ABSTRACTS - oia - Portland State University

ASPAC Conference 2010
June 18 – 20, 2010 | Portland, OR
First it describes colonizer Japanese male and female’s self-fashioning as a middle class people in
1930’s colonial Taiwan. Secondly, it describes communication with the dead, in other words bun-yuu (partage)
of violent memories and death using the techniques of magical realism. The dead in this novel include both
Japanese and indigenous Taiwanese people, the Sedrq in the “Musya” incident of 1930 and the Japanese
female heroine Micha’s child as well as her niece, Lili’s child, and also Tsushima’s lost child.
Third, this report considers how Tsushima’s perception of colonial Taiwan and the effect of the bunyuu
of memory can be related to recent historical fruit. Nakamura Masau’s Captivity: Historical Anthropology on
Subjective Nature and Social Power in Colonial Taiwan (2009, Ha-besuto) describes the colonial expansion of
Japanese capital and the Emperor system of the modern state in relation to Japan and the indigenous
Taiwanese peoples. The recent works of Tsushima (born in 1947) and Nakamura (born in 1944) who are of
the same generation, overlap at the point of reflexive description of modern Japan’s behavior in relation to
colonial Taiwan, especially its indigenous peoples. This report will investigate both memory and historical
recognition from the point of how to take responsibility for colonial rule.
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Pramila Neupane
Globalization and Education in Asia: A Comparison between Success and Failure
Link between education and globalization is one of the major subjects of interest in the contemporary
discourse on international development. Increasing global interaction and interdependence has expanded
opportunities for those countries in Asia with better levels of education but has made progress more difficult
for countries with low levels of education. Thus, what are the relationships between globalization and
education in the region and to how important is investment in human resources for gaining more benefits
from the increasing trend of globalization and ultimately for the development of a country? To answer these
questions, this paper compares the education, globalization, income and health indicators of successful and
unsuccessful countries in terms of per capita income growth over the period of 1970 to 2006. The study finds
that countries with high levels of education, savings and good socioeconomic policies have attracted foreign
direct investment and advanced technology, and have achieved rapid export growth and other aspects of
globalization. For example, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, and China represent such success stories. On the
other hand, countries with low levels of education, such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Papua New
Guinea have found it more difficult to achieve progress. They have experienced very slow growth in per
capita income and have not been able to effectively integrate with the global economy and society. Rather,
globalization has made it more difficult to secure investment in education in these countries, because
government expenditures in the social sector have been severely reduced to adjust to the negative
consequences of globalization. Consequently, the development gap has been widening in the region.
Successful countries have a good spread of education that leads to high growth and more resources for
further educational development, whereas failing countries have poor human resources that lead to very low
growth and limit their capacity to build up their educational systems. Thus, how to secure the necessary
investment in the education sector in such countries is the urgent issue for further research.
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Jeffrey Newmark
Confucian Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan and Korea: Amenomori Hōshū (1668–1755)
In the narrative of Tokugawa era Confucianism, Amenomori Hōshū represents an aberration of sorts. Even
after Ogyū Sorai’s (1666-1728) spearheaded the turn toward kogaku (ancient studies), Amenomori levied
criticism on his contemporary by criticizing Sorai’s emphasis on philology over virtue. In contrast,
Amenomori’s philosophy relied on the Song Confucian interpretation of the Confucian Classics and offered a
series of didactic platitudes that at times inverted or simply restated the teachings of Han Yu (768-824) and
Chu Hsi (1130-1200). Yet, Amenomori’s principal contribution to Edo Confucianism was not in the realm of
thought, but rather in the diplomatic world. Amenomori Hōshū served as a quasi-diplomat for the Tokguawa
Shogunate in the mid eighteenth century. While his predecessor in intellectual diplomacy, Arai Hakuseki
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