Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

The phallus, penis, dick, prick, cock, member, shaft, pecker, peter, tool, putz, or in other words, the male sexual organ, is celebrated in Japan’s Kanamara Festival as a symbol of fertility. To us Westerners, this sounds pretty strange, since we’ve all been brought up to keep our sexuality in our pants and in the back of our minds. The Japanese, it seems, are much more liberal about it. The Kanamara Festival is most famous for a giant consecrated shrine of a penis, which is carried through the town. MSN Mainichi Daily News writes:

Revelers also watched mostly young women sit atop huge wooden penises made as Shinto totems, each woman sparking a rapid-fire succession of camera flashes from the dozens of mostly middle-aged men armed with digital cameras.

Megadem’s Flickr photostream has some good illustrations of the shrine, genitalia candy, the large model phalluses:

If you want to know the history of this festival, I suggest Metropolis:

Sexually transmitted diseases spurred the popularization of phallic symbols in some of Japan’s festivals dedicated to the male member, such as this one dating back to the Edo period (1603-1867). At that time, Kawasaki’s “ladies of the night” prayed not only that business would be brisk, but for protection from syphilis.

Wikipedia suggests another origin:

There’s also a legend of a demon that hid inside a young girl and castrated two young men on their wedding nights before a blacksmith fashioned an iron phallus that was used to break the demon’s teeth, leading to the enshrinement of the item.

Just remember–in Japan, this is a family safe festival. I write this for my mother, who will definitely wince when she sees a post celebrating any kind of sexual organ…

There’s no quiz today!! Hurray!! We all get an additional 5 quiz points, although it is unknown at this time whether the five points extend over 100% or not.

All of China is thriving in the Song dynasty, the medieval period of great innovation and progress.  Westerners were always stunned at the level of sophistication of Chinese markers, cities, politics, and all other realms.  China was unquestionably the leader in world civilization at the time.  Today, we ask “What went wrong?”  However, this is a wrongly worded question.  To ask why China didn’t produce capitalism assumes all history is on the same trajectory, and is a very bizarre question.  We don’t have to assume that any civilization is on any particular path.

After the Song dynasty there was a brief period of disunity, and then the Mongols happened, everywhere.  They swept into central Asia and eastern Europe, and were militarily superior to any settled civilization.  It was quick and easy for them to win battles, so when they decided to hold the territory they conquered in China, they decided to Sinify, to settle down and adopt Chinese custom.  Their broader impact on Chinese society is not entirely clear during the Yuan dynasty.  They reify the four books of the Confucian tradition, and push more Chinese to the south.

Then, in the 1500s, there is the black plague, originating in central Asia.  Another invention that makes a big impact is wood-block printing.  Before, there were two ways to copy—by ink rubbing or copying.  Even though there are 5000 standard characters, laying them out in blocks for mass-rubbing was much faster to produce large quantities of text.  Over the next several hundred years, a handful of well-known printing houses emerge.  Eventually, by the Ming, the printing houses have figured out that even more than the elite literati whose sons are studying for the exams, there is an enormous population who is hungry to read.

With printing, it became possible to take oral stories and link them together into cohesive novels.

This new level of national unity in the Ming (1400s), and through the dissemination of the classical canon through books, is still diverse, with many languages and politics.  For example, Shanghainese is not just a dialect of Chinese, but rather a completely different language of the Wu family.  This has nothing to do with writing scripts, which can be used to render an arbitrary language through a symbol isomorphism.  Another way to think about the diversity in China is in the distance from the center, which could be a full week with good transportation.  On the fringes of China, there are few Chinese people and officials, and significantly less civilization and society.

The Ming continue the small number of government officials monitoring local officials who actually cooperate to form a government system.  However, this doesn’t always work well.

Zheng He was a eunuch in the main court—a Muslim—who became the commander of a fleet of ships that traveled all along the Chinese coast and southeast Asia, to India, and the middle east, as well as the coast of Africa.  In 1350-1450 China is the strongest world power, but for some reason there’s a withdrawal of Chinese expansion back into China.  We don’t understand why these trading trips shut down, or why there was a corresponding closing down in other ways in the mainland.  Ming society begins to become ultra-conservative, even more than neo-Confucianism.  Filial piety takes on enormous proportions, with stories of sons honoring their mothers.

There is another genre of stories about chased widows, who go through acrobatics to remain chaste and loyal to their previous husbands.  These two values are the ultimate representations of loyalty.

• “Shi” configuration or potential born of configuration

We’re going to talk today all about Chinese painting as a broad topic. The style of Chinese painting we’re all familiar with really has its roots in the Song dynasty, and is done in the rest of Imperial Chinese history. So, it’s a topic that lends itself to a general non-chronological treatment.

This atypical painting of the Emperor tilling the earth is that it’s a straightforward painting of a narrative scene and that it’s been influenced by European art. There are too many people for a traditional Chinese painting, it’s too dense, and only the clouds looks abstract and Chinese. Also, linear point perspective identifies it as Western.

If you look at a typical abstract Chinese painting, they’re basically monochrome with big empty spaces and then detailed space. Typically Chinese landscape paintings give a distinct partition of the white space, in contrast to small sections of dense, dark, intricate detail.

Prominent features include mist, twisted trees, and mountains. The distinct feature is the ability to render in 2 dimensions something lifelike and energetic.

Writing in Chinese calligraphy is said to reveal the moral nature of your soul. Until you are able to produce living words, you teacher will have you write the same character over and over.

“Shi” is a word that has not been well translated into English. This is a kind of potential energy that is inherent in the overall configuration of any given event or scenario. Imagine a crossbow cocked and ready to go—this has huge “shi.” Painters use this to describe how they hang large rocks over the heads over their victims, or rather, the potential energy of the layouts of their paintings.

These lecture notes are compliments of the lovely Julie Geng.

Terms:

- Zhu Xi (1130-1200)

- 5 Classics – Changes; Poetry; Documents; Spring & Autumn; Ritual

- 4 Books – Analects (Confucius); Mencius; Doctrine of the Mean; Great Learning

- After Tang, An Lushan Rebellion, government backs off locally … how will court deal with this?

- Neo-Confucians

Lecture Notes:

I. Question of the Day: After the An Lushan Rebellion, the government is unable to exercise control over much of its territory;

a. It was never clear whether the Tang had complete control over their land

b. There’s an agreement amongst the families: we all want social stability and the status quo and peaceful society, which can be achieved through Confucian ideas such as filial piety and morals and values

i. It doesn’t matter whether they’re on the government payroll, and they can still collect taxes and have a say in the local government anyway

ii. Mutual responsibility system: a notion that in any village or community that agrees if any single individual does something wrong, everyone in that community is blamed for it; everyone keeps a check on everyone else

1. This allows the government to stay back from the rest of society

iii. Everyone is socialized to memorize and think like a Confucian (especially for the examination system)

iv. They’re convinced that these sagely texts contain the solutions to real world problems like floods and other disasters

II. Five Classics

a. Problems — The classics are very hard to read; the language is constantly changing over time; the language is very old and the examinations were written in this classical language which only made it more difficult

b. Some believed that Confucius had a hand in editing these five classics; but as time went on, they realized this was probably not true

i. Complex questions about the universe such as “how did the universe come about?” did not get answered by the five classics or by Confucius

ii. In the Song Dynasty, people began to think that Confucius needed a sophisticated response to such questions as how to deal with the converts to Buddhism, Daoism, etc. and political questions of the time

iii. The theory then becomes that the Han, celebrating the five classics, got it wrong; that they’re reading the wrong set of books

III. Instead they’ve looked to 4 books:

a. Analects (Confucian sayings) – very bizarre snippets of Confucius to get a sense of his personality

b. Mencius (the next great Confucian thinker) — human nature is good; juxtapose ourselves from Buddhism (Xunzi is too similar)

i. Zhu Xi really doesn’t like the Buddhist sense that life is just suffering

ii. Neo-Confucians will tell you that the basis of reality is li (principle); which is inherent pattern or structure

1. Li is like the veins in a jade stone

c. Ritual texts (Doctrine of the Mean and Great Learning)

i. The ancient sages began ruling with their own village; their own families, themselves

ii. You start with self-cultivation, and self-examination and then move on

d. A slow movement towards a reformulation of the Confucian texts; easier to manage, to read, to understand; more appropriate to the times

i. Reduces the amount of information that people will be tested on for the examination system

ii. Nowadays, most people go looking to study Confucius’ Analects and Mencius, but very rarely anybody studies the five classics

• Economic revolution
• An Lushan rebellion (755)
• Tang (618 – 960 AD)
• 5 dynasties (907 – 960)
• Changes in Taxation

• 2 million registered households in 760
• 9 million in 755

Important news about the Quiz scheduled for 2 weeks from now.  There will be no quiz.  There’s a reason for this—most of you are doing well, but in recognition of the TAs hard work, we’re sparing them grading another round of quizzes.  That quiz will be treated as an extra 5 points on your grade.  This is the last good news, ever.

The medieval economic revolution!  We will see this topic appear over and over again, this chunk of Tang / Song time during which everything goes from whatever it was to whatever it’s going to become.

Improvements in irrigation, terraforming, economic changes, southern migration, and the change to rice all come together in this period and allow us and look back to say that the revenues in the Song available are dramatically higher than any previous time.  Strangely, the government doesn’t become richer; China becomes wealthier.  This will be true into the late imperial period.

By the Tang/Song period, the south is unified with north under a regular system.  A 20^th century scholar (Skinner) looking back tried to trace back various economic markets and networks.  He came up with a set of macro regions.  These overlap with the geographic people groups of the Neolithic and all of Chinese historical group categorizations.  These also delineate linguistic and cultural boundaries.  We can observe two kinds of trends:  increasing complexity of networks (religious, markets, transportation), and the founding of Tang infrastructure in these regions.  Then, what’s going on everywhere else?

The simple answer is they are hilly and remote.  When you get above cultivated land, you find a different ethnic group.  There was a constant encroachment on their territory by Chinese over the centuries.  However, it’s hard to distinguish them from Chinese after slow assimilation, because they pay taxes and serve the king, but sinification/sinicization isn’t total and they speak different languages than most of the Chinese.  So, there’s a long process of chipping away at diversity inside China.

Pre-sui taxation was done by equal-land share, where all land was divided into equal plots and lend by the government to your family.  You were taxed based on the number of plots you held.  This creates a predictable tax base for the early Sui and Tang.  To do so, they require annual census, a huge administrative process.  This changes in the An Lushan rebellion.

The Tang manage to survive the rebellion by allying with a handful of remaining groups to come together to prop that Tang back up, but the nature of the Tang state is radically changed.  At this point, the administration decides to offer the power to emperor in exchange for local autonomy and taxation.  The government also abandons artificial control over the markets.  Thus, there is a process of federalization.  However, the exam and value systems remained the same, even though the national elite lost their power base, because they are popular and useful.  A new set of players have come to the same game.