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ASPAC Conference 2010 June 18 – 20, 2010 | Portland, OR Chinese courses, teacher training, cultural exchanges, instructional materials for the communities, and a platform for research on Chinese language education in the U.S. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Zhihai Xie MacArthur’s Missionary Policy and the Christian Boom in Occupied Japan 1945-1952 Right after World War Ⅱ, the United States conducted an occupation policy toward Japan from 1945 to 1952. Japan under Occupation witnessed an unprecedented development of Christianity which was called “Christian boom” by many scholars. The Christian boom owed to both U.S. Occupation policy and Japanese domestic momentum. On the one hand, SCAP (Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers) and MacArthur regarded the spiritual reformation of Japanese people as the basis of the reconstruction of Japan. Therefore, a missionary policy was executed by SCAP to encourage the spread of Christianity to fill the “spiritual vacuum” in Japan. In addition, Christianity was also seen as a political value to accomplish the democratization of Japan as well as a strategic tool to contain the rampant Communism in Japan. On the other hand, the Japanese, both the government and the common people showed great interests and embracement towards Christianity. Katayama Tetsu, the first Prime Minister elected under the new Constitution was the first Christian leader in Japanese history. He declared that Japan should be guided by Christian morality and based on moral principles. The United Church of the Christ in Japan (Kyodan) also saw a great opportunity for its enlargement and actively exerted its influence on social and political affairs. The U.S. missionary policy and the Japanese Christian movement interacted with each other and made the “Christian boom” happen in occupied Japan. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Catherine Xiaowen Xu Revival: When a Tang Lady Lives in Wang Xiaobo's Contemporary Fiction This paper aims to explore the intertextual possibilities between contemporary Chinese fiction and Tang tales of the marvels, taking Wang Xiaobo's rewriting of a popular Tang tale as an example. With a contextualized reading of Wang Xiaobo's multiple re-writing of a Tang tale "Qiuran Ke" (The Bearded Stranger), I hope to uncover the marvelous dimension in the Tang text and reconstruct its revival in the contemporary text of a highly ironic nature. Hongfu, the Tang lady in the tale, has been taking a journey toward cliched image ever since the day she was created by the Tang literati. Her marvelous quality in her contemporary world was tamed by later adaptations, until Wang Xiaobo comes to her rescue in late 20th century. Her revival in Wang's texts showcases how a literary yearning for intellectual independence and literary imagination is reincarnated by contemporary contextualization of the cliches. Wang's texts present a continuation of the great marvelous tradition in the Chinese narrative literature, a tradition that gives more weight to imagination than to mundane reality, that pays more respect to aesthetic emancipation than to discursive regulation, and that endows literature a penetrating force across time and space. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Tongyun Yin Nationalism and the Construction of the Chinese Art Canon: Gugong Weekly 1929-1936 Throughout the prolonged turmoil of modern Chinese history, the Forbidden City and its imperial collections have been inextricably intertwined with the culture, society, ideology, and politics of that era. Concomitant with the construction of new nation-state, the Forbidden City was transformed from the imperial palace to a public museum, with all the imperial family property being recast into national patrimony. This paper examines how the Palace Museum used modern media and printing technology to create new ways of seeing Chinese traditional art in general, and paintings in particular, through the lens of a periodical, the Gugong Weekly, published between 1929 and 1936. It argues that by using photography and printing technologies and by situating its art collections in the historical context created by the mass reproduction format, this periodical encouraged a general perception of the historical continuity and significance of Chinese art tradition. The 46
ASPAC Conference 2010 June 18 – 20, 2010 | Portland, OR intellectualization of these art collections, achieved by the Gugong Weekly, played a significant role in shaping the modern concept of Chinese art and in constructing the canon of historical art in modern China. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Zhou Ying Evaluating China’s Soft Power Diplomacy in Asia and Its Relationships with East Asian Integration It goes without saying that China is growing visibly and practically at a fantastic speed compared to decades ago or to other actors. Many analysts and experts spare no effort to assess China’s power, both hard power and soft power, for government policy recommendations. Their evaluations of China’s hard power are made difficult by the opaque Chinese government while their evaluations of China’s soft power are empirically lacking and methodologically problematic. These problems contribute to their hasty conclusions regarding China’s rising soft power. However, a report, Soft Power in Asia: Results of a 2008 Multinational Survey of Public Opinion, conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA) in partnership with the East Asia Institute (EAI), produced a number of counterintuitive and counter-popular findings through a survey in the United States and five Asian countires, including China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia. In terms of soft power in Asia, China ranks well below the U.S., Japan, and South Korea in five key areas addressed in this survey: economics, culture, human capital, diplomacy, and politics. Two main findings about China’s soft power diplomacy are: first, in aggregate China’s soft power diplomacy lags far behind other Asian great powers. Second, there is a huge gap between China’s own assessment of its soft power diplomacy and that of others. Given the growing importance of and rising international interest in the Asian region, along with the role of China’s soft power diplomacy in the regional integration, this paper focuses exclusively on soft power in the diplomatic area, examines the factors behind Asians’ evaluation of China’s diplomatic soft power from the 2008 suvey. The paper will argue that China’s performance in improving the regional integration elicits the lower scores from its neighbors. The paper looks at China’s soft power diplomacy through the ideas, interaction, institutions, and responsibilities on the bi- and multilateral level that is shaping China’s foreign relations in Asia. Then it will examine the relations between China’s soft power diplomacy and the East Asian integration. The paper concludes that in order to improve the effectiveness of its soft power diplomacy in Asia, China will need to more actively engage in and contribute to the regional processes and institutions in the region. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ MaryAnn Young Sustainability of Japanese City Festivals: Tensions Between Tradition and Tourism in Asahikawa’s Natsu Matsuri The topic of Japanese festivals (matsuri) has traditionally held the attention of scholars in the fields of ethnomusicology, religious studies, and anthropology. Traditionally focusing on understanding the structure and organization of matsuri (Chapin 1934; Morarity 1972; Grim and Grim 1982), scholarship has now turned to sustainability of festivals and the role of tourism in Japanese Shinto matsuri as “folk performing arts” (Thornbury 1993; Hashimoto 2003). Unfortunately, this interest in the traditional matsuri ignores the growing tensions between matsuri traditions and tourism demands in the sustainability of city festivals. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper presentation places a cultural performance-centered approach (Singer 1955) to Asahikawa’s Natsu Matsuri with particular focus on the examination of music occasions (Herndon 1971) throughout the three-day festival. Ethnomusicologist Marcia Herndon defines a music occasion as “an encapsulated expression of the shared cognitive forms and values of a society, which includes not only the music itself but also the totality of associated behavior and underlying concepts” (Herndon 1971, 340). In the context of this study, each music occasion sheds light on issues facing city festival sustainability with nostalgia for traditional Shinto matsuri amid tourism demands. The city of Asahikawa provides an interesting challenge as tourism is promoted not only for cultural outsiders, such as Japanese tourists from other cities or regions, but also cultural insiders in the form of previous residents generally leaving for education or work. For this reason, music occasions range from processions of mikoshi and odaiko to competitions featuring enka, yosakoi, disco, and hip-hop. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 47
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