I encounter a great model recently. I was looking up Japanese podcasts for my friend who wants to learn how to speak Japanese politely but not too formally. One of the shows I found is Living Style ～暮らしの中の先生たち～ By JAPAN FM NETWORK from 4-5 years ago. It caught my eyes because it had an interview with Ueno Chizuko (and many other scholars I like). I listened to her speaking, and she is exactly what I was looking for. A chilled-out intellectual. She is funny, passionate, quite feminine, of course smart, and sounds very approachable. The show was almost entirely about her latest book on the single elderly life, but towards the end, she also summarizes what women’s studies (or feminism) is about in a few words: it means that no one but you decide who you are.

Right after this, yes IMMEDIATELY after this, the interviewer asked her the last question: “what is the best thing about Japanese women (“nihon josei” and what is not good about us?” I hit my head against the desk. Did you not hear she just said we decide who we are —?! Perhaps you prepared that question before the interview, and could not process the context on the spot. In response, Professor Ueno just casually goes, “there is no such thing as nihon josei. Everyone’s different, dear.”

She is SO COOL. She probably got the same question over and over by now. She doesn’t even bother saying “like I just said.” She did not intimidate or humiliate the interviewer or the audience. In the end, her message was a lot more acceptable than someone shouting angrily. It is her victory. I wonder achieving her level requires experiences after experiences…

I presume everyone’s answer is, IT DEPENDS. The meaning of “democracy” totally depends on the local context. It could be a rebellious, or conservative, concept depending on who uses it for what reason. The importance of such discursive analyses also depends on the context — would it trigger a new political phase like the one in the 1990s Taiwan and South Korea, or just another speech by the US president? Thinking this way, I thought I did not like discursive analyses no matter how elaborate they are. Because it is the background that mattered, not the discourse itself.

I was wrong. Besides the fact that I have encountered wonderful discursive analyses, I felt the same frustration when the book was so strictly empirical. I do social history and I like detailed facts, but people have hearts and brains. I want to know what they were thinking and feeling. Ultimately, without that imagination, history is boring.

And I realized a very simple fact. Even if you are interested in one kind of analysis, you need to add information from a different point of view. I remember the best feedbacks from professors to speakers are usually asking to add another dimension. “Who are these people in the committee that you are talking about? Did they get along?” “Why did they advocate the policy in such a way?” are good questions to ponder if you are doing political history, for example. The question of “how did they feel, or how did the other people feel, when soldiers came back from war?” requires both social and discursive research in addition to the issue of compensation. And for those who do discursive analyses, “to what extent did people care or know about these things? what impact did it make?” is always a challenging but worthwhile question to keep in mind. Exciting histories I have read address all-round questions like these. They make our imagination rich and expansive.

…. Sigh. (feels like I’m raising the bar by myself.)

Why do we feel disgusted by these ideas? One clear reason is the accuracy issue. We know a lot of what people consider traditional and culturally unique was created (or “invented” together with the modern nation-state. Speaking of which, most of us, including myself, doubt everything the nation-state does for its own sake. I don’t know about other people, but my reaction is quite instant and harsh, and it does feel like I have a real mental allergy to this whole area of thoughts, which I cannot explain just by the historical accuracy. Maybe because we encounter too many histories that are so badly tainted by nationalism, and are tired of it. Or maybe because historians do not want to repeat the same mistake of exoticizing foreign objects that they study as it happened in the past. We feel guilty for what our predecessors kept doing up until a few decades ago. Maybe that is it. I used to force my partner (a male caucasian) to say he likes me “despite how I look (=asian)” just to make sure this is not about exoticization.

I noticed, however, our allergy is making our lives (including my partner’s) harder than necessary. People love anecdotes and conclusions about national essences. They really do. People want to confirm with each other that North Koreans are absolutely bizarre by discussing how people wept on the street when their leader died. I also tell people that the Japanese eat fermented soybeans and seaweed everyday when I sense people want to hear something exotic. Japanese families keep asking foreigners what they think are unique about Japan and how difficult they think the Japanese language is — they love exoticizing themselves! Just recalling all these things makes me feel nauseous now, but they are just enjoying conversations in bars, and this is one of the most polite, and potentially witty, things to talk about with complete strangers. It is only us who feel weirdly distressed in this situation, not knowing whether we should argue back, or just go along with it.

Maybe I should try this costume to get over it.

Looking at the gorgeous beach and blue sky in the countryside, I just keep thinking of my dream of hosting a summer camp for high school students from all over East Asia. I have not worked out anything practical. But I want to have students from Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan live together for a few weeks, do history together, think about social issues, hike in the deep mountain and dive in the tropical sea, and maybe learn each other’s languages a bit. Okinawa is such a perfect location for its historical role as a small hub and to keep some distance from any national capital yet stay physically close. I don’t know what language in which we will operate. I also don’t know how to lead the history workshop to constructive critical thinking, instead of creating the clear-cutting aggressor-vs-victim narrative. (Ugh, this positionality issue, again.)

I kept thinking about it while we drove along the coast, but it also made me realize that I am affected a lot by my research topic — youth groups. I have to admit that a famous Japanese novel, 次郎物語 (Jiro monogatari), was a powerful piece. The latter half of this long novel describes the idealized version of what youth group advocates imagined to do during the youth training in 浴恩館 (Yokuonkan) in Tokyo — probably because this part was written after the war, the author, Shimomura Kojin, depicted it as such an anti-militaristic, youth-centered, bonding experience for the youth. My desire to open a summer camp worries me if this is a sign of me getting a little too close to my research object.

Another note is about case studies. Even at this stage, case selection is hard. It cannot be too rural or too urban, has to match the other cases, and you have to find good witnesses. This time I found a bunch of self-published autobiographies — fortunately the Okinawan elderly write many of those –, and I might be able to track down a perfect Okinawan figure in Aichi. Yes, in the Japanese main island. This is another thing. Those who were active in village youth groups often became successful businessmen or politicians. They all left the village early on (or died in the war, of course), making it harder to find them.

Finally, the relationship between Shimazu (in Kagoshima) and Okinawa is fascinating. It gives a good sense of the political tensions between the center (whether it’s Toyotomi Hideyoshi or Tokugawa shogunate) and Shimazu, as well as the relationship between Ming/Qing China and the Japanese local domains. Interpreting Shimazu’s rule/invasion of Ryukyu is the key to imagining the place of Okinawa in the modern history of Japan. I would most definitely include one lecture on Okinawa’s point of view if I teach Japanese survey history. Please remind me that I should write a historiographical analysis of the history of Okinawa written by various Okinawan intellectuals before I graduate.

Thinking about what I have gone through over the past year, I am very happy. Twelve months ago, I was still in Tokyo, being unsure of whether I would be able to find anything in each place. I moved to Okinawa in February, which was lucky for me in retrospect in that I avoided a series of decisions I would have had to make if I had stayed in Tokyo when the earthquake hit Tohoku. In terms of my research, Okinawa from Meiji to WWII keeps blowing my mind, and even though the information I collected is scattered, I got enough to write a chapter during my short stay.

Once I moved to Taiwan, I had a panicky moment because I could not find local material in any archive. I panicked for one week, but the destitute pushed me to call people, which quickly gave me a breakthrough. I would never do that if I did not have to, but the reward was so big that I became immune to the awkward phone conversations in Chinese or Korean afterwards. My affiliation with the Center for Chinese Studies forced me to sit down and write up a chapter on Taiwan before I left. That was the best thing I did during my research.

Thanks to my experience in Taiwan, I did not panic in Korea. Surely I got frustrated when my first attempt to find interviewees who fit my case studies in Cholla Namdo did not go well, but I knew it would not be that easy in Korea. I eventually found an interesting and perfect figure in Ch’ungch’ong Namdo. It is still not like the amazing luck I had in Taiwan, but I really appreciate my encounter with the informants here.

Now because I met the protagonists of my dissertation in Taiwan and Korea, I need to go back to Okinawa and Miyagi to find the Japanese counterparts. I am visiting Okinawa briefly to meet elderly villagers in Kijoka, Okinawa in two days — keep the fingers crossed.

The challenge of the coming year is that I will be writing while doing something else the first half of the year. I have a couple of deadlines (which I love to have), for which I will be writing about Miyagi and Taiwan while I am still in Korea, and I will be writing about Japan and Korea while re-collecting sources in Tokyo. I am also finally, finally, finally wrapping up my field research, which involves many short stays in many places. My goal is to review my sources on Taiwan and Okinawa and draft up chapters on them BEFORE going back to campus in the fall. (I said it! I said it!)

On the first day of the interview, he took me to a near-by restaurant for lunch. His hearing ability has gone weak so he speaks very loud, and almost cannot hear what I say. Without paper and a pencil in hand, I sat in front of him quietly and smilingly, while waiting for the food. He was very nice and was trying to remember things that might be of my interest. Suddenly, he started singing a Japanese military song very loud — and said that when Ch’ungch’ong Namdo donated a fighter jet to the Japanese military, he brought schoolchildren to the ceremony and sang this song. The busy restaurant went all silent to figure out what was going on, without him noticing it.

I have conducted about two dozens of interviews in Taiwan and Korea so far. It always fascinates me that people remember songs better than anything else. Songs bring them vivid memories. My superhero Taiwanese interviewee often sang Umi Yukaba for me. The lyrics of this song are scary, featuring loyalty and willingness to die for the lord. But the way he remembers this song is very personal. He remembers his friends, teachers, and students that he loved in his youth while singing it.

This Korean gentleman I meet here also wrote down many songs that he sang as a youth group member for me.

Mr. Kim writing down the lyrics of the song of 防空監視哨 for me

The lyrics, again, are expectedly ultra-nationalistic, and there is not much interesting analysis I could think of. But it is this whole conduct of remembering these songs, singing them for me, and writing them down off the top of his head — the form of his memory — that tells a lot more than the content of the songs itself.

There is another example when I realized that the form of the historical material could be more interesting than the content itself. Mr. Kim gave me a copy (original copy!) of the leaflet that American Commander Hodge distributed from the sky in September 1945, entitled, “Declaring to Korean people.”

It does excite me as this is a real marker of a new phase of Korean history. But what also fascinates me is the the backside of it:

His younger brother used this leaflet to take notes in his biology class! It shows how plenty of them they got at the time (Mr. Kim could spare me one because he had multiple copies), and how scarce paper for notebooks was. More symbolic for social historians like me is that their personal needs always override whatever ‘historic’ significance they knew these things could have. Politics is always digested within their personal context. This is totally the opposite direction from “how politics affected people’s everyday life.” This little leaflet reminded me of why I liked social history.

I am an avid user of digitized sources and I truly appreciate online access to historical material. But the trade-off is that our sources are detached from the context of preservation. I am a little sad that, in many cases, we can get the content more easily but have no idea about the form. For me, it is still worth spending time walking around, and seeing the personalized sources even just for an experience as a student of history.

People have been telling me, and I myself have been telling people, that my research in Korea would be the hardest part. Two full months have passed (!!), and I have a few opinions regarding the difficulty in finding stuff on the full-fledged involvement of the colonial government in the Korean countryside, or finding good testimonies for it.

First of all, I have mixed opinions about the central libraries (like 국가중앙도서관 and 국회도서관 located in Seoul. They are great because you can bring in your digital camera, and/or you can xerox books by yourself, and many of the prewar materials have been digitized and are accessible from outside. In fact, there are other databases like 서울대중앙도서관 [gives some articles of local newspapers] and 국사편찬위원회 databases that allow you to download scanned documents. It is nice but it would be far better if I could stand in stacks and browse through the books rather than doing keyword search online because, however systematically I go through databases, I sometimes found interesting sources by randomly browsing through stacks. I also found out (or I’d love to know if I’m wrong) that there is no good comprehensive search engine for old book titles. The database 한국역사정보통합시스템 sounds as if it lets you cross-search, but it doesn’t work as it claims. The biggest complaint I have (forget the discrimination against Mac users) is that their images are often very unclear and impossible to read. Look at 毎日申報 articles in 국가중앙도서관! What I end up doing is to type up all the dates so I can look them up in hard copies. Another thing I noticed is that 국가중앙도서관 DOES NOT HAVE ALL THE (RECENT) PUBLICATIONS at all. I visited the Naju city hall the other day and they gave me a bunch of their own publications which I never find anywhere in Seoul. Isn’t there a law that all the publications have to be submitted to the central library?! Anyway, overall I like using their systems so I should not complain too much.

Second of all, do old Korean people remember the colonial period differently from the Taiwanese counterparts? It is too hasty to give any conclusion because I only had a few interviews with witnesses, but so far my feeling is: not necessarily. Among those around 80 or over, some people still have fond personal memories, others still have tragic memories, and most of them have both. Just like in Taiwan. The diverging point is those in their 70s, it seems, who technically experienced the last few years of the colonial period, and grew up listening to all the heroic anti-Japanese anecdotes in the immediate postwar period. They think their memories are authentic because they were born under the colonial rule, and they heard first-hand stories. Their narrative of the colonial period is cutting-clear: Koreans fought the Japanese all the way through and never gave up ethnic nationalism. In contrast, the memory of this generation of Taiwanese is more strongly affected by the 2.28 massacre. Some do believe in the resistance discourse for the colonial period, but many are more neutral about it compared to Korean counterparts.

Disclaimer: [This is my quick observation so far. I might be totally off, and it is NOT my intention to offend anyone or defend the Japanese rule at all.]

たとえば、少し古いが加藤邦彦氏の『一視同仁の果て』や林えいだい氏の『証言台湾高砂族義勇隊』を読むとする。加藤氏は1935年に高雄で生まれており、林氏は在日韓国人という個人的なバックグラウンドもあってか、著者の際立った情熱を感じるし、生き証人との対話の中で、私と同じように「これは書かなくてはならない」という衝動があったことが見て取れる。ジャーナリストとしては一流の仕事だとは思う。でも、ナレイティブが終始一貫しすぎて、それ自体がなんだか現実的じゃないような気がするのだ。

「ナレイティブ」と簡単に言ってしまったが、これこそ歴史家のbuzz word。政治学から転向した時に「歴史学部の学生ってやったらnarrativeって言うよな〜」と思った。中々うまく定義できないけれども試してみよう。歴史とは、過去に起こったことの物語、と平たく言うとして、やたらめったら史実を書いて物語になるわけでなし、話の筋というか、なぜこの部分の史実とあの部分の史実をつなげる必要があるのか、自分で決めなくてはならない。大抵は自分が証明したいことのために因果関係を追って物語を書く。その話の筋が「ナレイティブ」。植民地史ともなればそりゃもう色々なナレイティブが交錯するーーひたすら搾取の50年だった、というナレイティブ。帝国主義が近代インフラをもたらした、というナレイティブ。帝国主義の名を借りて資本家が一般人を搾取したんだ、というナレイティブ。台湾人はそれでもしたたかに生きた、というナレイティブ。女性は男性よりも虐げられた、いや、逆に解放された、というナレイティブ。日本時代は台湾社会を根本的に変容させた、というナレイティブ。いや、日本統治は結局台湾社会をちっとも変えなかった、というナレイティブ…。切りがないのでこの辺でやめよう。とにかく、ナレイティブなしには歴史は語れないし、自分の独自性や信念をさらけ出すことになるので、歴史学者はこれに非常に敏感なのだ。

上記の作品を含めて多くのジャーナリズムは、ナレイティブをシンプルにしなければ読者が混乱するし、メッセージが伝わらない、という制限を（本人たちは知ってか知らずか）抱えていると思う。例えば、『一視同仁の果て』は日本帝国政府が加害者で、軍夫として徴用され片腕と片目を失った台湾男性を被害者とする。どこからどう見ても、この加害被害関係は明らかだし、「戦争と帝国動員のせいで悲劇を被った可哀想な植民地青年」というナレイティブは説得力がある。ただ、おや？と思う点を、この大きなナレイティブのせいで無視することになる。当時、恋愛結婚は社会規範に反していたけれども、それを無視して好きな人と結婚した、と語る男性。まるでこの「社会規範」は帝国主義の一部のように語っているが、当時日本統治者が散々「聘金制度撲滅！」「自由結婚推進！」と叫んだことを利用したのではなかっただろうか。また、このナレイティブ内では搾取されていると感じ続けた彼が、なぜ日本の敗戦に涙を流して悲しんだのか。というように、疑う余地のない大筋のナレイティブの中でも複雑極まりない要素が色々とあるのだ。歴史家としては、というか私個人的に、こういう簡単には説明できない心理や現象に心惹かれるので、シンプル且つパワフルなナレイティブに必ず疑問を挟んでしまう。一筋縄で説明できないのが人生だと思うから。

実はジャーナリストだけではなくて、オーラル・ヒストリーをする際にもこういうパワフルなナレイティブと複雑な史実の間に立つ問題があるのだが、それはまた次回。

それから更に、３人の老人に繰り返し会いに行くようになった。初めて会うとき必ず聞く「私は大正生まれです。」という気高い一言。自分が祖父母と育たなかったせいか、「現在85才以上」の他にどういう意味があるのか分からず「はあ、そうですか」と間の抜けた返事をするばかりだった。「大正生まれのどこがえらいの、ただ早く死ぬだけじゃないの、という冗談があったんですよ、日本時代が終わってずっと後のことだけれど。」とそのうちの一人の老女に言われて、ハッと気がついた。日本語が禁止されてからも言われ続けるほど、「大正生まれ」は台湾にとってある深い意味をもつということに。

多分それは、台湾人が日本の兵隊となった数年の枠のせいだと思う。昭和生まれは終戦時19才以下だから、昭和16（1941）年に始まった志願兵にも、終戦直前の昭和20（1945）年に始まった徴兵制にもひっかからず、主に少年工として台湾や日本各地に飛ばされた。この1941年から1945年までに兵隊に行ったのは当時20才から25才程度の若者、今100才から86才の老人ということになる。ちょうど大正15年・昭和１年生まれが分かれ目だ。

戦争へ行くことが彼らの人生を変えたことは、言うまでもない。そして実際に兵士や軍夫となった人々と共に、「兵士となるべく」教育されたこのジェネレーション全体が特殊な経験をしたと言っていい。歴史学者はこの日中戦争が始まる昭和12年（1937年）以降を「皇民化運動」時代と呼び、台湾、朝鮮総督府が日本人としての国民意識を植民地に本格的に植え付けた、アイデンティティー上の「民族抹殺」の時期だと説明する。正直、私は民族の問題よりも、当時の青年層を形成した世代がこの時代をどういう思いで生きてきたか、に興味がある。皇民化運動時代、男女ともに「青年」というだけで重大任務を負う存在とされた。日本語を流暢に話すこと、親に日本語会話を強要すること、強靭な肉体を作ること、爆薬を使う危ない勤労奉仕をすること、米を増産すること、「死ぬまで鍛煉」と念じてあらゆる私欲を絶つこと。そうやって今まで期待されたことのない責任を果たしながら、台湾の未来を引っ張っているという希望。それと同時に感じる就職先のない不安感。金持ちや日本人ゆえに上級学校に進む人たちへの卑下。私が見る資料は、こうした青年の日常生活を目の前に描き出す。

終戦の日が来て、時も政治も容赦なく移り変わる。青年たちが受けた動揺は他の世代の比ではない。彼らは激動の台湾社会を、引き続き踏ん張り支え続けることになる。多分「死ぬまで鍛煉」と思いながら。日本人への様々な感情は別にして、「私は大正生まれですよ。」の一言には、その矜持が込められている。