Digital Commons Network^™

Confronting Cultural Difference In The Establishment Of A Global Zen Community, Joshua A. Irizarry

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

As a commercial phenomenon, Zen is recognizable throughout the world as a lucrative brand name that communicates harmony, simplicity, and cosmopolitan elegance. In contrast, the Japanese Zen institution’s attempts to develop Zen into a successful global religion have proven more problematic. Despite initial successes by Japanese clergy in establishing centers of Zen practice throughout Europe and the Americas, the past fifty years have seen the dream of a global Zen community descend into a legacy of controversy, scandals, and schisms over conflicting claims of authority.

Looking specifically at the internationalization efforts of the Japanese Sōtō Zen sect, this paper will …

The Cult Of Ho Chi Minh: Commemoration And Contestation, Dat Manh Nguyen

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Ho Chi Minh, the “father of modern Viet Nam,” remains a powerful figure in contemporary Vietnamese politics and culture. Since his death in 1969, the Vietnamese Communist Party has constructed a state cult surrounding his image. The construction of the Ho Chi Minh memorial complex in Hanoi, the propagation of Ho Chi Minh’s teachings, and the state commemorative rituals for Uncle Ho contribute to his continuous presence. The state cult posits Ho Chi Minh not only as the “father figure” to whom Vietnamese people pay respect and tribute, but also as the moral compass by which the people orient themselves …

Negotiating Colonialism And Chineseness: Museums, Tours, And Heritage Preservation In Pearl River Delta, Macau, And Hong Kong, Wing-Kai To

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

The history of Hong Kong, Macau, and the Pearl River Delta in connecting China with the world through European colonialism and globalization is a well-documented story. Yet the recent designations of the Historic Centre of Macau in 2005 and the Kaiping "diaolou" (fortified watched towers and mansions) in 2007 as World Cultural Heritage sites have further placed two Chinese outposts of western influence and overseas emigration into sharper focus. With the return of Hong Kong and Macau to Chinese sovereignty at the turn of the last century along with cultural change in the Pearl River Delta, museums, tourism, and heritage …

Maneuvering Modernity: Family Law As A Battle Field In Colonial Taiwan (1895-1945), Yun-Ru Chen

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Twenty five years after launching its own legal modernization in response to Western imperialism, Japan imposed a modern legal system upon its first colony, Taiwan. In accordance with the “respecting old custom” colonial policy, the Japanese created a system called Taiwanese customary law, a mixture of imperial Chinese laws, local customs and European legal concepts, and gradually implemented its newly adopted European-style Meiji Civil Code (1898). However, even since the late 1910s when the colonial policy changed into “full-flag assimilation,” family law remained an exception to the transplantation of Japanese laws. That did not, however, mean that family law was …

Between Regional And National Identity: Spectacle And Festival In Modern Japan, Sean H. Mcpherson

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Distinctive cultures of display and spectacle mark the regional diversity of Japanese festivals. At the same time, material and ritual links among these traditions speak to broader forces of cultural standardization and commodification. This paper examines the mobile architecture and wood sculpture of festival floats (dashi) in central Japan as discursive and material markers of the connections between local Shintō festivals (matsuri) and broader agendas of nationalism in modern Japan. The Chita peninsula in Aichi prefecture is famous for dashimatsuri, Shintō shrine festivals featuring the procession of huge, wheeled floats called dashi. I argue that the recurrent reinvention …

Painting Taiwan's Modern Identity, Shelley D. Hawks

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Taiwan’s painters were dynamic contributors to a revolution in color that dramatically reshaped East Asian art. During the early twentieth century, new techniques of on-site sketching and the introduction of oil paint shook the foundations of Chinese and Japanese ink painting as it had been practiced for centuries. The Japanese colonization of Taiwan, a period when educators such as Ishikawa systematically introduced European painting methods, produced a cohort of painters in Taiwan professionally trained and committed to watercolor and oil painting. Building on international art trends like Impressionism and Fauvism, these painters developed a sense of color distinctly their own. …

Recreating Traditional Japan In Brinkley's Japan, Described And Illustrated By The Japanese, Daniel J. Johnson

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

In 1897-98, Francis Brinkley edited the ten volume set Japan, Described and Illustrated by the Japanese, Written by Eminent Japanese Authorities and Scholars. Brinkley (1841-1912) was an Irish sea captain who resided in Japan for over forty years, spoke and wrote fluent Japanese, was the editor of Japan Mail, an influential English-language newspaper. Published by J. B. Millet Company in Boston and Tokyo, the books were produced for the American and European markets and were a great financial success.

Published in several sizes, from cheap editions illustrated with black and white reproductions to folio sized editions bound in …

Artful Networking: Art Collecting And Cultural Positioning In Early Qing China - The Case Of Gao Shiqi (1645-1704), Amy Huang

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

In this paper I analyze Gao Shiqi’s高士奇 (1645-1704) collecting practices in the context of early Qing politics. This paper argues that art collecting was used as an effective networking tool and played an significant part in defining Gao Shiqi’s cultural status in the court during the Kangxi reign (r. 1661-1722).

Gao Shiqi rose to prominence as Kangxi Emperor’s favorite courtier despite not having a jinshi degree. Because of his inferior background, Gao Shiqi was under pressure to assert his status within the circle of cultural elite—art collecting was his solution. Analysis of his private art inventory indicates that Gao had …

Aesthetic Beauty In The 18th Century Chinese Novel Guwanyan (Preposterous Words), Qing Ye

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

This paper explores the tension between the radical sexual description and orthodox rhetoric in 18th century Chinese vernacular narrative. My research focuses on a xiaoshuo fiction, Guwangyan (Preposterous Words), authored by Cao Qujing and composed in 1730. This novel pictures the domestic lives of four families in Nanjing from the end of the 17th century to the early 18th century, including many explicit sexual descriptions. I argue that the author projects the ethic concern through the structure and characterization, while presents the anxiety towards desire in graphic sexual descriptions in the novel. The contrast and complementarity of the structural frame …

Absent Presence: Li Yu’S Drama Wanli Yuan And Early Qing Sartorial Politics, Guojun Wang

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Li Yu’s 李玉 Wanli yuan 萬里圓 (Thousand-li Reunion) is one of the few dramas in the early Qing period that directly addresses the topic of the Ming-Qing transition. Although Wanli yuan was never published in its entirety during the Qing Dynasty, its popular scenes circulated widely on stage, resulting in a series of “performance editions.” Oriented toward stage performance, most of Li Yu’s plays include detailed costume instruction. By contrast, almost none of the extant editions of Wanli yuan includes any costume instruction. Despite this absence, the dialogues and stage directions of the extant performance editions show that different scenes …

The East India Company's 1835 Currency Reform, Ian Barrow

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

This paper examines the East India Company’s 1835 currency reform. The measure created, for the first time, a unified currency within the Company’s Indian territories. Moreover, it stopped the longstanding practices of minting rupees in the Mughal Emperor’s name and solely in Persian, and instead introduced coins that featured the bust of the British King along with the Company’s name and the denomination written in English. Because coins are among the most evident ways states express their sense of self and power, the political effect of the reform was to underscore the decades-long process whereby the Company phased out Mughal …

Searching In The Dark - Han Learning And The Controversy Of 1799 Metropolitan Exam, Shiu On Chu

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

This paper investigates the introduction of Han Learning (hanxue 漢學) in Qing civil examinations from an institutional perspective. Focusing on the controversy over the 1799 metropolitan examination, I argue that hanxue was resisted not only by the intellectual orthodoxy Cheng-Zhu learning, but also a concept of “proper advancement” (zhengtu 正途) from examination.

The 1799 metropolitan examination was often seen as a triumph of Han Learning because the chief examiners Zhu Gui (朱珪1731-1806) and Ruan Yuan (阮元1764-1849), who were famous patrons of Han scholarship, awarded degrees to a number of established Han scholars. Contemporaries attributed this high rate of …

K-16 Education Outreach In Asian Studies: Mcc And Asdp, Dona M. Cady

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Middlesex Community College is strongly committed to the view that sharing the languages, philosophies, histories, literatures and arts of different peoples is the most profound basis for building bridges and creating respect and civility among cultures.

Our commitment to global education, and specifically our commitment to Asia, has been strengthened by our twenty-three year association with the East-West Center’s Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP). As its first regional center, MCC has collaborated with ASDP on a variety of projects, including multiple Title VI, Fulbright-Hays, NEH Institutes and Bridging Cultures grants, national conferences, and workshops.

Both ASDP and MCC promote a …

Navigating 18th Century Haiku: Translating The Poetry Of Yosa Buson, Allan Persinger

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

One of the difficulties in translating the poetry of Yosa Buson, an 18th century Japanese poet and painter is negotiating the cultural differences between time and place, and still writing a translation that moves the audience within the limits of a haiku without doing any violence to the original text. My presentation is on the difficulties in translating a literary master from the Edo Era, Yosa Buson, especially when the poems contain embedded cultural references that the average American reader would not be familiar with as it is important to convey all of the information in a meaningful way and …

Wash Education: Need For More Than Water Treatment For Floating Villages In Cambodia, Kevin Curry

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Point of use (POU) water treatment systems are widely used around the world to provide microbiologically safe drinking water in developing countries. Work done in Cambodia by Brown et al. (2007) and Liang et al. (2010) have documented ceramic and biosand filters as cost effective point of use treatment systems capable of removing over 95% E. coli bacteria when properly used and maintained. Bridgewater State University and Water for Cambodia (WfC) explored using BioSand filters (BSF) to provide microbiologically safe drinking water for people in the Moat Khla floating village on the Tonle Sap Lake in Siem Reap Province. All …

Turning Into A Shadow: Textual Management Of Sexual Violence In Taketori Monogatari, Otilia C. Milutin

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

This paper is an integral part of an ongoing doctoral research which examines the varied textual representations of sexual violence in Heian and Kamakura monogatari. The first part of this dissertation, opening with the section presented here, addresses the three mid-ninth to mid-tenth century texts, Taketori, Utsuho and Ochikubo monogatari, whose representations or misrepresentations of sexual violence shaped Murasaki Shikibu’s own, in the eleventh century Genji monogatari.

The present study focuses on the Taketori text and its management of sexual violence; it traces the work’s textual lineage and underlines the consistent and sustained attempts to sanitize its content …

Local Global Connections Via Asian American Studies, Shirley S. Tang

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

In this presentation Shirley S. Tang will highlight the specific contexts, curriculum structures and pedagogical practices developed by the UMass Boston’s Asian American Studies Program, particularly in relationship with local Asian American communities and their transnational networks in Asia. She will share reflections and analysis on connections between her teaching and research in Asian American communities as a bilingual/bicultural immigrant faculty in an urban, public university in Boston, Massachusetts and her ongoing projects on civic engagement and service learning in Boston’s Asian American communities as well as her most recent experience supervising U.S. students in their participation in the 4th …

Teaching In China: Reflections On Higher Education, Student Learning, And Teacher Training, Wing-Kai To, John Marvelle, Ryan Labrozzi, Chien Wen Yu

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

In spring and summer 2013, four faculty members from Bridgewater State University taught courses on history, business, education, American studies, and second language acquisition in several universities in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and a workshop for teachers in an international school in Xiamen. These opportunities offer our faculty new perspectives on the current state of higher education, student learning, and teacher training in China and Hong Kong. Wing-kai To taught history, culture, immigration, and ethnicity to graduate students and undergraduate students in the spring semester at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and University of Hong Kong and in a …

The Emergence Of Singlehood In The 20th And Early 21st Century: Hong Kong, Japan, And Taiwan, Joanna Kang

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

In East Asia, Confucian philosophy is the dominant value system, especially its prominent doctrine of filial piety. Filial piety is a requirement of life, and being filial is an essential approach to acquire public recognition as an individual with integrity. The most unfilial and unforgivable behavior is being unmarried or sonless.[1] However, there are more and more Asian women who are immersed in this social milieu yet are choosing to embrace their singlehood. The liberation of Asian women is one of the momentous outcomes of Western modernization. This is also a trans-cultural trend that spans nations, societies, and ideologies. What …

Enhancing Cross-Cultural Competence Of Advanced Chinese Learners — Strategies In Teaching Business Chinese At The College Level, Fang Lu

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Integrating cross-cultural education into language instruction has been a considerable challenge for second language educators, becoming even more challenging when teaching languages for specific purposes, such as business, which faces significantly increased global competition. This paper presents a few pedagogical strategies I utilized to implement cultural components in advanced business Chinese instruction with the purpose of enhance students’ cross-cultural competence. The first part focuses on strategies of selecting appropriate teaching materials to create a dynamic context for cross-cultural language learning. While adopting Yuan Fangyuan’s Business Chinese for Success: Real Cases from Real Companies as the textbook, I have integrated a …

The Role Of Culture In Making Psychiatric Diagnosis: Hwabyung (火病) And Neurasthenia (神經衰弱), Jonghyun Lee

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

The Role of Culture in Making Psychiatric Diagnosis: Hwabyung (火病) and Neurasthenia (神經衰弱)

My paper looks at two psychiatric illnesses and discusses their social and cultural dimensions. The two illnesses to be compared are the Korean affliction called hwabyung, and the once-popular Western malady labeled neurasthenia, a common ailment in 19th century America.

Neurasthenia was defined as “a disorder characterized by feelings of fatigue and lassitude,” which is caused by the nervous system. That definition could fit most people at some time or another. Hwabyung, on the other hand, means “fire illness.” Koreans believe that chronic distress can …

"I Cannot Teach Because I Am Not Smart": Working Class Mothers’ Support For Their Children's Education In Japan, Yoko Yamamoto

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Social class is a powerful element which predicts mothers’ support for their children’s academic development in Japan. Middle class mothers tend to hold higher educational expectations, invest in their children’s educational opportunities, and interact with the teachers more frequently than working class mothers (Stevenson & Stigler, 1992; Yamamoto, 2006). While ample evidence shows social class differences in parents’ academic support, few have examined why working class mothers are not as involved in their children’s education as middle class mothers. In order to understand the mechanisms of social class reproduction and mobility, it is critical to investigate the experiences and elements …