

I responded that I would be happy to do so every week on my day off. The children were then asked to perform a “traditional Tibetan song” for myself and the other staff of my school. The song was about “loving the motherland” (ai zuguo - 爱祖国) and was sung in Mandarin Chinese. When I asked them why they would sing a traditional Tibetan song in Mandarin Chinese[77], the children told me they had never learned the song in Tibet and had only been taught it after coming to Guangdong. While the song featured a recognizably Tibetan melody, it seems highly unlikely that it is either traditionally Tibetan or reflective of traditional Tibetan views. Moreover, that these children are now taught Tibetan history[78] and culture in Mandarin Chinese is an obvious step away from autonomy and encourages Tibetan students to view their own land’s heritage through the PRC’s eyes. The following week as I was preparing the outline for my second meeting with these children, I was informed there would be no class. A local government official

Orientations Volume Nine : Transcultural Perspectives on Asia had called the owner of my school and told her that foreigners were not allowed to have interactions with Tibetan children. The principle of the school the children attended later told me the local government had informed him that the Tibetan students were to be confined to their dormitories, no longer allowed off-campus.

Conclusion In comparison with the lose close alliances with local chieftains of pre-Yuan times and the not-quite-insider status of tusi during the Yuan, the Ming dynasty was able to enforce a greater degree of centralized control over the frontier lands of modern-day southwestern China. Continuing this trend, the Qing dynasty exerted even greater control over much of modern-day Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi. Despite this development towards more centralized control, neither the Ming nor the Qing were able to claim any sort of full control over much of this territory. Both dynasties encountered difficulties in implementing administration, conquering or even acclimatizing to the natural environment, and introducing a system of Confucian education to the native chieftaincies of the southwest. Under administration we’ve seen how the quality of officials, problems regarding taxation, the behavior of Han settlers and the complicated rules governing inheritance systems all produced major obstacles to direct rule by the central state. The environment proved a major difficulty to attempts at governance both because of animal threats and rampant disease. The introduction of Confucian schools, a policy with the stated intention of bringing “barbarians” over to a more “civilized” way of life did not produce the desired results and, in fact, often backfired.

In the last section we looked briefly at how the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China regularly interferes in local autonomy even in so-called “autonomous regions”. While it is obvious that a modern state with modern similarly modern technology will have fewer troubles collecting taxes than any Ming or Qing-era government would face, we’ve we haev seen how the central state today works at controlling details as specific as people’s use of language, religious practices, social mores, and even hygiene.

When we look at the status of autonomy in the PRC today alongside the inability of the Ming or Qing governments to control much of the southwest, one question naturally arises: if what the “autonomous regions” today possess is to be called autonomy, what do we call the status of these tusi areas during the last two dynasties of imperial rule? If autonomy means not having control over the education of one’s own children, not being able to move freely outside of one’s province[79], having the central state able to influence one’s social mores, financial decisions and hygiene…every aspect of one’s life, wWhat do we call the tusi areas that were free of all such interference? If we choose to lump them into the same category and refer to them as autonomous areas of the Ming and Qing states, we’re faced with a bizarrely broad definition of autonomy that doesn’t may not seem to fit well with any real sense of the word[80]. If, on the other hand, we choose to say that these areas were not even autonomously inside the Ming or Qing states, we’ll we will be forced to deal with the political questions that then arise[81]. Chinese control over areas largely populated by ethnic minorities is usually justified on the grounds of their historically being part of China, and the Communist Party having first “liberated” these areas and then improved the living conditions of the inhabitants.

If we can never consider them to have properly been a part of any Chinese state we’re we are left with only the second justification. When confronted with the possibility that Tibetans or some other nationality’s people may not feel that their lives have improved under Communist rule, it is normal to hear Chinese nationalists or apologists fall back on the historical argument. If both are removed, what justification exists?

One successful aspect of Qing expansionism that was not touched on in this paper was the expansion of cartography and ethnography during the last dynasty. While the Ming had been largely content to distinguish between registered citizens and “barbarians” or “wild” people, Qing officials began a more intrinsically “modern”[82] enterprise of categorizing and analyzing the ethnic minorities within their borders. This eventually led to the development of “albums” made by officials to pass on information about the minority groups in or around their own regions. Commenting on these albums, Laura Hostetler gives us an insight into how they were viewed at the time: The albums conveyed a sense that the frontier was known, that there was an order to the exotic peoples and customs found in these regions, and that by uncovering it the officials could and did know what they needed to in order to maintain harmony in the region. That the albums in some ways conveyed a false sense of security is another matter[83].

The Poisonous Haze of the Mountains: Borderland Limitations in the Ming and Qing Southwest

Tyler Cohen Living in China or watching Chinese television, one gets a sense that the ‘Ethnic Performances’ and colourful ‘ethnic’ costumes paraded in front of the Chinese people today[84] fulfill much the same function as the albums about which Hostetler is talking. I believe it would be of benefit to the PRC and the Han-Chinese majority to pay greater attention to the historical independence of the ethnic minority areas.

[1] A local friend of mine once commented: “Four days? This is not a rescue mission, this is a funeral procession!” The owner of the lodge said that this policy had been used the year prior when an Israeli traveler was lost.

He was found after four days, though in bad condition and unable to descend under his own power.

[2] For further information on the beg system, consult Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise [3] Regarding the use of Chinese characters in this paper, all names and terms given in Chinese that are discussed in the context of pre-communist revolution history will be given in traditional Chinese characters. In the latter sections of this paper dealing with post-revolution issues the relevant terms will be given in simplified Chinese. This is done with the intention of making any further research undertaken by the reader easier, as for classical Chinese names it is required to know the classical characters, whereas modern Chinese terminology is most widely known in simplified Chinese. As is now standard, all Romanized spellings of Chinese words are done in pinyin.

[4] At this point it is helpful to clarify the use of certain terms. Till now I have been referring to the “Chinese state” or the “central state” instead of using the more common “China”. Determining what, exactly, constituted “China” in the past is an extremely messy question and outside the scope of this paper. In large part because of the nature of modern Chinese nationalism and the narrative of Chinese history supported by the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it is also an extremely political question. For the sake of this paper and to avoid any difficulties of understanding, I will continue to refer to the Ming and Qing dynasties, or the central Chinese state.

[5] The Yuan dynasty is more commonly known to western readers as the period of Chinese history when Mongol invaders ruled the state. Though Genghis Khan is perhaps more famous in the west, it was his grandson Kublai Khan who eventually conquered many of the areas in modern-day China’s southwest.

[6] John E. Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist, China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200 – 1700, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007: 103.

[7] “Tusi” and “native chieftaincy” are used interchangeably in this paper.

[8] Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist, 103 [9] Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist, 104 [10] Today part of northern Vietnam [11] Leo K. Shin, The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006: 56.

[12] The Mongols had managed to conquer much of modern-day Tibet, the southwestern provinces and all of Song dynasty China between 1206 and 1279, an impressive feat even if one doesn’t look at their further conquests in central Asia and eastern Europe.

[13] Shin, 57 [14] Shin, 57 [15] Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist, 105 [16] Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist, 106 [17] Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist, 108 [18] Donald S. Sutton, “Violence and Ethnicity on a Qing Colonial Frontier: Customary and Statutory Law in the Eighteenth-Century Miao Pale,” Modern Asian Studies 37.1 (Feb. 2003): 41-80.

[19] Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist, 106 [20] Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist, 108 [21] Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist, 109 [22] Shin, 34 [23] Shin, 34 [24] Shin, 112 [25] Shin, 112 [26] Shin, 34 [27] Shin, 73 [28] Shin, 115 [29] Shin, 115 [30] Herman, 137 [31] C. Pat Giersch, “ “A Motley Throng:” Social Change on Southwest China’s Early Modern Frontier, 1700 – 1880,” The Journal of Asian Studies 60.1 (Feb. 2001): 67-68 [32] Giersch, 68 [33] John E. Herman, “Empire in the Southwest: Early Qing Reforms to the Native Chieftaincy System,” The Journal of Asian Studies 56.1 (Feb. 1997): 55 [34] Shin, 115 [35] Herman, “Empire,” 56 [36] One of modern-day China’s official minority groups [37] Herman, “Empire,” 56 [38] Herman, “Empire,” 57 [39] Which was a practice common in Chinese inheritance systems but different from many of the local practices in tusi regions.

[40] Herman, “Empire,” 57 [41] Herman, “Empire,” 63-64 [42] The Chinese characters for his name are not given in the article.

[43] Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist, 112 [44] Shin, 112-113 [45] Shin, 27 [46] Shin, 27 [47] Shin, 28 [48] We can be certain the number declined during the dynasty.

[49] Shin, 52 [50] Shin, 52 [51] Shin, 53 [52] Shin, 53 [53] In Chinese this policy was referred to as gaitu guiliu (改土歸 流).

[54] Bello, 301 [55] Bello, 302 [56] Shin, 71 [57] Shin, 71 [58] Shin, 72 [59] Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist, 114 [60] Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist, 115 [61] Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist, 116 [62] Herman, “Empire,” 54 [63] Herman, “Empire,” 54 [64] Stig Thogerson, “Cultural Life and Cultural Control in Rural China: Where is the Party?” The China Journal (July 2000): 129-141 [65] During my own stay in China from 2007-2009 the push for “civilization” was still in effect. Though the city I lived in - Huizhou, Guangdong province - had an ethnic Han majority and was one of the wealthier areas of China, the local government still felt the need to push forward frequent campaigns aimed at “civilizing” the public. One large sign near my workplace urged residents to “Speak in a civilized manner, be a civilized person” (shuo wenming hua, zuo wenming ren - 说文明话，做文明人). This same sign appeared in every public school I visited.

[66] Presumably this is a translation of fengjian mixin (封建迷信), however the author did not include the pinyin or Chinese characters in his article. As the most common religion in the area is Buddhism, it is likely that whatever Chinese term was translated as “feudal superstition”, it was referring to Buddhist practices.

[67] Thogerson, 138 [68] Thogerson, 139 [69] The name of the monastery and village are not given so as to prevent any recourse that might be taken against people mentioned in the article. However, Mr. Hillman does tell us that the village is somewhere in Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan or Yunnan province. It is likely that this village is in one of the so-called “autonomous regions”, though we cannot be certain. Even if it does not technically fall under this category, it is reflective of the level of autonomy enjoyed by ethnic minority regions in the PRC today.

[70] Some Tibetan Buddhists believe Shugden to be an incarnation of the 17th-century Tibetan lama Tulku Dragpa Gyaltsen. Tulku was a contemporary and rival to the 5th Dalai Lama and some Tibetan Buddhists believe he was assassinated by order of the Dalai Lama or some other religious authority. The 5th Dalai Lama later came to believe his spirit was indeed holy, and had temples built in his honour.

[71] Ben Hillman, “Monastic Politics and the Local State in China: Authority and Autonomy in an Ethnically Tibetan Prefecture,” The China Journal 54 (July 2005): 37-39 [72] It is outside the scope of this paper to properly raise this issue, but this obviously gives rise to questions regarding the role of a colonial power in recording the history and culture of the locals. While I support efforts to preserve the Tibetan language, it is not clear that sending Han social scientists to Tibetan villages actually helps, rather than hurts, the preservation of the language [73] Edward J. Kormondy, “Minority Education in Inner Mongolia and Tibet,” International Review of Education 48.5 (Sept. 2002): 395 [74] Kormondy, 396 [75] The natural response is that, contrary to the stated intent, the real intent of bringing Tibetan children to more “Chinese” schools is to ensure they grow up away from any connection to Tibetan nationalism.

[76] The article is still available online at: http://city.xizi.com/n/o/200803/21578.shtml [77] I was genuinely confused, but obviously being somewhat aware of the issues surrounding Tibet and the use of the Tibetan language I was more just curious to hear what answer would be offered.

[78] Again, it’s necessary to acknowledge that what they are taught in Tibetan history class does not necessarily, or even often, reflect the accepted international academia on Tibetan history or the traditional way Tibetan history was taught in Tibet before the 1950 invasion by PRC forces.

[79] As is the case for most Tibetans.

[80] Interestingly enough, the word “autonomy” in English doesn’t quite seem to capture the sense of the Chinese word used by the PRC. Zizhi (自治) is composed of two characters; the first means ‘self’ and the second means ‘control’ or ‘rule’. In English “autonomy” often carries the connotation of being part of something larger, whereas the word zizhi, taken out of context, does not carry any necessary connection to an outside or larger force.

[81] For further discussion on the political nature of evaluating the history of China’s southwest, refer to Hostetler, “Qing Connections”.

[82] For further discussion on the role of cartography in Qing expansion, see Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise.

[83] Laura Hostetler, “Qing Connections to the Early Modern World: Ethnography and Cartography in Eighteenth-Century China,” Modern Asian Studies 34.3 (July 2000): 641 [84] For further discussion on so-called “Ethnic performances” in China today, see Dru C. Gladney, “Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/Minority Identities,” The Journal of Asian Studies 53.1

Orientations Volume Nine : Transcultural Perspectives on Asia

Minority Responses to State Development: Three Experiences of Health in “Ethnic” China Jessica Yilan Tsang

This article was adapted from a portion of my undergraduate thesis “Minority Responses to Development: Alternate Articulations of Progress,” a bibliographical analysis of the Hui experience of modernity in contemporary China, completed under the supervision of Prof. Johanna Ransmeier.

h

The ethnic policy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is characterized by two major goals: promoting the socioeconomic development of its officially designated minority nationalities (shaoshu minzu) and the preservation of their traditional cultures. Though sometimes contradictory in practice, these two “selling points” are essential to sustaining the legitimacy of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) authority. The preservation of cultural heritage and promotion of integration (over assimilation) gained greater importance in the 1980s, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, during which the expression of ethnic difference was interpreted as a manifestation of class difference.

Since then, the reproduction of ethnic difference has been ubiquitous and essential to perpetuating the state’s ideology of modernization.

Soon after the Communist Party took power in 1949, it set out to identify China’s precise ethnic groups and began formal investigations in 1953. The CPC sponsored ethnological missions by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists who identified nationalities according to Stalinist criteria: common territory, language, mode(s) of production, and psychology. Influenced by pre-existing racial categories, which permitted the classification of Han nationality despite their diversity, as well as the Hui nationality, which selfidentified according to common religion and ancestry, they eventually counted fifty-six distinct nationalities by 1979.

In order to facilitate socialist revolution among the diverse nationalities, the anthropologist-cadres also sought out to identify each minority’s level of progress. Nationalities were categorized according to Friedrich Engels and anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s teleological schema of social evolution, and ranked according to their mode of production: primitive, slave holding, feudal, capitalist, and socialist. Already working toward communism, the Han majority was identified as the most advanced, while minority nationalities were identified as relatively backward, still occupying various lower stages of social evolution. Based on a purportedly scientific scale measuring socioeconomic

Minority Responses to State Development: Three Experiences of Health in “Ethnic” China

Jessica Yilan Tsang

progress, the results of the classification project gained the status of objective truth.[2] Although the influence of Marxism has greatly declined in China policy-making (most notably in economic planning), the hierarchical and materialist distinctions inherited from the 1950s investigations still persist in state policy and popular thinking. Under the constitutional principles of “mutual assistance,” the state assists shaoshu minzu with a variety of development projects, designed to improve the economic output of regions inhabited by minorities. The state also endeavours to develop the minorities themselves, making great investments to revive select aspects of minority culture, including traditional “customs and folkways,” notably song and dance.[3] However, the policy of development is self-defeating. Targeting minority nationalities as groups in need of development, while simultaneously defining them “objectively” as underdeveloped peoples, prevents them from ever realising the ambiguous goal of “development.” Instead of promoting equality, Chinese ethnic policy reifies the designation and perception of minority peoples’ “backwardness” and reifies racial inequalities with policies that do not respond to the needs and desires of minority groups. This is not to say, however, that minority nationalities cannot experience development or progress under the CPC’s regime. Rather, despite shaoshu minzu’s exclusion from statedetermined modernity, minority communities still articulate their own aspirations for progress, both engaging and challenging the state’s qualifications for development.

Members of the Hui nationality, in particular, in fact reclaim their own trajectory toward modernity, and work to realize it, independent of the state.

The Huizu are particularly interesting because of their social proximity to the majority Han Chinese population, into which some Hui communities have long assimilated.[4] As an ethnoreligious community, the Hui defy Stalinist criteria for nationality. Nevertheless, it is their religious identity (even when non-practising) that sets them back as a “feudal” minority.[5] It is also their religious identity that serves as an avenue for their realization and articulation of modernity. With respect to health and education, Huis attribute their efforts and achievements to the requirements of Islamic tradition. Identification with Islam also further entangles the Hui in a large global debate surrounding Islam and progress, where orientalist representations similarly exclude international coreligionists from limited definitions of modernity.

Looking at the inequalities reproduced in Chinese ethnic policy, public health is especially demonstrative of the varied experiences of development in different communities.

While the good health of minority nationalities is the goal of all parties involved, the experience of health and nationalities-targeted health policy is as diverse as the communities themselves. These differences are evident in the claims of the Hui, as well as those of the Tibetan and Tai communities in China. However, in spite of the self-defeating nature of ethnic health policy, the Hui community still manages to succeed in its own terms.

Orientations Volume Nine : Transcultural Perspectives on Asia

The developmental approach to minorities policy was, and continues to be, carried out in accordance with this ideology of good health and hygiene. In this vein, the state provided members of minority nationalities basic biomedical training and further retrained existing health care practitioners in the first decades of the PRC. Discussing orientalist representations of non-Han development under socialism, Louisa Schein identified the narrative of minzu progress under China’s contemporary civilising project in a compendium of China’s minority nationalities. It proudly declares that under the patriotic health campaigns of the People’s Republic, “One after another, new Miao villages are emerging that are clean, healthy, and literate.”[11] Following the model of the much-missed “barefoot doctors” who served the countryside with first aid, primary care, and traditional Han-Chinese medicine (zhongyi, or TCM),[12] attention was given to the traditional medicine of ethnic minorities on a pragmatic basis. At the same time, commitment to the health of the shaoshu minzu was designed around the elimination of religious or superstitious aspects of their medical practices, which were, and still are, received by the modernizing cadres as not only retrograde, but also fraudulent and sometimes harmful.[13] In doing so, the program of public health “sutured”[14] any potential recipients of care to the objectives of the state care-provider, objectives represented as universally desired.

In both the Mao-era of “barefoot doctors” and the post-revolutionary years of developmental policies, the cultural policies of the Chinese state establish a normative reference point for health. This position orients ethnic minorities as approaching, yet consistently outside, the qualifications for good health, whatever their own ideas and experiences, with the successfully modernized and scientized, healthy Han citizen at the centre. To bypass the problematic ethnic hierarchy this course inherently implies, as well as the antecedent discourses of racial deficiency,[15] weisheng is identified in physical/material-scientific terms, construed as a problem of secular concern, and thus made out to be apolitical.[16] This prognosis neglects less tangible determinants of health and negates experiences of good and bad health outside the standard nomenclature.

Nonetheless, communities outside the dominant understanding of weisheng continue to articulate their experiences of health in ways that challenge, complicate, and engage the normative qualifications of health; even if their accounts are objectified or made subaltern. Self-identifying groups experience and realize Illness, health directives, and acme in very different ways. Tibetan patients in Lhasa’s Traditional Tibetan Medical Hospital experience poor health not only with the vocabulary of traditional humoural medicine, but also as a consequence of their modern social environment. In Yunnan, the province identified as most affected by HIV/AIDS in China,[17] there are significant gaps between Chinese public health discourse – which has generally considered HIV/ AIDS to be a minorities-problem – and the actual reported cases, raising the question of whose health is really at stake in state projects to improve citizens’ health and hygiene.

Minority Responses to State Development: Three Experiences of Health in “Ethnic” China

Jessica Yilan Tsang

Finally, members of the Hui nationality credit their “traditional” religious practices for their good health, but cite “modern” statistics to verify their claims.

As indicated earlier, policies toward traditional medicine, especially ethnomedicine, have swayed between official and repudiation to the extreme of criminalization.[18] In recent years, there has been greater acceptance of traditional medicine and increasing support for its legitimization and incorporation in mainstream medical studies and practice. Since 1986, Tibetan medicine has taken a significant role in the region’s primary care infrastructure both within the government’s health bureaucracy and in the realm of a variety of non-state practitioners. Simultaneously, the nature of what we call “Tibetan medicine” has undergone many changes under the influence of different modernizing agents, beginning as early as 1913 with the 13th Dalai Lama Thubten Gyatso, whose reform projects had lasting effects on the historically diffuse professional sector.[19] Since the 1980s, a previously heterogeneous curriculum has been increasingly standardized, secularized, and scientized to meet the requirements of normative “scientific modernity.” Still, humoural epidemiology remains the primary mode for articulating the ill health of patients and an accepted means for diagnosis by physicians practising Tibetan medicine.

As Vincanne Adams points out, in Tibet and elsewhere in China, bodies “wear” social discontent.[20] In his short history of the evolution of Tibetan medicine over the course of the 20th century, Craig Janes indicates that the reporting of imbalances of the wind (rlung) humour – the chief diagnosis in Tibetan epidemiology, spanning a great number of specific disorders and related symptoms – has increased with “modern social changes,” especially in the tumultuous Cultural Revolution.[21] In the Tibetan Autonomous Region, such social changes – associated with imposed modernization – include the imposition of the state upon the physical body, an increase in economic burden, successive political campaigns, and religious/cultural oppression, among others. In general, these changes have brought Tibetan subjects increased opportunities for ill health.

In the women’s ward of the Tibetan Medicine Hospital in Lhasa, Adams found many diagnoses of rlung disorders related to reproductive health, in the face of these “modern social changes.” Aside from modernity’s introduction of new sexually transmitted diseases, women faced the demands of the state’s family planning and labour policies.

In addition to maximum birth quotas for urban dwellers and reports of forced sterilization,[22] employees of government offices or work units (danwei) of state-owned enterprises are further required to acquiesce to the birth planning procedures of their danwei and seek permission to have a baby. Without adequate contraception, those who get pregnant without authorization are forced to terminate their pregnancies or forego benefits for pregnancy such as maternity leave, future childcare, and even their extremely competitive employment. Consequently, abortions may be performed in rapid succession, sometimes in substandard conditions. Without sufficient time to recover and

Orientations Volume Nine : Transcultural Perspectives on Asia

restore the body’s humoural balance, there are often complications and problems for the patient’s future health.[23] In the wider population, both physicians and patients cite the stresses of modern worklife for the prevalence of rlung disorders. Chronic exhaustion from overworking and arduous physical labour without corresponding compensation exacerbate stresses upon the human body. “In Tibetan Medicine, social conditions that are not conducive to eliminating the poisons [that interfere with humoural balance] are seen as inherently pathological – as disease producing.”[24] Janes also reports ethnic tension and systemic discrimination as a source of un-health, where overwhelming feelings of social immobility manifested in physical symptoms, diagnosed as wind imbalance. “A recurring theme here was not only the demanding nature of the positions [in large government work units], but, more subtly in some cases, difficult day-to-day contact with Han Chinese, many of whom wield power over the Tibetan staff.”[25] Anxieties over unemployment and widespread poverty – well-recognized social determinants for health – contribute further.

In other instances, the moral dimensions of traditional Tibetan epidemiology are more striking. In Tibetan medicine, the humours are fully integrated on one level with the Buddhist “self” and its imperfections; and on another with the fundamental elements – very simply external factors such as diet or the environment, but also behaviour. As a result, issues concerning morality and suffering are implicated in the experience of poor health. Following the state’s modernizing policies, which called for the elimination of superstitious activities on a popular scale, work units in the 1990s continued to hold meetings calling for confession and reporting any suspicious behaviour. The obligation to behave in a manner that contradicts one’s moral principles – by desecrating religious persons or sites, for example – is yet another pathogen.[26] In the example of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, experiences of poor health and subsequent hospitalizations are tied directly and indirectly to Chinese modernization programs, which have brought with them a great number of new pathogenic situations.

Although the goal of preserving and creating good health in the Tibetan population is one shared by both Tibetans and state policy-makers, policies that affect arenas of daily life have had a counterintuitive and detrimental effect to weisheng in the region. As one physician reported, “the Chinese government makes people unhappy, and so rlung must be more common… Tibetans have rlung because they are not free.”[27] Since the 1980s, the southwestern province of Yunnan has been the locus of HIV/AIDS discourse in China, even as the epidemic grew in other locations across the country.

This diverse, and for a long time remote, part of China has been historically associated with disease and unhealthy practices, and many Han tourists indicate a fear of disease,

Minority Responses to State Development: Three Experiences of Health in “Ethnic” China

Jessica Yilan Tsang

specifically malaria, in “barbarian” regions of China.[28] HIV/AIDS is especially mapped onto the Tai autonomous prefectures: Dehong – marked by its cross-border heroine trade with Burma and high incidence of injection drug-use – and Sipsongpanna – a site for ethnic tourism and of emergent sex tourism.[29] In line with this epidemiological topography, Chinese public health literature ascribes high rates of HIV/AIDS to the Tai nationality. In contrast, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Sandra Hyde found little indication of infection among the Tai population of Sipsongpanna, and by the turn of the decade, the Han population represented the nationality with the largest number of cases. Furthermore, while public health workers assumed that minority women were prone to promiscuity and transmitting HIV in their capacity as prostitutes, Hyde found that eighty to ninety percent of sex workers in Jinghong – the capital of Sipsongpanna Tai Autonomous Prefecture – were in fact Han-identifying migrants from neighbouring provinces. Catering to male tourists who came with ideas about more “sexually enlightened” Tai women, these Han women adopted ethnic dress (performing ethnicity) to better attract Han clients. [30] Nevertheless, this AIDS discourse is reproduced in the anxieties of the Tai community living in an economy of ethnic tourism. Studying ethnic revival in Sipsongpanna, Sara Davis found that members of the Tai Lüe community were eager to provide more authentic and representative culture for the Tai than that provided by the state in ethnic theme parks. “[Pop song-writing monk] Dubi Gang had written songs about social problems: the one about the Tai Lüe dancer, and others on HIV/AIDS, and the growing problem of the traffic of Tai Lüe women and girls into the Thai sex industry.”[31] While public health policies do not ignore HIV transmission between Han workers and tourists in the Tai prefectures, the dominant discourse and popular perceptions distort the infectious nature of the disease and continue to place ethnic minorities on the path approaching but never completely achieving good health. Moreover, inaccurate epidemiologies and conservative sex education serve as obstacles to state HIV-prevention measures.

Finally, the Hui experience good health with reference to the preservation of traditional customs, but represent it in very modern terms. In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping’s reform program identified four key areas for modernization, the first of which was science and technology. Alongside public health and modern medicine, embedded in scientific modernization was the emergence of the discipline of populations science, within which the “truth of numbers” was health in high esteem.[32] The following passage recalls the quantified health experience of Hui subjects in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in the mid-1980s:

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Hui often say that longevity is the result of Allah’s blessing (Zhenzhu baoyou) for a devout qing zhen life. They attribute good health to their maintaining Islamic dietary restrictions and attention to personal hygiene. Hui say they are cleaner than Han because they engage in the “small wash” (xiao jin) 5 times a day before prayer, and the “complete wash” (da jin) every Friday. Hui are proud to note that, though the Hui are only one third of Ningxia’s population, the 1982 census revealed that 21 of the 23 centenarians in Ningxia region were Hui – veritable proof of the benefits of living a pure qing zhen life.[33]

While the state expressly recognizes weisheng among the Hui, it is represented more so as a special ethnic characteristic or cultural idiosyncrasy rather than an indication of collective civilized subjectivity[34] or an expression of modern-ness. In the Englishlanguage brief on the “Hui Ethnic Group” reproduced on various government websites, the declaration, “The Huis are very particular about sanitation and hygiene,”[35] rests between descriptions of ethnic handicrafts and festivals. Elsewhere, civilian informants described Hui weisheng as “compulsive” and “hyperfastidious.”[36] Ironically, there simultaneously remains the perception among the Han that Hui are “dirty, larcenous, and immoral.”[37] Quite differently from the previous examples in which minority members contradicted the diagnoses of state agents, the Hui respondents in this example cite the census in particular to validate their claims of good health and hygiene. While the modern census is often examined as a tool of political domination, the units they define are not always passive groups to be construed as “social problems.”[38] The “imagination” of a community – its construction, identification, and reification – even under imposed demographic topography,[39] occurs both state-to-population and vice versa.

I argue that the Hui subjects’ faith in the census is inherently modern because of the modern context in which national census taking and the art/science of statistics arose.

Discussing the role of statistics in nation building, Anat Liebler describes statistics as a project of modernity: Statistics in its nineteenth-century form was a liberal thought and was associated with hopefulness for improvement. It reflected a liberal spirit and a search for social reforms that thrived in that period. Statistics: (1) was mostly associated with progress due to its capability of describing comprehensive social reforms toward modernity; (2) signified the distinction between traditional and modern society; and (3) replaced the old social order with a new one by giving people new and equal positions in the social configuration. The last point refers to its identification with values such as democracy and equality.[40]

Moreover, the emergence of comprehensive census taking, distinguished by its ability to not only construct but quantify populations arose in the late 19th century in the context of modern colonial administration.[41]

Minority Responses to State Development: Three Experiences of Health in “Ethnic” China

Jessica Yilan Tsang

Writing on the PRC’s pursuit of “demographic modernity” through population science and state birth planning, Susan Greenhalgh signals the power of numbers in the definition and claim of modernity: In the late 1970s and early 1980s, China’s newly minted population specialists mobilized a wide array of numbers, some from large-scale surveys, others pulled from typical location studies, to delineate the population problem. The specialists defined two sets of problems, one surrounding the “abnormality” and thus “Backwardness” of the population itself, the other concerning the effects of those irregularities on the nation’s economy and thus the speed of its socialist modernization.

Taken together, these two sets of quantitatively defined problems would establish China’s backwardness in the global order…[42]

Greenhalgh argues that in state birth planning policy, both population scientists and ordinary Chinese citizens attributed great stake in the science of numbers and their power in determining quantified targets of modernity. However, while the population scientists interpreted their numbers as indicators of “abnormality” and “backwardness” – problems – in the reproductive health and quality of its general population, the Hui instead found themselves to be quite healthy as a qingzhen community within a multiethnic order of fifty-size nationalities.

In this particular case, Hui subjects actively pursue an institution that is not only modern but also inextricable from the state to assert their self-identification with good health. By both abiding by the terms of the state – identification as one of China’s fifty-five shaoshu minzu in the census – and taking up the terms of the state – employing specific figures from census data – the Hui are at the same time engaging and resisting the hierarchical claims of the PRC’s ethnic policy.

As in other areas in which China’s ethnic minorities are discussed with reference to modernity, in shaoshu minzu experiences of weisheng, there remains a gap between identified communities’ own aspirations for progress and state policy’s definition of modernity. In the case of public health in particular, the incommensurability has very tangible effects on minority groups’ standards of living. In the long run, such consequences will pose a persistent obstacle of the state’s pragmatic goal of improving the fitness of its population for the purposes of socioeconomic integration.

While Hui communities have shown success in their health and educational outcomes, they still receive little recognition from the Chinese state, which continues to orient minority nationalities on a path approaching, but never attaining, progress. If the CPC is to truly integrate China’s minorities with its political aspirations of widespread socioeconomic development, it must reform its policy to be more inclusive of the aspirations of minority communities themselves.

Public health is just one area in which there is a gap between the experiences and aspirations of minority nationalities, and the prerogatives of state development policy. In

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everyday sartorial choices, members of minority nationalities – especially female – not only demonstrate agency in their self-representation, but additionally defy the orientalist representations that often present minority women as “fascination objects of erotic fascination,”[43] imperative for the visual and ideological reproduction of minority “backwardness” and “primitiveness.” Concerning education, the Hui once again design their own avenues to modernity, organising education opportunities for themselves where the state providers fail to do so. There is much more room for scholarship on the independently initiated development projects of minority nationalities.

[2] Maris Boyd Gillette, Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 9-14; Mette Halskov Hansen, Lessons in Being Chinese: Minority Education and Ethnic Identity in Southwest China (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1999), 3-4; Stevan Harrell, “Introduction: Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to Them,” Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, ed. Stevan Harrell (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1995), 9; and Colin Mackerras, China’s Ethnic Minorities and Globalisation (London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 20-21 [3] State Council of the People’s Republic of China, National Minorities Policy and Its Practice in China, White Paper (Beijing; Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China) [4] Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 264: “It is not surprising that, under a Chinese policy […] the Chendai Hui, who lack most of the outward cultural traits that should distinguish them as Hui, would have difficulty in being officially recognized. Chendai Hui in almost every respect are cultural similar to their Han nationality neighbours: They speak the Southern Min (Hokkien) dialect, light incense to ancestors in their lineage temple, do not believe in Islam, and remarkably, publicly disregard all Islamic dietary restrictions.”

[5] Maris Boyd Gillette, Between Mecca and Beijing (2000), 14 [6] David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 7 [7] Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese (1991), 7-15 [8] Maris Boyd Gillette, Between Mecca and Beijing (2000), 33 & 92 [9] Maria Jaschok & Shui Jingjun, The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A mosque of their own (Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000), 130 [10] Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 291 [11] Louisa Schein, Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 103-104: from Zhongguo Shaoshu Minzu Editing Group, Zhongguo Shaoshu Minzu (Beijing: People’s Press, 1981), 457: emphasis my own [12] Alexander Casella, “Rural China misses ‘barefoot doctors,’” Asia Times Online [13] Vincanne Adams, “Randomized Control Crime: Postcolonial Sciences in Alternative Medicine Research,” Social Studies of Science, 32:5/6 (2002), 671 [14] Vincanne Adams, ”Equity of the Ineffable,” Public Health, Ethics, and Equity, ed. Sudhir Anand, et al (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 287 [15] Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 1 [16] Vincanne Adams, “Equity of the Ineffable” (2004), 287 [17] State Council AIDS Working Committee Office and UN Theme Group on AIDS, “UNGASS Country Progress Reprot [sic]: P.R. China,” (Geneva: UNAIDS, 2008), 2

Minority Responses to State Development: Three Experiences of Health in “Ethnic” China

Jessica Yilan Tsang [18] Vincanne Adams, “Randomized Control Crime” (2002), 667 [19] Craig R. Janes, “The Transformations of Tibetan Medicine,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 9:1 (1995), 14 [20] Vincanne Adams, “Equity of the Ineffable” (2004), 295 [21] Craig R. Janes, “The Transformation of Tibetan Medicine” (1995), 30 [22] Vincanne Adams, “Suffering the Winds of Lhasa: Politicized Bodies, Human Rights, Cultural Difference, and Humanism in Tibet,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 12:1 (1998), 77 [23] Vincanne Adams, “Equity of the Ineffable” (2004), 294-295 [24] Vincanne Adams, “Equity of the Ineffable” (2004), 299: Such poisons include unfulfilled desires for better living conditions, anger over years of oppression under the Chinese state, and ignorance, among others.

[25] Craig R. Janes, “Imagined Lives, Suffering, and the World of Culture: The Embodied Discourse of Conflict in Modern Tibet,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 13:4 (1999), 397 [26] Vincanne Adams, “Equity of the Ineffable” (2004), 295-296 [27] Craig R. Janes, “The Transformations of Tibetan Medicine” (1995), 31 [28] Sandra Teresa Hyde, Eating Spring Rice: The Cultural Politics of AIDS in Southwest China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 41 & 91 [29] Sandra Teresa Hyde, Eating Spring Rice (2004), 6-8 [30] Sandra Teresa Hyde, Eating Spring Rice (2004), 19, 51 (Figure 5), 81, and 107 [31] Sara L.M. Davis, Songs & Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwestern Borders (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), 72 [32] Susan Greenhalgh, “Globalization and Population Governance in China,” Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong & Stephen J. Collier (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 357-358 [33] Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese (1991), 144-145 [34] Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese (1991), 15: Gladney and other authors have discussed how, with the very words qing and zhen have constructed their identity around truth and purity superior to the Han majority they distinguish themselves from.

[35] For example: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “The Hui ethnic minority,” 15 November 2000 (Beijing: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, 2000); and ChinaCultura.org, “Hui Ethnic Minority” (Beijing: Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China, 2003); among others [36] Susan D. Blum, Portraits of “Primitives”: Ordering Human Kinds in the Chinese Nation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 76 & 138 [37] Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese (1991), 15 [38] Anat E. Liebler, “Staticians’ Ambition: Governmentality, Modernity and National Legibility,” Israel Studies, 9:2 (2004), 123-124 [39] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition (London: Verso, 2006), 169 [40] Anat E. Liebler, “Staticians’ Ambition” (2004), 123 [41] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (2006), 168 [42] Susan Greenhalgh, “Globalization and Population Governance in China” (2005), 358 [43] Louisa Schein, “Gender and Internal Orientalism in China,” Modern China, 23:1 (1997), 77

A History of Tattoo Stigmatization in Japan - Joanna Y. L. Lai

A History of Tattoo Stigmatization in Japan Joanna Y. L. Lai

“ There is no body but the painted body, and no painting but body painting.”

Michel Thévoz

When practices are deemed deplorable by the public, it is the responsibility of those with vested interest in the practice to question the basis and legitimacy of such opinion. Admittedly, it can be difficult if not impossible to draw strict correlations between intangible general feelings of negativity and empirical evidence, but it is nonetheless necessary to shed light on the practice to provide for its livelihood and secure its reputation. To this end, this paper seeks to explore the history of the tattoo in Japan in order to understand the practice’s stigmatization. Consequently, this paper does not intend to challenge popular belief as much as it intends to make sense of it. Admittedly, the conclusions and results presented are largely dependent on a limited amount of diffuse data gathered by scholars and students of the topic – the following being merely my modest attempt to compile the evidence in a manner that offers a relatively objective look at the issue.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the importance and popularity of traditional Japanese craft was apparently diminishing. In 1950, the Law for Protection of Cultural Properties was instituted to protect the livelihood of these crafts, and the practitioners of these crafts were deemed “National Living Treasures” (Motegi 1984, p.103) by the government. Although the Japanese tattoo tradition is widely recognized as the final stage in the evolution of ornamental markings and one of the only remaining traditional practices of this particular art form, it would be absolutely unimaginable to anybody familiar with Japanese attitudes and society that a tattooist would ever be designated as a “National Living Treasure”. The reasons for the utter lack of regard for a traditional Japanese craft can ultimately be understood by an appeal to the history of the Japanese tattoo, or irezumi.

Without going into too much etymological detail, the word irezumi means “to insert ink” and is the word most typically translated as “tattoo”, although more specific terminology exists (chiefly used during the Edo period) for tattoos implying differing purposes. At this point it is necessary to note that tattoo is not definitively native to Japan,

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nor is it a definitively imported craft – that is to say, there has been some evidence of tattooing practices around the world dated to around the same periods of prehistory as in Japan, but there has been no conclusive evidence of the specific origins of tattoo (Mendi, 2004, pp. 42). The origin of tattooing itself is an interesting question, however it is outside the scope of this paper.

The traditional technique of tattooing uses manual pricking employing the two basic implements of needles and black India ink (which appears deep blue under the skin).

Thin needles are attached to a shaft of bamboo and range in length from two centimetres to twenty, as illustrated in Fig. 1 recorded by Wilhelm Joest (van Gulik, 1982, p.94).

The refinement of different sized needles is likely a development of later periods, but as there are few alternative means for inserting ink beneath human skin, it is reasonable to presume that similar albeit perhaps more archaic methods were used before the Edo period, just as modern tattoos are applied employing the same basic method despite being more automated. The tattooist applies ink directly onto the skin, and inserts the needle several millimeters deep into the skin in rapid, repetitive moments until the work is complete. This technique effectively imbeds the ink under the surface of the skin, rendering it indelible.

Fig. 1 Three tattooing needles arranged by thickness: (a) fine, (b) medium, (c) shading. (Joest, 1887, p. 72)

There is an issue of continuity in the history of the Japanese tattoo in that the available archeological evidence does not provide enough material for definitive links to be drawn between different historical periods. There are entire centuries, 600-1600 specifically, where there has been no evidence of the existence of the tattoo despite evidence being available for the centuries preceding and proceeding (van Gulik, 1982 p. 21). This is not to lay blame on archeological deficiencies as there may have very well been no intentional effort put forth to record the craft of tattoo, or any history for that matter, during the time. That being said, an in-depth look at the resources available dating from different periods of Japanese history, even in a slightly disjointed manner, along with an appeal to resources from other countries, can provide a relatively comprehensive image of tattoo stigmatization.

A History of Tattoo Stigmatization in Japan - Joanna Y. L. Lai

The following sections will fill in the picture firstly by establishing the earliest known appearances of tattoos in Jōmon and Yayoi period artifacts, progressing into the first evidence of stigmatization in the Kofun and Edo periods, and ending with a dissection of stigmatization from the post-war period onward.

Jōmon Period (ca. 10,000 BCE – 300 BCE)

Although intensive archeological research in the post-war years has yielded an abundant amount of evidence for a previously unknown old Stone Age culture in the Japanese islands, the majority of the artifacts found were stone tools, which provide no way to determine whether or not the people of this time decorated their bodies at all. However, the excavation of Jōmon sites throughout Japan several decades later yielded a large number of artifacts and materials that provided opportunities for hypotheses regarding the Jōmon period to be made (Klompfmakers, 1980, p. 39). The category of artifacts of these excavations that shed the most light on our topic are the clay figurines known as dōgu. These figurines often feature markings on the face and body that could be representative of tattoos, although it could just as easily indicate the prevalence of face painting or scarification. However, when the facial markings on the figurines are compared with markings on similar figurines of the same period from various locations in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, strong indications are provided that the markings on the dōgu are indeed evidence of tattoo (Takayama, 1969, p. 89). In particular, dōgu from the fourth and fifth Jōmon period heavily suggest the use of tattoos as body markings. Archeologist Esaka Teruya diagrammed the evolution of facial markings from the earliest to the latest Jōmon periods, as shown in Fig. 2.

The evidence available from the Jōmon period can only lead to tentative conclusions at best. Ultimately, uncertainty lies in the fact that not enough is known about the dōgu figurines to conclude that Jōmon peoples practiced tattooing on themselves.

The dōgu may very well be depictions of animals or deities, and the markings on the body and face could have been evidence of scarification or face paint. Furthermore, they may have even been entirely representational depictions suggesting nothing about reality. However endless the doubt, analyses and ethnographic comparisons made by Takayama and Esaka seem to present very strong Fig. 2 Facial markings on dōgu of the Jōmon conclusions that the Jōmon peoples had practiced period (Esaka, 1967, p.307) bodily or facial modification at some point in the later periods. As the existence of bodily and facial modification can only vaguely be suggested, the attitudes that the peoples of the Jōmon period towards tattoo, positive or negative, can not be at all confirmed with the information available.

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Yayoi Period (300 BCE – 300 CE)

Scholars continue to debate the continuity from the Jōmon to Yayoi periods in terms of carryover characteristics and culture. Nonetheless, archeological evidence shows that burial practices of the Yayoi period are far more similar to those of those of the population inhabiting the Japanese islands from the sixth century, while they are completely dissimilar from Jōmon period burial practices (Mendi, 2004, p.50). Thus the Yayoi culture and peoples may be classified as the first known emergence of what can be understood as a uniquely “Japanese” culture. During this time, two Chinese dynastic records make specific mention of tattoo in Yayoi Japan. The first reference, from “The History of Wei” (a part of the Records of the Three Kingdoms compiled by Chen Shou in the third century CE) mentions this about the inhabitants of Japan (or “Wa”): A son of the ruler of Shao-kang of Hsia, when he was enfeoffed as lord of K’uai-chi, cut his hair and decorated his body with designs in order to avoid the attack of serpents and dragons. The Wa, who are fond of diving into water to get fish and shells, also decorated their bodies in order to keep away large fish and waterfowl. Later however, the designs became merely ornamental. Designs on the body differ in the various countries [...] their position and size vary according to the rank of the individual (Tsunoda and Goodrich, 1951, p. 10).

The second mention of tattoo occurs in The History of the Later Han, and confirms the previous description of the Yayoi peoples: The men all tattoo their faces and adorn their bodies with designs. The position and size of pattern indicate the difference in rank (Tsunoda and Goodrich, 1951, p.21).

Although the texts seem might be intended as purely neutral observations from the perspective of the writer, it must be noted that the Chinese at the time regarded the practice of tattooing as abhorrent and characteristic only of savages (Tsunoda and Goodrich, 1951, p. 4). By making specific reference to tattoo, the description draws attention to their perceived savagery and barbarism, rendering it condescending and critical rather than tone-neutral. Of course, this can also be attributed to general feelings of animosity towards cultures and regions outside Chinese territory. The origins of the Chinese attitude towards this frequently practiced ritual in Yayoi Japan will not be covered in depth in this paper; the significance of these attitudes lie in their foreshadowing the future stigmatization of tattoos in Japan as Chinese ideals and values slowly become the standard amongst the elite of the proceeding Kofun period.

Kofun Period (300 – 600 CE) While the textual evidence of tattoo stigmatization in the Yayoi period is found strictly in the history of Chinese dynasties, three textual references to Kofun-period tattoo are found in the Nihonshoki, and two more are found in the Kojiki (Japanese documents;

A History of Tattoo Stigmatization in Japan - Joanna Y. L. Lai

Van Gulik, 1982, p.8). These five references display one of two distinct attitudes towards tattoos: the first of both the Nihonshoki and Kojiki excerpts are relatively neutral in tone; the latter evidently equate criminality and tattoos. The three passages from the Nihonshoki demonstrate this attitude transition, the first two being typically dated to around the middle of the Kofun period (Van Gulik 1982, p.10).

27th year, Spring, 2nd month, 12th day, Takenouchi no Sukune returned from the East country and informed the Emperor, saying: “In the Eastern wilds there is a country called Hitakami. The people of this country, both men and women, tie up their hair in the form of a mallet, and tattoo their bodies. They are of fierce temper and their general name is Emishi.

Moreover, their land is wide and fertile. We should attack them and take it. (Van Gulik, 1982, p.4)

At the time that the Nihonshoki was compiled, Chinese attitudes were prevalent amongst the Japanese elite. Thus the mention of tattoos on the Emishi people is an allusion to the stigma of barbarism imparted by their presence. The proceeding passages are amongst the first known textual records of tattooing as punishment for criminal behaviour, inadvertently linking the presence of tattoos to criminality (Van Gulik 1982, p.10). The third of the Nihonshoki excerpts, dating to the later Kofun period, also mentions punitive application of tattooing (Van Gulik, 1982, p.11): Winter, 10th month. A bird of the Bird-department was bitten by a dog belonging to a man of Uda and died. The emperor was angry, and tattooing him on the face, made him one of the Bird-keepers guild. (Van Gulik, 1982, p.4)

Similarly, in the Kojiki, the earlier-dated of the two excerpts seems less concerned with the presence of tattoo compared to the latter, in which criminality and tattoo are linked explicitly: Then, when O-kume-no-mikoto announced the emperor’s will to Isukeyori-hime, she saw the tattooing around the eyes of O-kume-no-mikoto; thinking it strange, she sang:

“Ame-tutu

Tidori masi toto- Why the tattooed eyes?”

Then O-kume-no-mikoto sang in reply:

“The better to meet Maidens face to face

Are my tattooed eyes” (Van Gulik, 1982, p. 14)

While this text does draw attention to the strangeness of tattooed eyes, it does not seem to imply much else. On the other hand, a later story states: When they arrived at Kariha-i in Yamashiro, as they were eating their provisions, an old man with a tattooed face came along and seized their provisions (Van Gulik, 1982, p.16)

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Here, the old man’s actions and his being labeled as tattooed can indicate that his tattoos were received as punishment for criminal behaviours.

Although the aforementioned excerpts certainly do not necessarily provide a comprehensive look at tattoo practice in the Kofun period, the presence of two very distinct stages can be drawn from the texts – the earlier Kofun period being a time where tattoos were still socially acceptable albeit “strange”, and the later Kofun period wherein tattoos started being considered as indication of criminality – undoubtedly due to adopted Chinese practices (Reed, 2000, p.363). These negative associations can be understood as the beginning of tattoo stigmatization – this viewpoint finally blossoming in the Edo period despite the popularity of tattoos among the characters of the “floating world”.

Edo Period (1600 – 1868 CE) The evidence for the practice of tattoo during the period between the Kofun and Edo period is scant at best. Van Gulik notes that a reference to punitive facial tattoo is made in the Jōei code of 1232, so it could be assumed that this was the only variety of tattoo available to the public.

Unfortunately, this does not give any explanation for the startling growth in popularity enjoyed by tattoos in the Edo period, and thus far no known case for voluntary ornamental tattooing has been made for the pre-Edo period, although its existence is possible considering the high level of development evident in Edo period Fig. 3 Edo period punitive tattoo markings on tattoos (Van Gulik, 1982, p.18). Thankfully the arm and forehead (Poysden, 2005, p.121) for our purposes, the Edo period tattoo is a practice for which there is overwhelming documentation and visual evidence, unsurprisingly becoming that which “traditional” Japanese tattoos today draw from. Because tattoos were still used as punitive measures during the Edo period (as seen in Fig. 3), certain terminology surfaced to distinguish between the voluntarily, self-inflicted tattoo and the punitive tattoo. The word irebokuro, meaning “to insert (a) mole” is typically used in reference to a small mark or character tattooed with connotations of being a love pledge. Similarly, horimono was adopted to distinguish figurative tattoos from punitive ones (Van Gulik, 1982, p.103).

Although tattoos flourished amongst the denizens of the “floating world” – progressing from simple script characters to elaborate body suits encouraged by the translation of Shih-Nai-an and Lo Kuang Chung’s Yuan period novel Shui-bu Chuan into the Japa-

A History of Tattoo Stigmatization in Japan - Joanna Y. L. Lai

nese version known as the Suikoden, it did so in spite of the government at the time. The Tokugawa bakufu was exceedingly conservative, basing its philosophy on the Chinese Confucian ideal , and since the Chinese had long regarded the tattoo as a particularly severe punishment, the Japanese government could not accept approval of non-punitive use of tattoos by the general populace (Van Gulik, 1982, p.98). During the Edo period, the Japanese government attempted countless times to issue regulations and prohibitions against the arts that flourished in the “floating world” such as kabuki theatre and ukiyo-e wood-block prints, along with tattoo (Van Gulik, 1982, p.98). A large number of laws were issued by the idealistic reformer Sadanobu; and in the year 1811 an edict forbidding tattooing was issued: Recently, carefree individuals have been propagating tattooing; they tattoo all sorts of pictures or characters on their whole body; they apply the tattooings in black ink and colours. It should be noted therefore that this custom and particularly the way in which the unblemished body is defiled, must certainly be called a scandal. Nevertheless, young people consider it fashionable and do not mind being mocked and laughed at by everyone behind their backs. Recently, quite a number of people are to be seen who have had themselves tattooed, and once they have started on this deplorable practice, it will even extend to the hands and feet eventually covering the entire body. Furthermore, even though the people who have themselves tattooed are of the opinion that others may perhaps approve, the decision has been taken, after mature consideration, to censor this highly improper behaviour that people freely tattoo themselves without any aversion. It is therefore forbidden as of this moment. Pass this order on! (Van Gulik, 1982, p.82)

One of the most important messages of the traditional tattoo in Japan is the dissidence of the wearer; that such edicts would be ignored by significant sections of the population should come as no surprise.

The clientele of Edo period tattoo can be summarized as the type of people who were known for their rowdy behaviours: chōnin, a sort of homogenous combination of the two lowest classes of society (artisans and craftsmen). Tanizaki Jun’ichiro summarizes the diversity of the clientele at the time in his work “Shisei”: People did all they could to beautify themselves, some even have pigments injected into their precious skins. Gaudy patterns of line and colour danced over men’s bodies. Visitors to the pleasure quarters of Edo preferred to hire palanquin bearers who were splendidly tattooed; courtesans of the Yoshiwara and the Tatsumi quarter fell in love with tattooed men.

Among those so adorned were not only gamblers, firemen, and the like, but members of the merchant class and samurai. Exhibitions were held from time to time; and the participants stripped to show off their filigreed bodies, would pat themselves proudly, boast of their own novel designs, and criticize each other’s merits.

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There is a fascinating aspect of the attitude towards tattoo in Japan that differs quite a bit from the Western attitude. In the West, a small, easily hidden tattoo can be disregarded and explained away as a mistake even though a large scale work may evoke more intense feelings of negativity. In Japan, there are only two categories: either a person is tattooed, or he is not (Poysden, 2005, p. 22). Keeping this in mind, the development from tattoos of simple characters in the early Edo period to ornate and colourful neck to ankle tattoos in the later Edo period is a question that has yet to be answered adequately. If the prevailing Japanese attitude permitted no gradations, then there would have been little reason to refrain from tattooing more Fig. 4: Kuniyoshi: “Yan Qin” Edo elaborate works from the start. Obviously, many Period, Obwada Collection factors can come into play, but scholars seem to attribute this development more or less entirely to the tattooed heroes of Suikoden, one of which is illustrated in Fig. 4 (Poysden, 2005, p. 41). Although it is somewhat of a legitimate correlation, an even more interesting question arises when one realizes that the illustrations accompanying the Suikoden were painted by ukiyo-e artists Hokusai and, later, Kuniyoshi in his own version of the work (Van Gulik, 1982, p.103). The original text explicitly mentions the heroes’ tattoos, but the illustrations are entirely unique works by the aforementioned artists – and whether the artists drew inspiration from their own imaginations and consequently influenced the Edo period tattoo style, or the artists drew inspiration from the tattooed people of their time, is entirely up for debate. Did their art attempt to imitate the life around them, or did the life around them resultantly imitate their art?

Although the art of Edo period tattoo is certainly of heavy interest to art enthusiasts and tattoo aficionados, it can be said in brief that this specific style of tattoo, regardless of subject matter, is largely ornamental (Van Gulik, 1982, p.68). Furthermore, the fashion amongst the chōnin to become elaborately tattooed can also be explained simply as an attempt to enhance prestige and identify themselves as a part of their societal group.

Naturally, strong group identification through a medium as specific as tattoo involuntarily creates a stigma that resulted in the equally specific association of tattoos with lower classes of artists and tradesmen, alongside criminals, courtesans, and gamblers.

With such a strong sense of class-consciousness in Edo period society, tattoo culture flourished alongside a growing stigma among the untattooed populace.

A History of Tattoo Stigmatization in Japan - Joanna Y. L. Lai

Modern Period (1868 – present) The end of the golden age of Japanese tattoo came to a halt with the onset of the 20th century. With the end of the Tokugawa bakufu and the dawn of the Meiji Restoration, the new central government concluded that tattooing would be seen by outsiders as a sign of barbarism, and rigorous efforts were made to close tattoo establishments and discourage its practice (Sekai Daihyakka Jiten, 1981, p. 463). Ironically, it was not forbidden for non-Japanese citizens to have tattoos, and thus began the exportation of traditional Japanese tattoos via the bodies of foreign sailors, travelers, and apparently British royalty including the likes of Prince Louis of Battenberg, the Duke of York (later King George V) and the Duke of Clarence (Burchett, 1958, p.104).

Today, the full body tattoo is more often than not identified with yakuza – those involved in gambling, prostitution, drugs, and a plethora of anti-social activity. A mythology surrounds the yakuza in Japan and its most recognizable identifying trait is the tattoo – the visual reminder to which the average Japanese responds when he or she associates tattooing more or less exclusively with yakuza (Poysden, 2005, p.52). Significant amounts of documentation in the field of Japanese cultural studies stress the pressures to conform to various norms, usually exerted by one’s peers – it would not be unreasonable to believe that persons involved in the yakuza participate in the tattoo tradition strictly due to overt pressure from peer members to demonstrate their solidarity (Saga, 1997, p.14).

Nonetheless, the tattoo stigma is undoubtedly fueled by projections of tattoo-covered gang members in popular movies and video games, and even by sentiments carried over from history; it is not an acceptable explanation for the overwhelmingly negative attitude toward tattoos today (Saga, 1997, p.23). After all, how has the entire chōnin population that so identified with tattoo in the Edo period seemingly disappeared within one century, resulting in significantly fewer people to carry on the tradition? A reasonable explanation lies in an often publicized government statistic found in various economic journals concerning the Japanese economy and class structure. The statistic reveals that an alleged ninety percent or more of Japanese regard themselves as belonging to the “middle class” – and although there has been much debate regarding the legitimacy of the statistic – it possibly reflecting only the tatemae side of Japanese society (since comparative quantitative studies suggest that Japanese patterns of socioeconomic inequality show no large deviance from those of other late capitalist countries), if the central Meiji government was on any level successful in its modernization of Japan (as it was, evidently), instituting universal education and promoting literacy via a government-controlled framework thereby preparing the citizenry’s entry into a modern, industrial economy – then a large number of the former lower classes could very well have disappeared within a century (Martin and Olenik, 2005, p.261). Since the tattoo in Japan has been more often than not self-inflicted “dark marks” of the lower classes or government inflicted “dark marks” of criminality historically and strongly thought to be associated with the

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yakuza currently, the general decline of tattoo enthusiasm and increased stigmatization of tattooed persons can be attributed to a largely diminishing population of persons who identify with the lower classes since the beginning of the 20th century.

As mentioned previously, one of the universal messages of the traditional Japanese tattoo, regardless of wearer or its content, is his dissidence – not simple non-conformity in the “conformity to non-conformity” sense very present in modern Japan, but a higher degree of non-conformity that transcends trends such as hair styles or clothing (Hambly, 1974, p.3). This dissidence, instead of the imagined connection to yakuza today, may be why authority has always and continues to be consistently anti-tattoo, and why the masses follow with a public consensus shortly thereafter.

The stigma surrounding the Japanese tattoo seems to have always existed throughout the history of Japan proper (that is, with the possible exclusion of the early Jōmon culture), and does not appear to waver. The so-called yakuza connection, along with the diminishing number of practitioners and clients willing to invest time and large amounts of money in the traditional Japanese tattoo will undoubtedly lead to its eventual disappearance in its native land. Nonetheless, however insignificant authorities may consider the public preservation of the traditional tattoo, and however permanent the stigma, the Japanese tattoo will continue to be studied, dissected, and and recognized as a small but proportionally incredibly significant aspect of Japanese culture.

Works Cited

Bratt, Marco, and Mark Poysden. A History of Japanese Body Suit Tattooing. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2005.

Burchett, George, and Peter Leighton. Memoirs of a Tattooist: From The Notes, Diaries And Letters Of The Late ‘King Of Tattooists’. Compiled And Edited By Peter Leighton. New York: Crown, 1958.

Hambly, Wilfrid Dyson. The History of Tattooing and Its Significance: With Some Account of Other Forms of Corporal Marking. Detroit: H. F.& G. Witherby, 1974.

Kitamura, Katie M., and Takahiro Kitamura. Tattoos of the Floating World: Ukiyo-E Motifs in Japanese Tattoo. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2003.

Klompmakers, Inge. Of Brigands and Bravery: Kuniyoshi’s Heroes of the Suikoden. New York: Koninklijk Instituut Voor de Trope, 1980.

Lewis, Charlton, W. Scott Morton, and J. Kenneth Olenik. Japan: Its History and Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005.

Mendl, Wolf. Japan & Southeast Asia V1. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Kiyoko, Motegi. “Aural Learning in Gidayū-Bushi: Music of the Japanese Puppet Theatre.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 16 (1984): 97-108.

Reed, Carrie E.. “Tattoo in Early China.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 120 (2000): 360-376, http://www.jstor.org/stable/606008.

Saga, Junichi. Confessions of a Yakuza: A Life in Japan’s Underworld. New York: Kodansha International, 1997.

Tsunoda, Ryusaku, and L. Carrington Goodrich. Japan in the Chinese Dynastic Histories. New York: Perkins Asiatic Monographs, 1951.

Van Gulik, Willem R.. Irezumi: The pattern of dermatography in Japan (Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden). Leiden: BRILL, 1982.

When it comes to Chinese New Year (whenever that is, it seems to be different every year, like everything else), they always have a huge feast of a human heart (not the leg), snake, swallow and elephant1as if we didn’t have enough last year; I don’t know why they call it “New.”

I always know what to say as they come and go, as I go and come back, and I know it’s right because I see the smiles.

The brief smiles they exchange with one another, so warm it makes my heart ache like a hand scorched by the heat of the candle inside a lantern, the one I had lit with the love I never received.

I can speak Chinese, and I speak it well.

Vinci Ting

Speaking Chinese Orientations Volume Nine : Transcultural Perspectives on Asia

They don’t like red roses much; they’re different.

At first, they might see us from a distance and come towards us, ready to pluck.

They pull at you, and pull, and pull, and pull

Whenever I visit, I enjoy the feeling of coming back to an exotic home.

Like the feeling a child has when he explores the attic of his grandparents’ house (even though there wereno attics or houses in my grandparents’ time), or when he is playing in the garden behind the house, pulling out trees and planting rose bushes instead.

Sometimes I gaze perpetually at the moon on the water, the full moon that we celebrate every now and then reflected on that water, the same water that separates me from the celebration.

I find myself drowning in it, trying to swim, from time to time.

Speaking Chinese - Vinci Ting

I like books, but I speak Chinese too.

I never understand them Chinese people, They think me simple, even though I speak Chinese.

“Ma-ma,” I say, talking to my other grandmother one day (because Chinese people always say one thing and mean another), “I’ve brought you a present- a book- from the West, just like I’m supposed to, the Chinese way.”

She takes one look at it and replies, “We Chinese people don’t need such things; don’t waste your (or my) time.”

So I took it (and myself) away.

But I’m not really a rose. I can speak Chinese.

I can count from one to ten, to the hundred, to the thousand, to the thousand things I cannot do.

until they see that you’re a beautifully defected plant 2 and toss you away into the corner of the mahjong table , roots and all.

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2: A tile that is extra is placed at the corner of the table during a mahjong game and is called 花 (fa), the same character for “flower”.

1: Word play on the sounds of characters in the Chinese saying “人心不足蛇吞象,” which translates to “a man’s heart unsatisfied is like a snake that swallows an elephant.”

This means that man always wants more than what he can hold.

“In Chinese or in English?”

So I ask them, as politely as I can,

“You are so easy to read,” is what I’m always told; but I think they mean difficult, since, you know, they always say one thing and mean another.

Speaking Chinese - Vinci Ting

The Evolution of Calligraphy and Writing in Mao’s China - Guillaume Lamothe

The Evolution of Calligraphy and Writing in Mao’s China Guillaume Lamothe

The Archetype of the “Calligrapher”: Feudal Officials and Wandering Revolutionaries As Mao Zedong read aloud the document establishing the founding of the PRC on October 1st, 1949, he was perfectly aware that the literacy levels across China were nowhere near those required for the modern industrialized state he wished to create. Across the country, over 80% of the people were functional illiterates, incapable of reading anything but the simplest of texts.[1] Of the remaining twenty percent, those who could write well, according to the old calligraphic principles, were increasingly few. Pencils and fountain pens were easier to find than brushes in China since the time of the May Fourth movement. A strict adherence to the old calligraphic principles was no longer necessary for the large majority of the literate public, who only needed to produce passable characters for everyday life. Even Lu Xun, the PRC’s most revered modern writer, was a particularly unenthusiastic calligrapher and saw the ritual associated with the practice as emblematic of everything wrong with China’s old feudal elites.[2] Like Shen Yinmo, those who still practiced calligraphy as a serious art often had problems making ends meet, and were victims of the bad social implications of their craft.[3] Within this turn away from the old calligraphic tradition, it is surprising that the amount of commercial calligraphy was, in fact, increasing during the 1940s, spurred on by the growth in demand for billboards and advertisements in China’s recovering urban economy.[4] Meanwhile, the demand for calligraphy as art was decreasing. While mediocre calligraphers were living well by painting billboards, traditional calligraphers like Ye Gongchuo, were unable to find customers outside of the foreign concessions, and perceived as hopeless reactionaries.[5] Others, like Deng Sanmu, were only able to overcome their craft’s negative reputation through generous public contributions to progressive newspapers.[6] The negative public reaction, against this archetype of the calligrapher as a feudal offical, was forcing calligraphy to take on a decidedly proletarian turn even before the Communist takeover.

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Away from the cities, however, a new archetype of the calligrapher was being born. Historian Richard Kraus terms this archetype “the calligrapher as a wandering revolutionary”.[7] Mao Zedong, of his own account, traveled the Jianxi-Fujian border areas with a special bag for brush, ink, paper and inkstone, where he joked, “I’ll use the four treasures of the scholar’s studio to defeat the four big families of the Guomindang.”[8] Shu Tong, later the head of the National Calligrapher’s Association, was known during the Long March as the “horseback calligrapher”, because he so often wrote verses while the army was on the move.[9] Guo Moruo describes in his autobiography that when he tried to buy a jacket while traveling in a remote town, the shopkeeper asked him to write a piece of calligraphy as payment, as intellectuals did not come often to his village.[10] The experiences of the revolution and of the civil war helped bring Communist wandering revolutionaries into contact with a large number of Chinese people.

For a wandering revolutionary, good calligraphy was practical in several ways. It not only allowed for attractive propaganda, but it also spoke to the erudition and quality of character of the revolutionary in question. This explicit link between morality and calligraphy was still very strong in the 1940s and survives to this day. In this, the Communists followed very closely in the old Imperial tradition.[11] Where the calligraphic archetype of the “wandering revolutionary” differs from that of the “feudal official” is on the issue of content. For a revolutionary, art had to have a direct social impact: Communist art workers had two tasks (...) The first was educational: to quickly train many art cadres (...) to serve the workers, peasants and soldiers. The second was productive: to use modern printing technology to issue art in large quantities for the masses.[12] Along these two principles, the sole purpose of calligraphy, like the other arts, was to further the cause of the revolution. While revolutionary calligraphers certainly made an effort to establish a link between themselves and the past by showing deep reverence towards traditional calligraphy (Mao, for example, regularly quoted Li Bai’s poetry),[13] the “wandering revolutionaries” copied little classic calligraphy while producing a lot of their own works, unlike the “feudal officials”. These works, mostly slogans or poems, would often formed a new canon of calligraphy; it is very telling that, under Mao, most calligraphers felt safer copying Communist poems and slogans than Yan Zhengqing’s classic pieces.[14] The 1940s had thus seen the emergence of another popular vision of what it could mean to be a “good” calligrapher: that the attractive, comprehensible, and purposeful calligraphy of the “wandering revolutionary” was accepted in the public imaginary as proof of his erudition, gentlemanly character, and social righteousness.

Calligraphy for the Elite: Calligraphy as Art With the fall of the Guomindang, the new China gave rise to two venues within which the elite could practice calligraphy as an art. If, like Mao Zedong, Guo Moruo, or Kang Sheng, one was perceived along the lines of the wandering revolutionary arche-

The Evolution of Calligraphy and Writing in Mao’s China - Guillaume Lamothe

-type, then one could disseminate one’s own calligraphy for political purposes. Indeed, “the greater one’s fame and influence, the more likely one’s zi (characters) will be revered as art.”[15] If a Communist leader was incapable of producing decent calligraphy at the very least, a few options remained open to him. He could either hire a ghostwriter, or show his skill in other proletarian activities, like the Labour Union Chief Ni Zhifu, who regularly showed his skill in operating machine tools.[16] On the other hand, if one truly was a skilled calligrapher, then one could attain a position of artistic authority under the auspices of the Communist Party without necessarily becoming involved in direct politics after. This was the case for most calligraphers who had previously fit under the “feudal official” archetype. Emblematic of this is the story of Li Kuchang, a calligrapher and guohua artist who, as a victim of popular hostility against the feudalism of his art, lacked official employment in 1949. Worried about his future, Li managed to write an impressive calligraphic request for work in caoshu to none other than the new Chairman, Mao Zedong. Unbeknownst to Li, caoshu was Mao’s favourite style of calligraphy, and within a month Mao had solved Li’s unemployment problem.[17] The politician calligraphers, however, such as Mao, Zhou Enlai, or Chen Yi, all followed in the time-honoured tradition of publicly using their calligraphy to bolster their political authority. This was certainly nothing new: calligraphy had been a part of politics for hundreds of years. High officials, and even sometimes the emperor, had indicated personal support for particular projects or installations by writing a few characters (xie jige zi). In the ubiquitous web of Chinese guanxi, (social relations), this indicated a special connection between the calligrapher and the public area (restaurant, museum, bank, art gallery, etc.) in which his calligraphy was displayed.[18] By displaying a leader’s calligraphy, a particular institution was “borrowing the authority of the leader, which was itself expanded in the process.”[19] The Communists were perfectly willing to pursue this cultural tradition; it is told that, in his days as a humble book store owner in Changsha, Mao Zedong wrote to the provincial governor Tan Yankai, asking if it would be possible for him to write the sign for his store.[20] The Communists, however, took the traditional link between politics and calligraphy to an entirely new level of importance. There are three reasons for this: a technological reason, a political reason, and a diplomatic reason. Technologically, with the advent of modern printing and carving techniques, it had become much easier by 1949 for an individual leader with money to make his characters accessible to a wide audience. During the Republican Period, Sun Yat-Sen had been among the first to use modern technology in disseminating his calligraphy, by having his characters “wei renmin fuwu” carved on the front of many new public buildings. Mao Zedong went a step further than him by having his calligraphy engraved, not only on public buildings (such as the new Martyrs’ Memorial in Tian An Men), but also on a wide range of household necessities such as

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calendars and flower vases to teapots and small porcelain busts of himself.[21] Coupled with the later necessity of owning a copy of the Little Red Book, Mao’s calligraphy became present, in one form or another, in almost every Chinese household. This led the populace to become extremely familiar towards his handwriting, and by 1966, it seemed that almost every literate person in China could instantly recognize Mao Zedong’s characters.[22] In addiction to his particular political position, this gave Mao’s calligraphy unprecedented power during the Cultural Revolution.

The second reason for the rise in the political importance of calligraphy under Mao was rooted in the Communist political system itself: in an uncertain world of struggle sessions and rightist deviations, owning a piece of calligraphy by someone better politically positioned than oneself was among the best guarantees of safety. Guo Moruo was perfectly aware of this by 1928: when he received an inscription from Mao Zedong with the request that he forward it to a revolutionary base in Jingangshan, Guo decided to keep it for himself instead, proudly displaying it in his study as proof of his close relationship with the Chairman, a useful defense should anyone later question his political integrity.[23]More than simply indicating guanxi, however, the state of a leader’s public calligraphy also became a good barometer of his political fortunes. After Lin Biao’s defection and death, for example, his calligraphy was hastily removed from around the country, and further editions of the Little Red Book were published without his calligraphic preface.[24] The same thing happened to the head of the secret police Kang Sheng; villified after his death, his calligraphy (most notably the masthead for the magazine Wenwu) was quickly removed or replaced.[25] Even among those whose political fortunes were good, there seemed to have been a certain level of competition over who could get their characters written where; Mao Zedong criticizing Guo Moruo in the early 1960s for writing too many inscriptions is emblematic of this.[26] Also, national institutions such as The People’s Republic of China or The Chinese Communist Party were always expressed in neutral printed characters, and were too great for any individual to personalize.[27] The third reason for the rise in the political importance of calligraphy was because of its use in diplomacy. Although China had been using its national culture for hundreds of years, sending abroad gifts of porcelain, silk, calligraphy, or pandas as symbols of imperial favour, the Communists found calligraphy to be of particular use when dealing with Japan, whose government they had no official contact with until 1972.[28] In the absence of official political relations, cultural contacts assumed great importance, and it was a mark of Cold War Sino-Japanese diplomacy, that cultural exchanges always preceded economic or political ones. This is not to say that the Communists could not put the cultural exchange of calligraphy to good political use; the linking of art and ideology is clear in Guo Moruo’s 1955 visit to Tokyo, during which he gave a gift of an inscription “Seek Truth From Facts,” a quote directly from the Chairman.[29] Interestingly,

The Evolution of Calligraphy and Writing in Mao’s China - Guillaume Lamothe

Sino-Japanese calligraphic rivalry seems to have, in fact, encouraged the study of calligraphy as an art in the PRC. In 1957, an impressive exhibition of Japanese calligraphy convinced Shen Yinmo that “if China was to exploit calligraphy effectively in terms of improving its relations with Japan, then Chinese calligraphers (...) would need the same high degree of official backing as was enjoyed by their Japanese counterparts.”[30] Taking this matter up with the Chairman, in 1960, Shen was made head of the new Shanghai Calligraphy and Seal Carving Research Association, designed to foster the formation of Chinese calligraphers capable of competing with those of the Japanese.[31] Thus, under Mao, calligraphy for the elite was able to achieve the status of art, whether it was through the calligrapher’s genuine talent or his political position. Politically, calligraphy was used to increase one’s own authority, both by publicly disseminating it as an authority booster, and by exchanging it to strengthen one’s position in the tangled web of guanxi. The diplomatic use of calligraphy as art was also well recognized by the Communist party, who saw it as a useful tool of national culture to use in dealing with other nations, particularly Japan.

Calligraphy for the People: Ideological Repositioning The early years of the PRC were marked by significant intra-party debates over the future of the entire system of Chinese characters. The left posited two main reasons for their abandonment: the first was that an alphabetic writing system would make mass literacy easier, a presently debatable notion considering the current high literacy rates across East Asia. The second was more complicated but ideological: Chinese characters, traditionally being products of elitist feudal culture, were considered inherently reactionary.

Chen Duixu, the Dean of Beijing University, summed up the left’s view: “The Chinese script cannot communicate new things and new principles. It is, furthermore, the home of rotten and poisonous thought.”[32] With the establishment of the People’s Republic, however, the old archetype of the evil “feudal official calligrapher” was largely replaced by that of the good “wandering revolutionary calligrapher”. Though the leftist drive for romanization would officially continue until 1958, when Zhou Enlai finally asserted that “historically, Chinese characters can never be eradicated”, Mao Zedong issued a clear rebuttal against the main ideological pillar of romanization as early as 1951, declaring that calligraphy was “a neutral battleground on which class conflict was taking place. (...) if the proletariat did not take the lead in calligraphy, as in music, painting, and chess, then the bourgeoisie certainly would.”[33] This entailed that characters were class-neutral, a position diametrically opposed from Chen Duixu’s.

By officially stripping calligraphy of its class association, Mao was ensuring that this most classically bourgeois of Chinese arts could be used to advance the revolution. It was with no evident irony that, in 1949, he used his classic calligraphy in a performance

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in which he wrote publicly, “Cast away the old, bring forth the new.”[34] Viewed in this light, calligraphy could then become a weapon of the proletariat in the revolutionary struggle. Concretely, this new ideological position would most affect education; the Party launched mass literacy drives, in complete defiance of the elitism which had surrounded both calligraphy and the characters of which it was composed. As it is impossible to teach one how to read and write characters without teaching him at least basic calligraphic principles, it is safe to say that these literacy campaigns brought an unbelievable number of Chinese into the realm of calligraphy.

It is perhaps natural that these literacy drives changed the face of calligraphy in several ways, the first and most obvious being the simplification of characters. The first list of 515 was published in 1956, followed by a second, much larger one in 1964, bringing the total to over 2000 simplified characters. Interestingly, though many of these simplifications came from unorthodox versions of characters used in the marketplace, which would have been considered vulgar a few years before, a large number were also, at Mao’s request, based on literati caoshu.[35] As calligraphy continued to expand, it also moved beyond the world of the brush. While Lu Xun had mocked outdated decrees that banned the importation of pens and pencils into China, by the early 1950s, the new regime was publishing affordable guides on how to write calligraphy using fountain pens.[36] These pens, in fact, even became fashionable for city officials;[37] they were perceived as more practical and proletarian than the outdated, feudal brushes. For a non-elite, there was always the danger of criticism for taking too much interest in calligraphy as an art. Though the “Party had concluded that calligraphy could not – or would not – be eliminated, (...) many still nervously sensed its association with traditional elite culture.”[38] Even if it was simply aesthetically pleasing, writing with a pen or pencil provided a clear way of avoiding being branded as a reactionary.

Although writing well aesthetically was a bureaucratic necessity in the PRC (both Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, for example, demanded high calligraphic proficiency of their underlings),[39] being seen as taking too deep an interest in the art of calligraphy could lead to accusations of being “divorced from ordinary workers and peasants.”[40] It is an important distinction between Maoist elite and popular calligraphy that only the elite could flaunt established bureaucratic conventions. The idiosyncratic level allowed in one’s writing was directly proportional to one’s political authority.

Thus, in its early years, the PRC did away with the outdated idea of calligraphy and characters as inherently reactionary, and launched mass literacy campaigns aimed at helping the proletariat “take the lead in calligraphy.” This ideological repositioning led to concrete changes in the social role and aesthetic appearance of calligraphy, as simplified, proletarian characters were made available to a wide audience using modern writing implements. As literacy levels increased, the idea of calligraphy as a weapon of the proletariat moved into the realm of possibility, spurred on by exhortations from Mao Zedong and the Party Center, who, nevertheless, kept for themselves the social right to write for

The Evolution of Calligraphy and Writing in Mao’s China - Guillaume Lamothe

artistic purposes. Nowhere would this popular calligraphy find a more spectacular and socially significant expression than in the “Big Character Posters”, or DaZiBao. Da Zi Bao By 1956, Mao Zedong was ready to launch the first of his attempts to make the Chinese people participate in what he saw as China’s continuous revolution. A “democratic wall” was put up on the campus of Peking University, and intellectuals were invited to paste handwritten posters on it to make their views heard.[41] Guo Moruo, writing a few couplets to commemorate the occasion, inadvertently gave the new movement its name: the Hundred Flowers Campaign.[42] Soon, however, the democratic wall bristled with frank criticism against both the government and the Party, who responded by pasting its own handwritten signs condemning its critics as “rightists”.[43] Within weeks, hundreds of leading intellectuals were rounded up and arrested.[44]This was the first time- though not the last- that DaZiBao were used in a massive propaganda campaign attempting to link the people to the wider political process. But what exactly were DaZiBao? The idea of “Big Character Posters”, or DaZiBao, was not fundamentally new; large, handwritten posters had been used to convey information since the Imperial period, and most revolutionary intellectuals (Mao among them) had put up DaZiBao at some point in their life, finding them a useful means to spread their ideas without the printing resources.[45] The Soviets had also been using similar techniques in the 1920s with their “wall newspapers”, though by the 1950s they had largely fallen out of use in the USSR.[46] In China, however, the DaZiBao flourished, first proliferating during the abortive 1956 Hundred Flowers Campaign, and then again in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward. In fact, a Yugoslav professor visiting the National University of Peking in 1958 remarked that “the making of posters had become the first and foremost method of general education and political indoctrination.”[47] DaZiBao mirrored the social structure of calligraphy itself, in that every reader was also a potential producer.

The idea of DaZiBao was that they- having no fixed format, length, or style- were able to take on any role, from news reports, directives or orders, to proposals, praise or criticism. Their contents, though often regional in nature, ranged from the mundane to the erudite. One particularly amusing example was that of a DaZiBao condemning a local cook for making “half-done” millet, with the DaZiBao right next to it being the cook condemning his accuser for always complaining about his meals.[48] Deng Xiaoping stated that the practical value of DaZiBao lay in their ability to be “turned into an important forum for constantly developing criticism and self-criticism in the factories, offices, or schools,” as well as helping “the full and frank expression of opinions among workers.”[49] Big Character Posters were seen as a means for the newly literate people to express themselves.

Of course, however, by 1958 the DaZiBao were closely supervised; Mao had learned in 1956 of the possible happenings if the masses were left to write whatever they wanted.

Production was handled almost like a newspaper, and every government department and

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bureau were instructed by the Communist Party to “establish a tatzepao publishing unit and put up tatzepao regularly.”[50] When everything went well, the propaganda gains were significant; when the Party enforced the much-resented agricultural commune system, for example, it could boast that “the masses posted more than 30 000 sheets of tatzepao in a few days, resolutely asking to join the people’s commune.”[51] DaZiBao could give a relatively unpopular policy the veneer of popular support.

The most impressive thing about the DaZiBao was perhaps their abundance; though the exact number is uncertain, hundred of millions of them seem to have been posted up during the Maoist era. For example, during the “Double-Anti” campaign of 1958, the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party reported that over 100 million DaZiBao had been posted up, more than a third of them within “six or seven days.”[52] A Soviet Chemist, also writing in 1958, was more descriptive: (...) imagine my amazement when (...) I found every wall of the vestibule and corridor literally papered with these multicoloured sheets. On the second day, the sea of paper had risen up to the staircase and, on the third day, it was all over the second floor. Apparently, the walls of every corridor were not sufficient to carry everything the Chinese wanted to say, for I found a line stretched down the middle of the hall with tatzepao hung front it like wash hung out to dry.[53] Though impressive, the proliferation of Big Character Posters should have been hardly surprising. Mao Zedong had not only declared them “the best form of struggle, which is beneficial to the proletariat but damaging to the bourgeois,” but he had also positively encouraged their mass production: If you have 10 000 sheets of tatzepao in your plant, that is first class. If you have 5 000 sheets, that is second class. If you have only a few scattered sheets here and there, then you don’t count at all.[54] Mao was perhaps more aware of the power of DaZiBao than any other Communist leader, a fact which became apparent with his reluctant abdication of the state chairmanship in 1958, after the first failures of the Great Leap Forward. Sidelined from the official media, he was almost certainly instrumental in the 1966 setting up of Nie Yuanzi’s DaZiBao criticizing Peking University’s leadership, widely regarded as the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.[55] With the Cultural Revolution, writing DaZiBao went from being regarded as a weapon of the proletariat to becoming an ideological duty. Even illiterates became expected to produce them by asking others to help them write.[56] Renmin Ribao clearly summarized the attitude to take when it declared that “all revolutionary masses like Big Character Posters.”[57] Not writing DaZiBao during the Cultural Revolution was considered nonproletarian; even non-political people such as the ping-pong champion Zhuang Zedong felt pressure to become involved, picking up the brush to signal his desire to rebel.[58] DaZiBao thus became a sort of enforced spontaneity by which people regularly became expected to spontaneously voice their support for the Communist regime.

The Evolution of Calligraphy and Writing in Mao’s China - Guillaume Lamothe

In July 1966, it became clear that the launching of the Cultural Revolution was an attempt

by Mao to use unorthodox communication methods to regain influence at the expense of his Party rivals. Receiving a nicely written DaZiBao stating “Long live the proletarian revolutionary spirit of rebellion!” from the first group of students to call themselves Red Guards, Mao replied, “to rebel is justified (zaofan you li).”[59] Just a few days later, Mao wrote the heading for a Renmin Ribao article which he entitled “Bombard the Headquarters – My First Big Character Poster”, a literal justification for a top level purge of the Communist Party.[60] That “Bombard the Headquarters”, apart from its calligraphic title, was essentially a normal newspaper article and, in fact, not even Mao Zedong’s first Big Character Poster, emphasized the significance which the Chairman placed on associating himself with the proletarian calligraphy exemplified by the DaZiBaos of Nie Yuanzi and the Red Guards. Though he continued to write classically inspired poems, Mao Zedong clearly wanted to be seen as a proletarian calligrapher, writing Big Character Posters like everybody else.

Although the Cultural Revolution was a particularly inhospitable time for elite calligraphy with the campaign against the “Four Olds” underway, it also saw the explosion of DaZiBao and proletarian calligraphy. As self-righteous Red Guards ransacked the homes of well-known calligraphers such as Shen Yinmo and Pan Tianshou, destroying their calligraphy as symbols of bourgeois feudalism, they also had calligraphic battles amongst themselves, the winner being selected to “copy out manifestos and proclamations and to prepare forceful characters for armbands and newspaper mastheads.”[61] In fact, the calligraphic needs of the Red Guards became so great that the government art-publishing houses decided to publish booklets for them to help them write attractive characters. They based their instructions, without any irony, on the works of classic masters such as Ouyang Xun and Yan Zhenqing.[62] Once more in the People’s Republic, classical calligraphy was being promoted just as it was being destroyed.

DaZiBao and the context in which they were made thus epitomized the new ideological position of proletarian calligraphy. Touted as the best method of struggling against the bourgeoisie and helping the workers express their frank opinions using their newly acquired calligraphic skills, their production was nonetheless brought under the strict oversight of the party. Their role changed somewhat during the Cultural Revolution, as they not only became an ideological duty for most Chinese, but also a Red Guard weapon used by Mao to dislodge his political opponents. And though DaZiBao were seen as representing everything that was new, good and proletarian in the new China, they were still written based on the calligraphy of the classic masters.

Conclusion Thus, as we have seen, the evolution of calligraphy under Mao was steeped in contradictions, alternating from headstrong rejection of its feudal nature to grudging compromise in the face of its necessity with regards to writing. Calligraphy’s early days in the PRC were marked by the gradual emergence of the “calligrapher as wandering revolutionary” archetype, which provided a socially acceptable alternative to the hated “calligraphers

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feudal official”. These new revolutionary calligraphers, with their new ideological concept of proletarian calligraphy, launched literacy drives to bring characters to the masses.

Once the masses were made literate, they became expected to produce written support, DaZiBao, for the regime. Yet, as the DaZiBao proclaimed the death of the Old China, they were still written using classic models of calligraphy.

Thus, the PRC, despite its best efforts, could never rid itself of its calligraphic tradition, and the history of calligraphy under Mao is one of compromises with its uneasy feudal heritage. Characters were retained though simplified, and such simplified characters were from a mix of popular and elite shorthand forms. The brush was kept, though mostly for the elite, as well as controlled propaganda such as DaZiBao; Red Guards wrote rebellious DaZiBao, though basing themselves on Yan Zhengqing’s classic calligraphy.

Classic calligraphy was still written, despite the purpose of writing being about the uselessness of traditions, and the list continues on. Calligraphy under Mao underwent one of the most momentous changes in its long history, and studying the ways in which it has changed from 1949 to 1976 shows us a clear example of the competition between not only two popular archetypes of the “calligrapher”, but also between a classic Chinese national tradition and an internationalist modern philosophy.

[1] pg. 75 [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38]

Brushes With Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy, Kraus, R.C., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, Ibid, pg. 76 The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China, Barrass, G.S., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, pg. 68 Ibid, pg. 41 Ibid, pg. 76 Ibid, pg. 100 Kraus, R.C., 1991, pg. 58 Ibid, pg. 58 Ibid, pg. 60 Ibid, pg. 58 Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society, Yen, Y., New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005, pg. 33 Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, Frances, J., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, pg. 3 Barrass, G.S., 2002, pg. 116-117 Ibid, pg. 43 Yen, Y., 2005, pg. 31 Kraus, R.C., 1991, pg. 83 Frances, J., 1994, pg. 220 Yen, Y., 2005, pg. 20 Kraus, R.C., 1991, pg. 105 Ibid., pg. 56 Yen, Y., 2005, pg. 3 Kraus, R.C., 1991, pg. 12 Barrass, G.S., 2002, pg. 84 Yen, Y., pg. 111 Kraus, R.C., 1991, pg. 114 Ibid, pg. 119 Barrass, G.S., 2002, pg. 45 Nixon in China, MacMillan, M., Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 2006, pg. 147 Kraus, R.C., 1991, pg. 59 Barrass, G.S., 2002, pg. 71 Kraus, R.C., 1991, pg. 146 Kraus, R.C., 1991, pg. 76 Ibid., pgs. 77, 78 Ibid., pg. 72 Kraus, R.C., 1991, pg. 77 Ibid., pg. 82 Barrass, G.S., 2002, pg. 46 Ibid., pg. 79

The Evolution of Calligraphy and Writing in Mao’s China - Guillaume Lamothe [39] Ibid., pg. 71 [40] Kraus, R.C., 1991, pg. 79 [41] TaTzePao: Its History and Significance as a Communication Medium, Poon, D.J., pg. 189 in Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns, Chu, G., Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1978 [42] Barrass, G.S., 2002, pg. 46 [43] Poon, D.J., 1978, pg. 189 [44] Barras, G.S., 2002, pg. 47 [45] Poon, D.J., 1978, pg. 185 [46] Ibid., pg. 185 [47] Ibid., pg. 187 [48] Ibid., pg. 189 [49] Ibid., pg. 189, 190 [50] Ibid., pg. 192 [51] Ibid., pg. 191 [52] Poon, D.J., 1978, pgs. 190, 191 [53] Ibid., pg. 186 [54] Ibid., pg. 186 [55] Mao’s Last Revolution, MacFarquhar, R.&Schoenhals, M., Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006, pg. 106 [56] Ibid., pg. 192 [57] Ibid., pg. 198 [58] Kraus, R.C., 1991, pg. 98 [59] Ibid., pg. 88 [60] Ibid., pg. 91 [61] Kraus, R.C., 1991, pg. 98 [62] Barrass, G.S., 2002, pg. 49

Works Cited 1) The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China, Barrass, G.S., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002 2) Brushes With Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy, Kraus, R.C., Berkeley:University of California Press, 1991 3) Mao’s Last Revolution, MacFarquhar, R.&Schoenhals, M., Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006 4) Nixon in China, MacMillan, M., Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 2006 5) TaTzePao: Its History and Significance as a Communication Medium, Poon, D.J., in Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns, Chu, G.,Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1978 6) Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society, Yen, Y., New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005 Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, Frances, J., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994

The failure of nation-building without a conscience : Khmer national identities in Democratic Kampuchea - Sean Webb

The failure of nation-building without a conscience: Khmer national identities in Democratic Kampuchea Sean Webb

One prerequisite for building a “nation” is the presence of a national consciousness to which the population adheres -- those establishing themselves as leaders need to convince the people they deserve their loyalty and should embrace their national vision.

Leaders wishing to hold state power need to cultivate a kind of nationalism “in which popular perception of loyalty to the nation and to the state is one and the same.”[1] Where there are preconceived notions of “nation,” this demands that the leaders indoctrinate the population, subordinating societal, and perhaps traditional, concepts of nationhood and identity to their own concepts if these are not aligned. Ernest Gellner summarizes this process when he asserts that the “secret to nationalism” is “a high culture” that “pervades the whole of society” and “defines it.”[2] Ninety percent of the Cambodian population saw itself as Khmer, creating the impression that “the concept of the Cambodian nation…coincided with that of the Cambodian state.”[3] This synchronism would seem to indicate that building the Cambodian nation should have been relatively easy. However, the Khmer Rouge (KR) national vision proposed an identity that conflicted with that of the population.

Pol Pot and his inner circle were a unique group of students whose world view and opinions of homeland were influenced by their studies abroad and their ties to the indigenous elite. In short, they had not had the typical Cambodian experience. With an outsider’s perspective, the group formulated its own ideas of what it meant to be Cambodian and where Cambodia stood relative to the rest of the world, taking on the French colonial view of the Khmer people as a fallen race, whose glory needed to be restored. At the same time, the group proposed a socialist revolution that would allow Cambodians to be totally self-reliant, rejecting foreign support. But, while venerating Cambodia’s traditional past, the group members failed to incorporate into their national vision the elements of Cambodia’s culture that had shaped its present identity. For one, they demanded loyalty to a state quite at odds with the traditional structure of, the monarchy. The traditional political structure was intrinsically connected to Khmer identity, as the sense of community was built around the authority of the king, the embodiment of the state and its religion, Buddhism. Degrading the monarch entailed breaking down the bond between the state and its people and eliminating the state religion. Further, the group’s form of

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socialism implied a radical restructuring of Cambodian society, which included disintegrating the family, eradicating what little class formation existed and radical collectivization. The fact that the group’s plan denied the vital aspects of Khmer identity a place in the new society— and would even obliterate them—explains why the KR nation-building project could never succeed. Success would have required mass mobilization around the KR national vision ultimately engendering a national consciousness en masse ; the KR leadership failed to achieve this at all stages of the revolution: before the civil war, during the civil war and during their rule. This failure resulted in a fragmented ruling party with little coherence outside the highest levels of leadership and, when coupled with the radical literalism with which the KR attempted to carry out the revolution, led the leadership to purge its membership and resort to terror as a means of control. Ultimately, without genuine support, the regime could never hope to achieve its objectives.

1. Imagining the wrong nation: Origins, the Khmer Nation and Cambodian realities Long live the great and glorious people of Kampuchea[4] To understand the failure of the KR’s attempt at nation-building, one needs to dissect their concept of the Khmer nation. This is a three-fold task requiring first an examination of its origins: the French colonial constructed narrative of Cambodia’s past and its transmission to the Cambodian indigenous elite to which the Kampuchean Communist Party (KCP) leadership belonged. Second, it requires an understanding of the KR’s concept of the Cambodian nation and its nationalism. Third, a comparison has to be made between the proposed Khmer nation and the Cambodian people’s concept of nation to illustrate the more objective reality of the Cambodian situation. These analyses will demonstrate that there were significant discrepancies between the KR concept of the Khmer nation and that of the people-, particularly the peasantry-, and further, that the leadership faced considerable difficulty in advancing its nation-building project because of this divergence.

In common with much early nation-building in the post-colonial period, the vision of the Cambodian nation derives from the elite classes that are to lead the project, not from the masses. That the KR was a small group consisting of educated, elite youths, Pol Pot and his former schoolmates, is crucial to understanding why the nation-building project of Democratic Kampuchea was unsuccessful. The education of this small group and its presumptions about the motherland were in large part shaped (in)directly by the French colonizers. Their belonging to the indigenous elite inevitably molded the persuasions of the young leaders concerning their country’s past. Among this elite, there was a dominant narrative of Cambodian history, which owed much to the French colonists. Having “discovered” the civilization of Angkor for the Cambodians, the French reintroduced them to their glorious past while highlighting what they perceived as the civilization’s demise in the 19th century.[5] The French perpetuated myths about the Khmer people and society that were designed to emphasize their vulnerability, a strategy that both justified French colonization and shaped the collective memory of the Cambodian elite.[6]

The failure of nation-building without a conscience : Khmer national identities in Democratic Kampuchea - Sean Webb

Motifs such as the “gentle land,” “Cambodia’s version of Buddhist Theology” and a “jungle paradise” in which “the poor but contented peasants passed their days in sensual meditation against a background of ancient splendor” were imbued in the rhetoric about Cambodian history and society that was later used politically by the indigenous elite throughout the post-independence era.[7] This produced, what David Chandler calls a ‘’folie de grandeur’’r among the elite class, which perceived its ancestors as a civilization that had lost its splendor and thus needed to be revitalized.[8] Pol Pot and his contemporaries grew up with this collective memory: embracing “what they perceived as Cambodia’s incomparability” deriving from the glorious age of Angkor Wat, but reject ing “France’s disempowering protection” that justified itself by emphasizing the passive nature of the Khmers and their fall from glory.[9] Thus, the KR reading of history can be seen as at once affirming the French version of Cambodian mythology, which highlighted the Khmer’s singularity, and at the same time rejecting the French notion of the Cambodian need for protection, replacing it with a need to defend Cambodian uniqueness. Educated in Paris, the group tended to be “more aware of the world at large and the defects of their own society than other groups in Cambodian society.” [10] Moreover, the group members’ educational opportunities introduced them to modern political ideologies, notably communism, socialism and nationalism and to Communist revolutions in other parts of the world.[11] Eventually, the KR would draw on these “–isms” as defense mechanisms against the foreign, ever-threatening “Other.”

According to Khatharya Um, “there was an inherent paradox to Khmer Rouge revolutionary dynamism, that in its forward-oriented aim, it was driven by archaic fantasies.”[12] In its simplest form, the Khmer identity came down to a question of race.

The KR saw their race as unique and separate from that of their neighbors, the Thais and the Vietnamese. Taken to its extreme, this singularity justified the economic autarchy and policies of self-reliance pursued by the KR once in power. After the revolution, the KR inner circle’s aggrandizement of their race culminated in their belief that their project was “unprecedented.” However, according to the KR vision, the race had been defiled. In this defilement, it perceived both an internal and external threat. The President of Democratic Kampuchea, Khieu Samphan, illustrates this in a statement made on Radio Phnom Penh: “For thousands of years the colonialists, the imperialists and the reactionary feudalists have dragged us through the mud.”[13] Pursuing this theme, the KR emphasized the necessity of defending against the Other (particularly the enemies that infiltrated Khmer society from within and continuing threats from its neighbors on the borders) to avoid racial elimination. This dual theme— reestablishing a purified society and fear of racial annihilation— lay at the heart of the KR nation-building program.

The proposed radical plan (which the Khmer Rouge would follow quite literally), enunciated in a DK government document, was “building socialism on the one hand, and defending the country and providing a lesson for the future on the other.”[14] These two objectives were fundamental to a total break with the past and the building of a new nation. The revolution sought to implement a socialist system that would serve the KR’s nationalistic ambitions in waging class warfare. The KR linked the socialist revolution

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to defense of the nation as it would break ties with, and thereby protect itself against, the foreign imperialists and the ruling elites, the two historical sources of Cambodia’s “dependency, economic backwardness and social inequality.” [15] This vision of the nation must be measured against the historical and present realities of Cambodia to further contextualize the KR revolution. The question remains: did Khmer society as a whole subscribe to the same political vision of nationhood and the historical narrative? To a large extent, the answer is no, as a brief discussion of the pre-revolutionary political, social and economic structures will illustrate. Because 85 to 90 percent of Cambodia’s population was rural, peasant consciousness is a critical factor.[16] The traditional societal structure, “royalty, officials and peasants,” generally persisted until the 1950s,[17] with little interaction between royalty and the peasants and the officials acting as intermediaries. This disconnect is captured in one peasant’s words: “We worked at whatever we wanted and we were happy because we didn’t have anyone telling us what to do.”[18] Moreover, outside the family, there was little social organization in rural society, which explains the absence of “nationwide movements against the state.”[19] From the Angkor period until pre-revolution, the “god-king” endured in the minds of the peasantry as “the official protector of the state and national religion, Budhhism,”[20] the two essential markers of national identity. The Khmer as a people may have referred to themselves as “we Khmer,” [21] but this we was entirely different from that proposed by the KR. In economic terms, the peasantry maintained its small-scale subsistence agriculture throughout the post-colonial era.[22] Even during the French protectorate years, there was little social mobilization except among a small urban middle class dominated by non-Khmers, such as the Chinese and Vietnamese, who had been selected by the French.[23] Even the increasing pressure on landholdings due to population growth in the 1950s and 1960s was insufficient to stir the peasants to anger; the absence of landlordism, tenant farming, and sharecropping attest to this.[24] Because most peasants worked their own plot of land, they did not face famine or starvation,[25] and even though the Chinese and Vietnamese capitalists “extracted wealth from the agriculture sector through usury, taxation or payment for favors,” [26] these “patron-client” [27] relations were not perceived as taxing. Indeed, the peasants also benefited from the commodities the Chinese offered them.[28] Any economic grievances the Cambodian peasantry may have had were insufficient to trigger a revolution. It is true that some of the poorest peasants were known to be disgruntled, but these were isolated cases (yet the ones the KCP leadership pointed to in supporting their claims).[29] Nor, despite Pol Pot’s call for purification of Khmer society, did the Khmers harbor such strong anti-foreign sentiments. This is evidenced in their cordial relations with the Chinese and Vietnamese capitalists. The Khmers may have been resentful of their neighbors who previously had seized control of some of Cambodia’s border areas, but this did not translate into xenophobia or fear of racial annihilation.[30] The KCP leaders were aware of these discrepancies and understood that, to mobilize a support base for their revolutionary

The failure of nation-building without a conscience : Khmer national identities in Democratic Kampuchea - Sean Webb

vision, they had to mythologize a strong foreign threat and wake the peasants to their role in a “hidden” class struggle to eliminate the “apparent” inequalities-; in other words, to attempt “vertical intensification downwards, obliterating the folk culture and ‘little cultures’ of the masses.”[31] This task proved intractable, but the way in which the KR approached it goes some way to explaining their failure at nation-building.

2. An Ambiguous Agenda: Party Evolution from the 1950s to 1975 When pulling out weeds, remove them roots and all[32] To understand the KR’s failure one needs to look at the development of the Communist party and the leadership strategies for generating support. The party’s inability until the 1970s to garner any support base and its strategic choices in part illuminate why it failed to mobilize Cambodians behind the revolutionary cause, a lack of support that had repercussions for the creation of the Kampuchean nation.

The struggle of Communism/socialism to emerge onto the political scene as a mass movement in the 1950s and 1960s foreshadows the problems of support and security it continued to suffer. After Cambodia’s independence, the Communist movement sustained setbacks due to internal factionalism and suppression by the king. There were two sources of factionalism: ethnic tensions between Khmers and the Vietnamese involved in the party, and differences in political tactics.[33] In addition to this internal splintering, the King’s ability to suppress the movement as a whole, both politically and violently, weakened it from the outside.[34] It is in this context that the KCP was born in 1960 at the Second Party Conference.[35] Although it is unclear whether, as Pol Pot claimed, the party officially established itself at this meeting, it was here that the “Pol Pot faction”[36] made itself known. Returning from their sojourn abroad and motivated by their political education, the young students had maneuvered themselves into a position to dominate the party leadership by 1962.[37] However, while their camaraderie ensured control at the upper levels of the party, attracting a mass membership was more problematic. Again, it is important to stress that Communist ideals were not popular among the majority of the population (the peasantry) who were still bound to the traditional structures of Cambodian life. Despite the claims of Pol Pot’s circle, there was little evidence that there was a basis for a socialist revolution in Cambodia. Further, by 1963, Sihanouk’s crackdown against the left had forced virtually all the Paris students to “drop completely from sight” and “continue their activities underground,” [38] making them even less popular with the majority. The inability to generate mass support becomes clearer if one examines the party membership and its armed forces. In 1970, the year of Lon Nol’s coup d’état and, thus, the beginning of the civil war, the party claimed only 1,000 party cadres and 4,000 recruits in the armed forces; even on the eve of victory, the recruits had only increased by 3,000.[39] The increasing intensity of party purges after 1975 suggests that they were unable to identify their rivals until relatively late in the game.[40] The party’s apparent organizational weakness (except at the “politburo” level)

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and lack of membership posed significant challenges and indicates how its national program diverged from popular sentiments, with tragic consequences for its attempt to build a nation. The literalism with which the party followed its plan required exceptional organizational capacity and all members to adhere to the program.

In the face of the evidence that there was neither sufficient organization nor sufficient support for the KR to implement its nation-building project, one might ask how the KR even came to power in the context of the civil war period. As discussed above, the divergence of the popular nationalism and the nationalism of the Pol Pot group necessitated a top-down imposition of national identity if the KCP was to achieve its revolution with mass support -- unless another opportunity arose to mobilize the population. The immediate historical context in which the revolution evolved illustrates the KR’s supportgenerating techniques in two ways. First, the U.S. bombardment “constituted one of the more potent catalysts for national awakening,” in the sense that the catastrophic damage to the economy and society encouraged the breakdown of “peasant nativism.”[41] There was mass displacement and social upheaval, with Phnom Penh’s population expanding “from 600,000 to about two million,”[42] and the economy was “gravely disrupted” [43] with rice production, Cambodia’s leading export, being particularly impacted. As Khatharya Um argues, “when the destruction and deprivation are easily identifiable with a source that is foreign and hereditarily antagonistic, mobilization along the nationalist line becomes that much more conducive.”[44] The Vietnamese occupation of certain areas also made Cambodians more susceptible to nationalist mobilization. [45] The KR was the only viable option as the nationalist resistance movement, as even the KCP admitted in their 1976 account of the party’s history:, “although they did not want to join us, when the storm came they had to come and take shelter in our refuge.”[46] Second, King Sihanouk, widely popular among the Cambodian peasantry both for his position as monarch and for his personality, was ousted from power in March 1970 by the U.S.-backed, anti-communist Lon Nol, an event of great significance for Pol Pot and his group. This “combination of economic catastrophe and political opportunity” [47] was to provide them with the chance to penetrate the political system. The forced removal of Sihanouk immediately resulted in “violent peasant protests,” [48] and was accompanied by the installation of an allegedly U.S.-backed regime during the U.S. bombardment.

Concealing its communist identity, the KR strategically allied itself with Sihanouk, representing itself as the leader in a united national front against a regime assumed to be “the faithful servants of the American imperialists” [49] who were bombing the country.

This alliance demonstrates the KR’s awareness that “religious and social values [were] deeply embedded in the collective consciousness” of the Khmer peasantry; the leadership subsequently linked “traditional values with its cause.”[50] A Cambodian civilian, Thach Diem, noted that, when speaking with the peasantry, the KR claimed “they had come to help liberate Sihanouk and that they were there to help Sihanouk fight Lon Nol so that Sihanouk would win back his country.”[51] At the same time, Thach Diem

The failure of nation-building without a conscience : Khmer national identities in Democratic Kampuchea - Sean Webb

recalled that the KR concealed its communist nature, and “even the people who were working for them didn’t know about it.”[52] Even the revolutionary songs from the early years of the revolution contain no mention of the communist party, only appealing imagery alluding to “the land and the harvest” alongside direct attacks aimed at the Lon Nol regime: “Killing them, until the Lon Nol bandits are destroyed.”[53] The events of the 1970s provided the KR leadership with opportunities for organizational expansion. On the one hand, the war and the coup d’état left the population with no choice but to turn to the KR; on the other, the KR could exploit the symbols of the monarchy and traditional society. While this tactic proved effective in the immediate term, it was problematic in several ways. The KR’s organizational expansion should be attributed not so much to a successful top-down transfer of nationalism as to the people’s need to seek refuge in the only possible resistance movement in the face of foreign attacks and the resulting widespread disorder. Moreover, the strategic alliance with the king entirely misled the population as to the nature of the KR’s agenda. Most peasants were confused about what the KR was and what was its political agenda, especially after the taking of Phnom Penh. When it became clear that the KR was not working for the King, the genuine support base to a large extent evaporated; nor did the KR’s secrecy and dissembling aid them in mobilizing the people. How could the regime expect to engender loyalty if the population did not even know who Angkar (the party) was? By 1973, it had become clear that the king was merely a figurehead with little control over the liberation front, but by then the KR were firmly in control.[54] By keeping Sihanouk out of power and replacing him with Angkar, an organization that enjoyed little popular support because it did not adequately embody the nationalism of the populace, the KR effectively destroyed the glue that held the nation together. The failure to forge popular nationalism with its own vision of nationalism marked a vulnerability in the KR’s nation-building project, a vulnerability that would extend into the regime’s rule.

3. Continued Incoherence and Neglect: the Revolution in Power Let us all together commit ourselves to follow the way of the Angkar[55] Having seized Phnom Penh, Pol Pot and his inner circle were confronted with the paradoxical task of “realizing their revolutionary vision while maintaining power.”[56] During the KR rule, the incoherent, evolving plans of the leadership, the neglect of “social engineering and the elevation of political consciousness,” [57] and the lack of strong support and resulting organizational fragmentation, mutually doomed the leadership’s nation-building project to failure. The uncompromising nature of the regime’s totalist policies magnified the consequences of these problems leaving the leaders suspicious of internal and external threats and ultimately prompting them to resort to terror and violence as instruments of consolidation and mobilization. When its plans failed, the Pol Pot group did not attempt to adjust them, but instead, blamed dissent, fueling a cycle of paranoia and terror that ultimately undid its program.

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The Pol Pot leadership premised its utopian revolution on the engineering of a national political consciousness. A major reason for its inability to generate this consciousness was that its agenda was clandestine and never fully coherent. The ideas sprang from a small group of individuals “bonded largely by the urban background … and intermarriages[,] … the circle of ‘clandestine camaraderie’ of the years in Paris.”[58] This concealment continued until late 1977, provoking confusion among the mass membership and particularly the regional leadership as regards policies and plans. Even the party admitted that “its philosophy and consciousness are [were] not yet clear.”[59] Another reason the KR were unable to nurture the growth of a national movement was the fact that they did not invest in an education system that could help to achieve this goal. In fact, they did the opposite. In May 1975, the core leadership ordered the education system to “cease at all levels,” [60] and following this announcement, the KR “destroyed 90 percent of all school buildings, emptied libraries and burned their contents, and smashed nearly all school laboratory equipment.”[61] They demolished the educational infrastructure and attacked those who used it: “75% of the teaching force, 96% of tertiary students and 67% of all [elementary and secondary] pupils died in Democratic Kampuchea.”[62] No effective replacement was offered: “education was given, at best, cursory and pro forma attention.”[63] Regarding the Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, Pol Pot remarked, that “we study in order to serve the goals of the revolution.”[64] This attitude led the regime to hire “teachers…from peasant backgrounds but often with minimal education themselves and no real teaching experiences” and to select students from peasant backgrounds for the few schools that were established.[65] However, the limited amount of school, which only the poorest of peasants were selected to attend, attests to the fact that this strategy was not effective in inculcating the majority of the population with KR values. For most, education as a means of building revolutionary consciousness was translated into work: “seven or eight year olds up to about 13 to 14 years olds were organized in separate work teams.”[66] There were also frequent meetings at which “dances, songs and music” were used to cultivate revolutionary spirit and “re-education camps” for those who disobeyed.[67] The weakness of the policies designed to make the population internalize revolutionary fervor prevented any nationalist consciousness from materializing in Democratic Kampuchea; as a 1976 report on building socialism notes, “political consciousness…lags behind the other aspects. It has not yet transformed the collectivity, even in economic terms.”[68] The lack of benefits from economic and social policies further discouraged the people from supporting the nation-building effort. The rejection of those with technical skills who had worked under past regimes severely damaged public amenities such as healthcare. Doctors “trained for six months in simple health care” and were often “nine to thirteen13 year old nurses from peasant backgrounds, trained for three months.”[69] Modern and foreign medicine was strictly prohibited “because it was not originally Khmer.”[70] In failing to promote their revolutionary message effectively and neglecting to take care of the people, the KR forfeited the opportunity to mobilize the people behind a new nation. The irony behind the KR project was that their fixations with Angkor’s past glory worked to deconstruct the

The failure of nation-building without a conscience : Khmer national identities in Democratic Kampuchea - Sean Webb

traditional elements that had remained a part of Khmer culture, and by extension identity, until the 1970s. The abolition of the monarch, Buddhism and private property and the breakdown of the family structure in favor of collective communes and coercion did not bring about a nation of people actively supporting the KR project, but rather, a collective fear that made people passively submit to brutality in hopes of survival.

Failure to develop a national consciousness at all three stages of the revolution impacted it catastrophically. The lack of organization and coherence, a reoccurring theme throughout the party’s evolution, can be traced to the leadership’s inability to popularize its ideas of the Cambodian nation among its cadres, let alone its citizens. Without a strong, consistent organization or support base, Pol Pot’s radical agenda could not be carried out effectively. Across the regional zones of Democratic Kampuchea, there were wide inconsistencies as to what the prescribed policies should be and how they were implemented.

Inconsistency translated into inefficiency. Moreover, these discrepancies also resulted in paranoia at the top, which fuelled purges of suspected counterrevolutionaries who were infiltrating the system. Gradually mutilating its already small membership, the party rendered its radical vision even more unsuccessful. The only method available for maintaining power was a system of terror and violence with little support from the outside world (“self-reliance”), the Cambodian population, or even the party members. The radical plan never took hold in minds outside Pol Pot’s small group, ; and without the national consciousness on which a nation is built, the revolution fell as quickly as it had arisen.

[1] Kate Frieson, “The Political Nature of Democratic Kampuchea,” Pacific Affairs 61, no. 3 (1988): 411.

[2] Ben Kiernan, “Myth, Nationalism and Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 3, no. 2 (2001): 196.

[3] Kate Frieson, “The Political Nature of Democratic Kampuchea,” 410.

[4] Henri Locard, Pol Pot’s Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2004), 45.

[5] David Chandler, “From ‘Cambodge’ to ‘Kampuchea’: State and Revolution in Cambodia 1863-1979,” Thesis Eleven 50, no. 1 (1997): 36.

[6] Ibid., 37.

[7] Craig Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), 11.

[8] David Chandler, “From ‘Cambodge’ to ‘Kampuchea’: State and Revolution in Cambodia 1863-1979,” 37.

[9] David Chandler, “From ‘Cambodge’ to ‘Kampuchea’: State and Revolution in Cambodia 1863-1979,” 38.

[10] Roeland A. Burgler, The Eyes of the Pineapple: Revolutionary Intellectuals and Terror in Democratic Kampuchea (Fort Lauderdale: Verlag breitenbach Publishers, 1990), 12-13.

[11] Craig Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, 49.

[12] Khatharya Um, “The Broken Chain: Genocide in the Re-construction and Deconstruction of Cambodian Society,” Social Identities 4, no. 1 (1998), http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ijh&AN=49.1235&site=ehost-live.

[13] Roeland A. Burgler, The Eyes of the Pineapple: Revolutionary Intellectuals and Terror in Democratic Kampuchea, 58.

[14] Kate Frieson, “The Political Nature of Democratic Kampuchea,” 409.

[15] Ibid., 410.

[16] Kate Frieson, “Revolution and Rural Response in Cambodia, 1970-1975,” in Genocide and Democracy: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1994), 43.

[17] Michael Vickery, Kampuchea: Politics, Economics and Society (London: Pinter Publishers, 1986), 51.

[18] Kate Frieson, “Revolution and Rural Response in Cambodia, 1970-1975,” 43.

[19] Ibid, 34.

[20] Craig Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, 129.

[21] Kate Frieson, “The Political Nature of Democratic Kampuchea,” 411.

[22] Roeland A. Burgler, The Eyes of the Pineapple: Revolutionary Intellectuals and Terror in Democratic Kampuchea, 9.

[23] Michael Vickery, Kampuchea: Politics, Economics and Society, 51.

[24] Khatharya Um, “The Broken Chain: Genocide in the Re-construction and Deconstruction of Cambodian Society.”

[25] Ibid.

[26] Michael Vickery, Kampuchea: Politics, Economics and Society, 51.

[27] Roeland A. Burgler, The Eyes of the Pineapple: Revolutionary Intellectuals and Terror in Democratic Kampuchea, 9.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ben Kiernan, “Myth, Nationalism and Genocide,” 190.

[31] Ibid., 197.

[32] Henri Locard, Pol Pot’s Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2004), 77.

Orientations Volume Nine : Transcultural Perspectives on Asia [33] Craig Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, 45.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid., 46.

[37] Ibid., 47.

[38] Ibid., 59-60.

[39] Khatharya Um, “The Broken Chain: Genocide in the Re-construction and Deconstruction of Cambodian Society.”

[40] Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 134.

[41] Khatharya Um, “The Broken Chain: Genocide in the Re-construction and Deconstruction of Cambodian Society.”

[42] Michael Vickery, Kampuchea: Politics, Economics and Society, 51.

[43] Khatharya Um, “The Broken Chain: Genocide in the Re-construction and Deconstruction of Cambodian Society.”

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Kate Frieson, “Revolution and Rural Response in Cambodia, 1970-1975,” 34.

[48] Craig Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, 103.

[49] Kate Frieson, “Revolution and Rural Response in Cambodia, 1970-1975,” 35.

[50] Craig Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, 129.

[51] Kate Frieson, “Revolution and Rural Response in Cambodia, 1970-1975,” 35.

[52] Ibid.

[53] Craig Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, 127.

[54] Ibid., 132.

[55] Henri Locard, Pol Pot’s Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2004), 117.

[56] Khatharya Um, “The Broken Chain: Genocide in the Re-construction and Deconstruction of Cambodian Society.”

[57] Ibid.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Ibid.

[60] Thomas Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia: Educational Destruction and Construction under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979,” History of Education Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1998), 6.

[61] Ibid.

[62] Ibid., 7 [63] Khatharya Um, “The Broken Chain: Genocide in the Re-construction and Deconstruction of Cambodian Society.”

[64] Thomas Clayton, “Building the New Cambodia: Educational Destruction and Construction under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979,” 9.

[65] Roeland A. Burgler, The Eyes of the Pineapple: Revolutionary Intellectuals and Terror in Democratic Kampuchea, 82.

[66] Ibid.

[67] Ibid., 83.

[68] Khatharya Um, “The Broken Chain: Genocide in the Re-construction and Deconstruction of Cambodian Society.”

[69] Roeland A. Burgler, The Eyes of the Pineapple: Revolutionary Intellectuals and Terror in Democratic Kampuchea, 78.

[70] Ibid.

Works Cited Burgler, Roeland A. The Eyes of the Pineapple: Revolutionary Intellectuals and Terror in Democratic Kampuchea. Fort Lauderdale: Verlag breitenbach Publishers, 1990.

Chandler, David. “From ‘Cambodge’ to ‘Kampuchea’: State and Revolution in Cambodia 1863-1979.” Thesis Eleven 50, no. 1 (1997).

Clayton, Thomas. “Building the New Cambodia: Educational Destruction and Construction under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979.” History of Education Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1998).

Etcheson, Craig. The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea. Boulder: Westview Press, 1984.

Frieson, Kate. “Revolution and Rural Response in Cambodia, 1970-1975.” In Genocide and Democracy: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, edited by Ben Kiernan. New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1994.

Frieson, Kate. “The Political Nature of Democratic Kampuchea.” Pacific Affairs 61, no. 3 (1988).

Kiernan, Ben. “Myth, Nationalism and Genocide.” Journal of Genocide Research 3, no. 2 (2001).

Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 19751979. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Locard, Henri. Pol Pot’s Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2004.

Um, Khatharya. “The Broken Chain: Genocide in the Re-construction and Deconstruction of Cambodian Society.” Social Identities 4, no. 1 (1998), http://search.ebscohost.com/.

Vickery, Michael. Kampuchea: Politics, Economics and Society. London: Pinter Publishers, 1986.

Orientations Volume Nine : Transcultural Perspectives on Asia

War Memorial Joshua Cader

The shrine of memory is the memorial. War memorials are explicit glorifications of war, or, as this mode of thinking becomes unfashionable in countries that consider themselves post-industrial service economies, and thus post-modern (Bennett 269), perhaps glorification of the second order, that is to say that as war is recognized by those that consider themselves civilized as terrible, it must be blessed indirectly (as war involves teams, it is useful for group cohesion, and so should be blessed) by blessing those who have “sacrificed” themselves (been killed). The “sacrificed” are said to have always died with the knowledge of what they were fighting for; however, what was died for is commonly changed ex-post-facto. In the case of Japan, for instance, those who died fighting in the Greater East Asia War (大東亜戦争) are said to have fought in the non-existent Fifteen Year War (十五年戦争) or its component parts, and to have died for the society formed by the latter, not for the society that the architects of the Greater East Asia War intended to form. That is, it is implicitly claimed that soldiers died so that their country could be occupied by the Allies, not for perceived imperial glory (despite obvious indicators to the contrary). To refer to a parallel example, in Canada, those who fought in the War to End All Wars were not fighting in World War I. They did not fight to set the stage for World War II (as the sequence of numerals would imply); they fought to end war.

History here decides after the fact what is the “fact”, in part through naming (at the very least, textbooks require titles and subtitles). Particular memories are not only chosen to become history; the names by which they will assume this status are also chosen: these lids on the containers of memory being – in no small part due to history being categorized in texts which require headings in bold and lists of dates associated with events divorced from context – perhaps more important than the content itself considering the limited amount that can be communicated if one hopes to reach a mass audience. War memorials are what history is at a shallow (designed to be affective) level: the impressively physical embodiments of these lids, of a date and a name; they are the lessons, materialized, which the government wishes to impart to us.

When Fidel Castro declared “History will absolve me” while on trial for armed insurrection, it was with a conviction that history, the enactment of human self-development as found in Hegel, the history as seen through the world-spirit (in a famous example, Napoleon being designated by Hegel as the “world-spirit on horseback” as an exemplar of the dynamic process of history), will progress. In

War Memorial - Joshua Cader

other words, Castro’s statement assumes human development will continue to the point where his actions are recognized as being in line with the linear progress of history.

Therein lies a conviction that one represents the future, or rather, the past upon which the future will lay judgment. This is, given a reasonable amount of time, always the case (except when, say, the claims are so ridiculous that they are somehow noted as important as a historical ironic joke), as if history did not vindicate the prophecy, the previous words would not be in line with development and thus would be discarded from the record as unnecessary. Any lesson can be imparted by the state as the government that exists is, by definition, the most progressive, and thus in line with history, and can thus draw on what is history for justification simply by being its descendant.

This is the war memorial, the empty symbol of mere descendence from things that did not exist at the time they begat the future that has become the present. It could be argued that this is only those war memorials that have lost their personal character, their relationship to those actually living, but war memorials that bear marks of individuality are few, as their function is to elicit group feeling; the more individualized they are, the less sizeable the group may be that identifies with the message inherent. The more controversial the subject, the more abstract the material memorial is required to be if it is to function as an effective factor for cohesion. Perhaps the classic example of this is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall: a massive scar of a gravestone symbolizing a healing wound. Ironically, there can be controversy about whether or not there is controversy (and thus an abstract approach would be necessary), which in the case of the Wall, led to a traditional heroic statue being erected some metres away. A non-statement was identified as anti-traditionalism (and thus anti-natural and inherently bad). This is seen in Japan as well, with calls for a secular, abstract memorial to serve as replacement for the religious, concrete Yasukuni in the national imaginary being derided in traditional quarters.

Individuals (the actual people) themselves can be considered living memorials, but a proper useful example in this way is rare. That is, “useful� in fomenting the ideal group spirit, with coherence being required for legitimacy. People can be memorialized as heroes when living, but there are always the parts of the person that exist that would be considered non-heroic under the rubric that outlines the qualities determining heroism in the first place. A living person will always contain all his or her qualities, and those non-useful ones cannot be as easily forgotten, or perhaps more accurately, simply not remembered, as they continue to exist in the present with constant opportunities for debunking the myths surrounding the halo-encrusted whole.

Even those with a possibility for canonization pre-mortem are invariably those who have been scarred by the circumstances that cause the shears that are considered to effect historical progress in the Hegelian sense. Those who have been

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scarred are stereotypically considered to not want to talk about it, or, if the words escape, are so full of vehemence that they are commonly dismissed as marginal. A person memorialized is invariably constructed. The personal is pruned to create the statement, as the full catalogue of events is pruned to create the history that is enshrined in the memorial.

This is not to say that other strains of history do not exist in parallel to be argued about by professional historians as competing reconstructions, but the history sanctioned by the state, that which is to be memorialized, that which will provide the impetus for arguments between state actors, is the history as explained in a high-school textbook (“In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue”-type statements). Knowing the cause of a historical war (as opposed to one considered currently relevant and still argued over commonly as it has not yet passed into the common record with a commonly agreed upon linearity) as a Serbian guy shooting an archduke is more than most would ask for, however the still-arguable history, the one that positions may be taken on, for or against various interpretations, among historians – a case of national ambition in the days of high colonialism – is only recalled by those who consider themselves part of an enknowledged elite. This history is largely irrelevant, as the history that is under consideration is not that which may or may not exist, but that which is required to be effective, and it is effective in inverse proportion to the thought it demands, as thought engenders doubt.

To return to individual war memorialization, such an anomaly will, with the death of the individuals involved, become overridden by those memorials sanctioned by the largest and most efficient (in terms of ability to trade and thus produce a society and goods for its members, and thus commanding default allegiance) group one can identify with in our nationalized world. It is these, timeless memorials – timeless as long as the government that created the monument sees the utility of identification with it (though the utility is quite likely to remain in the form of empty shells with a sort of generally agreed upon historical value: the governed have already agreed that it is a thing that is less contrived than the government itself and thus can lend legitimacy), the utility only diminished if the symbols represented have picked up a disproportionate amount of negative connotations due to their past uses – that we think of when we think of a war memorial. A big commissioned statue somewhere, a plaque, some ceremony from time to time at a specific spot, a public park, a square, perhaps on a specific date, etc. Canada’s Remembrance Day, for instance, initially tied to the historical moment “of note”, the date of the 1918 Armistice, in its becoming further removed from this sacred day as time goes on gains usefulness as a catch-all state legitimizer that cannot be argued with (as sacrifice, if accepted, is unarguable, and it is considered foul play to not accept). Ironically, becoming disconnected from the fact – that is, due to length of time (do the French hold school assemblies in, say, remembrance of Waterloo?) rendering the fact less powerful along with a general sense that the First World War was not as “principled” as the Second, and thus less useful in imparting a sense of shared principledness – has granted it usefulness,

War Memorial - Joshua Cader

perceived relevance, and thus survival. This phenomenon can be seen in perhaps its most evocative and concrete form in the various Tombs of the Unknown Soldier that began proliferating in various countries after the First World War. These “tombs” represent nothing except for a vague concept of sacrifice. The vagueness lends legitimacy: as it does not even memorialize the soldiers of a certain war (the merits and justness of which could then be argued), all that is imparted is legitimacy for the inheritor state.

This is the war memorial: solemn, unquestionable, with the possibility of being sullied and thus rendered less useful by connection to the actual lived past (lived by those still living in our present), but rendered more powerful if it can claim to reach through what is lived into what is dead (as the dead not are not to be spoken ill of). Yasukuni Shrine is a fine example.

Takahashi Tetsuya describes Yasukuni’s function, as originally established by the Meiji state, as the “central locus of a national religion.” (Breen 106). This, along with the function of education (to support the ambitions of the nation as instituted by the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education) provided the support base for the nascent military and its state. In the context of a perceived loss of self-sufficiency and full self-government due to colonial encroachment, the military was the source of legitimacy of the state as seen from without, that is other powerful state actors with their own powerful militaries judged the ability to govern of the state in question from its military power, this being simultaneously self-serving and allowing themselves a certain measure of self-justification. The former as if a country could be taken by force or forced to submit in some way, then it should be taken over, and the latter, related, can be seen in the British idea of Empire made up of nations formerly suppressed by inefficiency and backwardness conquered en masse by a greater (in terms of ability to gain control) state, with its, by implication, more efficient administrators, creating an environment allowing for the nation to re-emerge and flourish at some point after tutelage (Bennett 235). Thus the need (to counter such encroachment) for state power flowing from the barrel of a gun, and thus the need for the support of these guns in the form of the coalescing of the state around the triple pillars of a “national” and “patriotic” education system, the military, and Yasukuni Shrine as the central site for the spiritualization of the nation.

Spiritualization is easy to take as a given where it is present in a form that is seen as unifying (as it is the appearance of homogeneity and not the fact of it that is important in its usability for mobilizing purposes). Unification can only occur within the context that is aware of the without. In Japan, this oppositional mode, while arguably present beforehand in relations with China, gained full realization only with the advent of Meiji, the Meiji Restoration being “a major turning point in Japanese history, marking the transition from a loose association of semi-autonomous feudal domains to a highly centralized government bent on instilling a sense of national identity under the nominal authority of the emperor. The changes were far reaching and dramatic,

Orientations Volume Nine : Transcultural Perspectives on Asia

driven by a perceived threat from Western imperialism and the need to put Japan on an equal footing in terms of industrial and military capacity.” (Schnell 270) Schnell’s assessment does not preclude, of course, an analysis or recognition of competing interests in the assertion of a state or national identity. An example given by Francis Robinson of contemporary interest is the “fundamental connection between Islam and political separation.” (Hutchinson & Smith 216) When the emphasis is on within, it can be ironically also a coalescing factor by this initial non-realization of the other, that is, in this example, where a state has an overwhelmingly Muslim population, there will invariably be parties whose “professed aim is to impose its vision of the Islamic ideal on contemporary politics and society” (216). Thus the difference is one of degree or type of belief, as well as differential power relations among those holding various types of beliefs. The coalescing factor where one would seem to be absent is, when the outside is encountered as it invariably will be in our media-saturated age, the shock at the difference being (relatively) one of kind, making the internal difference of degree, heretofore thought important, recede into the background. As it does in this case, the impulse to unify with the relatively similar often develops as a response to the shock of encountering the other. A belief professed to be fundamental is powerful in this way, as it forms the core of what a person identifies as their being without the intervention of rational thought. When others that do not have a similar belief at their core are encountered, it can be – if further probing is not attempted such as the recognition of shared values through conversation – meeting someone who cannot be reasoned with, as the faculty of reason is identified as stemming from the fundamental belief.

When a nation’s spiritualization is not in the form of a specific book or canon that can be read, understood, and thus adopted, the adopter becoming a nation member via an exoteric process (such as reading a book to pass a citizenship test), group membership can be more difficult to inculcate, as it is less explainable and rational. But for the purposes of the nation it is designed for, it can be far more of a coalescing factor due to its exclusivity. The esoteric quality of the belief can thus be conceived as more of what would be considered a feeling, that is, what is commonly thought of when the word “spiritual” is used: ephemeral and ghost-like. It is not explainable by conventional means, and this provides all the more reason for it to be perfectly open to manipulation and thus useful as a state tool. If the esoteric spiritual can impress a quality on the nation that is indescribable, it becomes ever harder to reason the unreasonable away and thus distance oneself from the overarching claim by the spiritual administrators to exclusive rights over the individuals in a catchment area. A non-canonical spirituality is the best means of continuously maintaining control over the effects of said spirituality; who is in, who is out, and what the beliefs are, are completely fluid and indeterminate. There is an expectation of simple acceptance because it is not a religion in terms of a gospel, guiding principles, doctrine; it is simply what life is for the nation. If one is truly a member of the nation, this is the practice – the nation is the spirituality is the nation. The nation is the practices

War Memorial - Joshua Cader

that uphold it, that is, its culture. While it has been argued (by Kuper, among countless others) that the term “culture” is so overused that it is best to break it down into its component parts and to speak of beliefs, ideas, art, traditions, etc., it is perhaps best to describe the nation, amorphous in its own right, as buttressed by an equally amorphous concept, and continuing further down the line to the element of spirituality: the nation is a ghost. The ghost, however, is accepted to play an important role in determining what a person belongs to and thus for the purposes of comparison with the other, is. Identification, like spirituality – the ghost – is mutable, and thus subject to manipulations, or that is, the identifying façade (that which is viewed from without and thus leads to differentiation, along national or other lines) is mutable, as what it is cannot be pinned down.

The definition of the nation as a concept is difficult to stabilize and thus put to use. The role “nations” are seen to play in inter-state or “international” discourse is telling in this regard. A collection of what are decidedly states is called the United Nations, a conflation perhaps generated by the appeal of the natural in that “nation” evokes tribal connotations of the Volk, the grass-roots, the bottom-up formation while “state” implies a bureaucracy, an elite, top-down formation. This conflation points toward the conclusion that that the “nation” concept is powerful though it does not exist as a well defined object. It is because it does not exist except as ghost-like, however, that it is so powerful, because what does not exist cannot be questioned. Though attempts have been made at definition, these are always (with the exception of academia) within the framework of the useful construction, that is, it is defined in a way that will allow the concept of “nation” to put to use. For example, Stalin defined it for the purposes of his national homelands (Autonomous Okrugs and the like) as “a historically constructed, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” (Hutchinson & Smith 20) This relies on the similarly amorphous “culture”. Further, what constitutes stability is subject to whether the nation has some sort of recognizable authority that fits into the current world order to the point where the authority of the other can recognize a same. No matter how concrete the definition of “nation” is made to seem, there is always at its heart various abstractions, and thus any characteristic assigned to it can pass as something any member of the nation should understand according to official and general discourse.

The spirit of the nation is perhaps best described by Renan as being subject to “an everyday plebiscite.” (Hutchinson & Smith 17) When something is chosen, it is necessary to choose rationally, if not, the choice becomes arbitrary. If it comes down to accepting whether there is a common spirit, the price of denial is exile, at least in thought, thus denial of the communal spirit carries a high cost; the choice is ready-made. Insofar as the amorphousness of the ghostly spirituality is alluring, once it is followed, the populace can be more easily corralled.

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This spiritual choice, in Japan’s case, can be seen at work in what has come to be known as “the historian’s debate”; the representative figures of this debate who will be considered here are Takahashi Tetsuya and the literary critic Katō Norihiro. Katō’s discourse, as seen in his Haisengō Ron [After the Defeat], identifies a “personality split”, a reference to the “opposition between the reformists and the conservatives.” (Calichman 194) The reformists represent an “outward looking self”, one that depends on foreign universal ideas, and the conservatives are an “inward looking self” that is grounded in “traditional” values of the homeland, purity of ethnicity, the emperor, etc. (194). As Takahashi points out, the argument is proceeding from the premise that “Japan” exists as a singular personality in the first place whereas different strains of thought are universal. He brings up the example of the American Democratic and Republican parties and asks if these are two equally opposed personalities that must be unified. Katō’s is a typical nationalist argument, consisting of restoring the cohesion that has been lost at some point in the past that is populated with only the dead – whenever it is, it is a time that nobody remembers personally, but everybody remembers it as it is what is remembered by society. The nationalist goal of “oneness” requires the synthesis of that which was never together (or strictly, apart). In our current system, however, it is perhaps best that the synthesis is believed possible, and its possibility is heightened by the acceptance of its putative existence at some point immemorial, but immemorial in the way that it is always just out of reach to the last person (that is, living and existing in the commonly accepted existing present) that may remember – grasping at a ghost.

The reason for cohesion, however, is not for its own sake, but for what has been identified by Katō as a noble cause – the personality split must be repaired, “rigourously eliminated in order for the Japanese to apologize to the Asian War victims as a unified ‘national subject’” (194). How can this chasm, identified as a terrible lack of cohesion that is necessary for the imagined community to exist (that the community may be imagined is neglected in Katō’s thought), be repaired? By not, to take a position identified with the reformists, focusing “solely on the Asian victims” (201) of the Greater East Asia War, but rather to first of all “deeply mourn the dead of [the Japanese] nation”, and particularly “the soldiers”, that is to “respect” and “thank” them from the perspective of those that are considered to form the imagined community of postwar Japanese. That is, life is good, so the past must be venerated.

This veneration, would, however, ignore three things. First, the present conditions are not necessarily directly linked to the actions of “soldiers”. Second, that the outcomes of the soldiers’ actions are opposed to their intentions (stated by their superiors) of creating an Asia “for Asians”, of creating a sphere free of the influence of those identified as malevolent by the government that did support and the government that continues to support war, the latter being made apparent by the continuation of the national veneration project by deciding that there is a need for some form of mourning. For example, when disparaging the place of Yasukuni, the reason is not given as “there is no need to

War Memorial - Joshua Cader

to identify with the past”, but rather that Yasukuni is a source of problems in the present due to the baggage it is considered to carry (by Japanese nationals and foreigners alike) as a spiritual place that has been stripped of the required subtlety and hidden perversity (as opposed to the government-led projects of forming history while hiding the exact forms to escape criticism), and thus must be replaced by a secular memorial with less identifiable power, that is a toning down as opposed to a rejection. Third, that such veneration is not for either the dead or for the living, but rather what is seen to unite them both (their shared subservience to society, even though their societies are radically different), and is thus a form of social self-worship (Hutchinson & Smith 65).

It is a worship of the present conditions by mistakenly affirming what the present is not (say, embroiled in an all-encompassing project such as total war), as opposed to what it is. This suggests a certain amount of shame about the present, as if there is an understanding among the administrators that worshipping the inhumanity of the present society would not create popular support, and suggests a certain amount of popular dissatisfaction with current conditions. Can production be worshipped, or exports? Perhaps, and seeing dams built to wall up the smallest of waterways and then presented as tourist attractions may be a first step towards honesty in self-worship, but a fully honest religious system along these lines is unlikely, perhaps due to the rise and fall of economic conditions, conditions which are always affirmed to be of the present. That is, the time lapse between one point identified as an “economic condition” and another is so short that the causality is either determined by the individual to be readily apparent to be prone to flux (to those who follow along and, say, read the Nihon Keizai Shinbun or The Economist) or incomprehensible and unidentifiable (to those who do not). Neither of these two is suitable for worship, due to instability. Gods must be presentable as immutable, but their existence comprehensible (that is, can be comprehended within the rubric of the present, and thus provide comfort). The dead at Yasukuni are both firmly entrenched within an unquestionable historical narrative (for all except those who maintain that there should be no mourning at all) and are identifiable (as people who could be ancestors, and thus part of a recognized continuity). Further, they are perfectly still and unchanging (as they are dead), and thus cannot be questioned. The problem here is what it is that cannot be questioned. It is not the actual, past motives of the dead, as they are unknowable and are subject to aggregation; the individual motives may have existed but the motive of the mass is a jumble of conflicting desires (that of course do not exist, following their death). The aggregation is even stated directly, and not indirectly, the latter as in say, when the people who died while wearing a military uniform are referred to by the collective designation “soldiers”. The former, this directness, at Yasukuni, comes with the particular way the dead soldiers (or rather, the administratively constructed image of individual dead soldiers) are “enshrined and worshipped as ‘glorious spirits’ in the Yasukuni shrine” (Breen 109), that is, Yasukuni is not “merely a place of mourning the war dead [say, a site set up so that a daughter could mourn her father who had died in the war]; it has always functioned as an apparatus of celebration, one that transfigures the war dead into a sacred, divine existence by enshrining them as glorious ‘spirits’, and eulogizing their meritorious deeds.” (113, interpolation mine)

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Furthermore, these spirits and their deeds are explicitly collectivized, as is shown by the requests, invariably denied, by relatives of the dead for a withdrawal from the “enshrinement registers of Yasukuni”. The argument given is that the spirits have been collectivized and thus the individual cannot be de-enshrined.

Lawsuits filed with the goal of de-enshrinement have been directed not only against Yasukuni, but against the state representing “Japan” which had provided the list of dead soldiers to the shrine in the first place. Many of these requests and subsequent lawsuits are instigated by relatives of the “glorious spirits” that identify as Taiwanese or South Korean, implying that these dead would, if alive today themselves, be seen as non-Japanese, and adopt (which implies being) a non-Japanese identity. By playing a part in this process, the Japanese state has committed a grave mistake, not in the sense of moral fault, but that of strategy. If the state wishes to preserve its coherence, it is important to have the official history show a direct line of descent. Having a list of names that is Imperial in character, having people who are considered by those who feel some sort of personal and not just over-arching societal connection to their memory (the most likely example being family members) to be non-Japanese according to the outlines of the Japanese community as imagined and referenced today, shows that the successor state – and if the state is to claim legitimacy at all, the successor society to the Empire of Japan – is not today’s official “Japan”, but rather non-existent. By enshrining Koreans or Taiwanese as Yasukuni gods, the line of descent is complicated and diffused and thus the pure national subject desired is fragmented. All states will have such slip-ups at one time or another, allowing more history to creep into the argument than is strictly necessary for claims of descent (and thus too much, causing braches on the claim, not allowing for neatness).

Present here, in Japan’s case, is the implicit claim of having been built by groups that are greater than or outside the current group upon which the state, after being legitimized by these outsiders, confers national legitimacy. For example, Japan’s “closed community of mourning” (Breen 205) may be wished for in order to bring about the unified national subject promoted by Katō, but it is now blurred. Koreans, to whom apologies are professed to be owed, are also those who should be mourned, and thanked. As are Taiwanese. Okinawans, who are supposed to thank and mourn, being within the arbitrary boundaries of the state, should, according to this rubric, be apologizing to the Koreans for causing harm to their (at the time) non-existent state. Conversely, Okinawans, now, according to the logic of the state, a subset of the Japanese, could be apologized to by “Japanese” (as a whole) for having to “participate in the war at the request of the army” (Calichman 118) during a time when they could have been executed for “allegedly spying on the Japanese military”. However, Okinawans, as members of the Japanese polity, are people who reap the benefits the enshrined spirits supposedly fought for, so they should be apologizing to someone/thing/society. It is impossible to tell: the logic breaks down, as it does when the categories it relies on are blurred. To take an extreme example, what does the man from Nanjing who immigrates to Japan, and becomes a citizen, do?

War Memorial - Joshua Cader

That the Yasukuni shrine debate is ongoing is largely thanks to the work of people who are aware of their personal ambiguity, or of their personal connections (direct or indirect) to those who show the categorizations that nation-propping symbolism is built on to be figmentary. The idea of unification of voices of apology assumes that people can be separated into two camps: those who need to apologize, and those who need apologizing to. This is not ever the case. However, in what is further overreach, the unification is proposed along national lines, showing it to be a nationalist building project. Whatever is approaching truth, that is, whatever each individual feels to be true about those things that they know about, would appear to be quite divergent from the sanitized, delineated “official” image (that is recognized, as nations are, and one to a nation). However, if what people are individually and personally connected to can contain pieces of truth, it follows that the disjointed chimerical picture that would emerge if the pieces were to be aggregated contains more truth than the simple gloss of a national image. The national image is used, of course, as stereotypes are used, because they are easier to work with (censuses being hard enough, to have the aggregate chimera of all truthful things properly measured would be an impossible task), because they allow for understanding of rules of engagement of and on the outside. If the stereotype is not adhered to, it is considered the insider’s fault; if the stereotype is not understood by the outsider, it is the outsider’s fault for the failure of the game.

Works Cited Bennett, Tony, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, eds. New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.

Breen, John, ed. Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past. New York: Columbia UP, 2008.

Calichman, Richard F., ed. Contemporary Japanese Thought. New York: Columbia UP, 2005.

Hutchison, John, and Anthony D. Smith, eds. Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.

Kuper, Adam. Culture: the anthropologists’ account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.

Schnell, Scott. “Ema Shū’s ‘The Mountain Folk’: Fictionalized Ethnography and Veiled Dissent.” Asian Folklore Studies 65 (2006): 269-321.

Japaneseness and the Discover Japan Campaign - Joshua Frank

Japaneseness and the Discover Japan campaign

Joshua Frank

In the 1970s, Japan National Railways launched a tourism campaign called “Discover Japan,” in an effort to encourage the country’s population to make use of the railway system that had recently been built for Expo ’70 in Osaka. Discover Japan ran for ten years – far longer than the usual six-month campaign. This paper will address the process of discovering Japan and the value which the Discover Japan campaign places in doing so.

In addition, it will analyze the defining characteristic of Japaneseness, as presented in the advertisements. In particular, the advertisements referred to in this essay can be found at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmVVocTbe_0.

The essay is divided into three sections addressing three interrelated questions: “How does one discover Japan, according to the campaign?”, “What is the value of discovering Japan?”, and “What kind of Japaneseness is presented by Discover Japan?” Discovering Japan is presented as an adventure, a do-it-yourself process of making memories. The Discover Japan campaign encourages consumption as a means to personal self-discovery and cultivating Japaneseness, and emphasizes prosperity, freedom, and leisure as inherent to the Japanese identity.

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How does one discover Japan?

Discover Japan was intended to bolster interest in travel on the system of railroads built for Expo ’70. Undeniably, the root of the campaign was to encourage consumption – only by consuming goods could one truly discover Japan. As the video advertisement makes clear, the discovery of Japan would be impossible without trains, which allow travelers to cross the country with ease and comfort. Travel, and the spending that it entails, is presented as the only way to fully appreciate the country. The young women in the first ad segment are eating in practically every scene filmed, whether they’re tucking into meals on the train, visiting a traditional family’s home for dinner, or enjoying on freshly-picked apples in an orchard. Their continuous snacking demonstrates a certain disposable income that allows the women to sample various foods, discovering Japan on a culinary level. The girls also partake in card games on the train, seemingly playing for money, emphasizing their ability to spend. Furthermore, it appears as though the pair has specifically purchased a camera for their trip – in one scene, they examine the device to make sure they’re using it correctly, before taking a snapshot from their moving train.

In the second Discover Japan clip, a woman stands on a country road, consuming the landscape by taking pictures wit her camera.

On a more general level, taking the time to travel connotes a certain degree of wealth: the young women appear to have a significant amount of time to devote to leisure. Adorno criticizes do-it-yourself leisure activities (Free time 167), which people at times seem to engage in to save money. One imagines that he would take issue with the women of the Discover Japan ad gleefully picking their own radishes, when an experienced farmer could do the job much more efficiently. However, I would argue that rather than demonstrate a misguided stinginess on the part of the two travelers, harvesting vegetables is another example of their freedom to consume. The women clearly have ample time for such (ultimately impractical) leisure activities, and visibly enjoy stepping down from their elevated city lifestyle to get their hands dirty.

While the advertisement does depict the pair of travelers taking pleasure in their consumption, their activities are decidedly un-decadent. From crop-pulling to running through fields, and bathing in hot springs, most of their doings seem within the reach of the middle class. Even status-markers such as the pair’s westernized clothes and their new camera would likely have been attainable by those watching Discover Japan advertisements on their personal televisions. The primary signifier of the women’s wealth, then, is their leisure time, and their ability to use it in creative ways.

According to the National Railway, discovering Japan involves consumption – it is their campaign, after all. However, the modest leisure activities that the travelers participate in place their experience as one attainable by more than just the elite class, to whom train travel was initially more accessible. The advertisement emphasizes consumption while grounding the quantity of spending that needs to occur, making domestic travel more appealing to a broader group.

Japaneseness and the Discover Japan Campaign - Joshua Frank

What is the value of discovering Japan?

As Fujioka Wakao, an advertising executive responsible for the Discover Japan campaign, is quoted by Marilyn Ivy, “For discovering, there is no need for nature or scenery or people. Discovery is really one’s own self.” (Trans-figuring Japan 41) Truly, the focus of the Discover Japan advertisements is not necessarily on landscapes: the second clip, for example, shows a woman photographing surprisingly desolate terrain. Instead, there is a distinct emphasis on gaining new experiences. In the first video, for example, the two women are shown learning to play cards, read maps, and use a camera. Even the act of taking trains is new, as Japan’s railways were hardly a decade old by the time the advertising campaign ended.

Ivy also explains that the use of the word tabi for travel connotes the spiritual journeys of male poets, but was also re-appropriated by the Japan Railway team and used to signify women’s overnight excursions. (Trans-figuring Japan 37) This implies self-discovery taking place on both philosophical and sexual levels. As she later articulates, “Tabi is everything that society is not: it is the natural, the free, the rural, the humane, the nonordinary. […] Travel operates as a line of escape from the everyday.” (Trans-figuring Japan 40, 41) The notion of escape, in fact, is essential to the Discover Japan campaign. With the extremely dedicated Japanese work mentality, free time is perhaps the most valuable resource to aspiring travelers. As Ivy notes, young Japanese women in the 1970s were often the last to enter society, only doing so after marriage. For this reason, the young woman’s experience is one of freedom from the stressful confines of Japanese society.

To Adorno, leisure is denoted by “the privilege of an unconstrained, comfortable lifestyle,” one that the female travelers of the Discover Japan series distinctly evoke. (Free time 162) The allure of the women depicted in the footage, and the journey they set out on, then, lies in the motif of breaking free from the restrictions of society.

While it may appear as though Discover Japan works to subvert Japanese society, this is perhaps too far of a leap to make. After all, the campaign’s very essence is that it supports the nation’s railways, and seeks to encourage spending on the part of travelers. Adorno’s claims in “The Culture Industry” attest that there is little subversion in domestic travel: “both escape and elopement [from society] are predesigned to lead back to the starting point.” (13) In the case of the Japanese who sets out to discover her country, this process is hardly a static one, though: the self-discovery involved will cause her to look at her home in a new light. Ivy comments, “the self discovered is left open to further operations of difference, to further desires: one always returns home from the sheerly partial pleasures of travel, but the home (and by extension the everyday self) to which one returns is thereby different.” (39-41) Despite the fact that rail travel is presented as an essential part of discovering Japan, the National Railway campaign also makes the integral point that travel is a valuable way to discover the traditions of the past. The first Discover Japan advertisement shows two

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young women stopping for a meal in a traditional house, as well as relaxing in natural hot springs. Figuratively and literally, the pair is shown discovering their roots while picking radishes.

The film segments also provide the opportunity to reevaluate the past: farming, being outside, and appreciating simple pleasure are reconceived as leisure activities. The roles of cameras in both of the advertisements, as well as the sentimental music and snapshot freeze-frames of the second, demonstrate the power of nostalgia as a marketing tool. On the topic of looking back in time, Ivy describes Discover Japan as a “mass campaign urging Japanese to discover what remained of the premodern past in the midst of its loss.”

(Trans-figuring Japan 34) Thus, the examining and reimagining of Japan’s past becomes an important part of Discover Japan.

What is Japaneseness?

First and foremost, Discover Japan associates the Japanese identity with adventurousness and the desire to travel and explore. By choosing to depict two young, female travelers, the Discover Japan advertisements also highlight the importance of youthful freedom to the Japanese identity. Based on the rigorous work ethic Japan is known for, this aspect of Japanese identity may seem paradoxical. However, the idea of breaking free of societal roles and norms appears to be a recurring trope in the Japanese consciousness.

The woman in the second advertisement – more mature looking than the first two traveling companions – is shown skipping like a child at various points, as well as interacting with village children. The use of young, carefree women in the campaign – especially the actions of the woman in the second clip – seems to anticipate an appreciation for childishness and cuteness that figures into the kawaii culture that came in the 1980s.

Interestingly, Discover Japan offers yet another claim on Japaneseness that seems paradoxical in the face of cultural tradition. Rather than place importance on particular national monuments, the campaign valorizes overlooked eccentricities. Ivy explains, “For the contemporary domestic audience […] no place is too remote, no festival too salacious, no group too impoverished or marginal to be featured in a guidebook or spotlighted on television” (Trans-figuring Japan 33) The Discover Japan campaign also provides insight into the relationship between traditional Japanese culture and the west in Japanese identity. The presence of the west is undeniable in the advertisements, from the fashionable clothing the women to the technology on display – trains and cameras. That being said, the train is used only as a tool to delve deeper into the Japanese experience. For its part, the camera also serves only as a means of recording the experience of discovering Japan.

Discovering Japan is a presented by the National Railway as a journey of self-discovery, one where consumption – whether eating, taking photographs, or picking vegetables – is an integral part of the experience. The campaign paradoxically associates Japaneseness with a certain youthful rejection of Japanese society’s expectations, stressing the

Japaneseness and the Discover Japan Campaign - Joshua Frank

-doxically associates Japaneseness with a certain youthful rejection of Japanese society’s expectations, stressing the importance of leisure, personal experience, and eccentricity. However, gaining an awareness of Japanese tradition remains essential to the Discover Japan campaign. While western technology – such as trains and cameras – figures strongly as a tool to discover Japan, it is by and large overshadowed by the importance placed in domestic exploration and personal discovery.

Works Cited

1970国铁Discover Japan, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QBHwPP6Xuo Adorno, Theodor. “Free Time,” The Culture Industry, 162-170.

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” The Consumer Society Reader, 3-19.

Ivy, Marilyn, “Itineraries of Knowledge: Trans-figuring Japan.” Discourses of the Vanishing, 29-65

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silver selvedge inside coin pocket

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