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ASPAC Conference 2010 June 18 – 20, 2010 | Portland, OR Lisa Donnelly Cold Blooded Murder or Cool Leadership: Reassessing the Death of Begter in The Secret History of the Mongols The Secret History of the Mongols has been accepted by scholars as both a valid historical account of the founding of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century and a record of Mongol cultural values at that time. It is also a history of one man, Temujin, the boy who would become Chinggis Khan. Western scholars in particular have puzzled over the inclusion of a number of seemingly negative portrayals of the character of Chinggis Khan, including the incident where a 10-year-old Temujin kills his half-brother, Begter. In the Secret History, the reader who is unfamiliar with steppe culture and social organizations is presented with a bewildering world where loyalties to any particular group appear to have been arbitrarily given and revoked. While some attention is given to possible steppe cultural paradigms, these fluid and shifting political and kinship relationships are usually interpreted by both Western and Asian historians within a markedly sedentary cultural paradigm. Individual Mongol loyalties and familial relations are also interpreted – or outright reinterpreted – according to the same. Ratchnevshy calls the death of Begter in the Secret History of the Mongols “cold-blooded murder,” de Rachewiltz blames Temujin’s actions on the struggle for succession but also calls it “callous.” Yet if the Secret History is a repository of true Mongolian values, why should we assume that this and other similar events are meant to cast Chinggis in a negative light? Was it truly cold-blooded murder, or the first example of the leadership skills of the young man who would grow up to rule the largest land-based empire the world has yet seen? ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Connie Earnshaw Romance and Social Ideal in Ming Painting of Bai Juyi’s Pipa Xing (Lute Song) Bai Juyi’s Tang poetic narrative about meeting a female musician during his exile to the Jiangnian region for critiquing the court became a popular subject for professional and literati Ming painters in Nanjing and Suzhou. The pipa player has lost her former career in the capital, like the poet, and plays poignant music that moves him to tears. Ming depictions of the theme evolved from figure paintings to figures set in landscape. The earliest examples are free standing figures by Wu Wei and Guo Xu. Pip axing was illustrated in a landscape setting in Wen Zhengming’s circle, initially by Tang Yin and Qui Ying. All of these paintings include the woman with her instrument, and center on her meeting with the poet. This theme of moonlit encounter on the river may suggest social ideals as well as romance through portraying a bond of sympathetic resonance between the man and woman strengthened by music, a model of interpersonal harmony in the face of adversity. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Stephen Epstein Kisses From Outer Space: South Korean Images of Central Asia Over the course of the last decade, South Korea has come into increasing contact with the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Recent labor migration has seen numerous Uzbekistani citizens arrive in Korea, for example, and there is now within Seoul a neighborhood known as the Central Asian village (chungashia ch’on). Nonetheless, if Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen’s putative Kazakhstani, suggests the depth of the Western ignorance about Central Asia, South Korea has fared little better in developing nuanced representations of the region. In this paper I explore contemporary Korean images of Central Asia with a particular focus on Hwang Byeong-guk’s 2005 comedy-drama film My Wedding Campaign (Naui kyorhon wonjonggi), which follows the journey of two rural Korean men to Uzbekistan to find brides with the help of a brokerage agency. The characters’ initial lack of familiarity with Uzbekistan, its location and even its actual name, which is humorously conflated with the Korean words for “outer space” and “kiss” suggests an exotic fantasy land. I will argue that in contrast to Vietnam, which functions as a quintessential “Asian” nation for South Korea, the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia, placed ambiguously in the Korean imagination between 10
ASPAC Conference 2010 June 18 – 20, 2010 | Portland, OR East and West, Asia and Europe, development and backwardness, and social freedom and repression off a fruitful site in which to examine Korean conceptions of “Asia” and to discern where the boundaries of such constructions lie. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Robert Fisher The 1860 Japanese Mission to the United States The 1860 Japanese Mission to the U.S. was a momentous, and now largely forgotten, moment in American history. The samurai and attendants were the objects of immense public interest and at every stop on their brief tour were greeted by public throngs hoping to catch a glimpse of the strange “exotic” visitors. Part of the reason for this intense popular interest was because the Japanese were the first real foreign mission of its kind to visit the U.S. and was therefore symbolically very important to America’s changing popular image of itself as an emerging world power. On the other hand this mission, despite its obvious import to the national self-image, was extremely problematic due to the little issue of the Japanese not being “white.” Race has always been something of a bugbear in the American psyche, and perhaps at no greater time in American history that 1860, just five years before the outbreak of the Civil War. This presentation will look at how these competing and often contradictory views of the Japanese were depicted in the popular imagination at that time and the impact this visit had on U.S.- Japanese relations. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Miho Fujiwara Japanese language learners' use of event anaphora in written discourse Unlike "hard rules" at morphological and syntactic levels, many discourse phenomena are usually governed by "principles" and "preferences," hence are hard to provide explicit instruction in a systematic way. It is, thus, undeniable that focus on sentence-level form tends to be prioritized in many foreign language teaching contexts, but discourse-level research and practice has also been attracting attention (cf. McCarthy, 1991; Thornbury, 2005). While grammatical competence focuses mainly on sentence-level grammar in terms of the rules that govern the formation of acceptable sentence, discourse competence is concerned with intersentential relationships. Such relationships are often described as cohesion and are realized by lexical or grammatical devices (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). Among a variety of beyond-sentence phenomena, our main concern is on referential cohesion. Especially this study will investigate how Japanese native speakers ONSs) and Japanese language learners (JLs) use event anaphora (demonstratives with sentential antecedent) to maintain overall coherence of a discourse. We built a comparable corpus between Japanese university students (JNS) and American university students (JL). In collecting data, an episode of Pingu, a Swiss clay animation, is presented to students as a prompt in producing a written narrative (Le., synopsis writing). The Japanese and American students were asked to reproduce the same Pingu story in their L1 and L2. The result shows that JNSs used event anaphora in object position rather than in subject positions while JLs hardly used event anaphora in object positions. In the presentation, we will also discuss implications of the results for Japanese language teaching. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Michele Gamburd Demographics and Remittances: Labor Migration and Population Aging in Sri Lanka Sri Lanka stands at the conference of two major social trends: a demographic shift toward an aging population, and changing aspirations among migrant families. As time passes, the median age of Sri Lanka’s population increases. Cultural expectations dictate that daughters-in-law should care for elders in the home. Simultaneously, three decades of transnational labor migration of guest workers to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) continues; in 2008, roughly 1.8 million Sri Lankans (over 23% of the country’s working-age 11
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