Friday, August 31, 2012

Lurie: 3 - one good trope deserves another

Although I intend to print this out and proof read it, I won't get around to that this weekend, so here it be in somewhat rough form. 


I have checked it a couple of times during the stages of its creation, but there are so many holes in Lurie's text that it just keeps growing, so I've decided that this is enough. In fact, this is a rather long post, but there is a diffuse amount of material that needs to be covered to adequately address the shortcomings of this piece of sophistry published by Harvard.


I'm not actually doing research in this field. I have only taken this up because he is part of a three-member group of dubious scholars associated with Columbia University and Bernard Faure that I am exposing as part of some secret society network that is in all likelihood connected to the intelligence operatives I have exposed here whose publications include similar patterns of false attribution of cultural contributions by Koreans, etc.


I don't know if these cretins are Freemasons, or maybe members of some Columbia University Skull & Bones type secret society, but there is no question that they are pseudo-scholars, and that extends the question to their publishers, because none of the three books I've looked at thus far demonstrates that a reasonable degree of fact checking was even performed. 


I will take this issue up again at the end of the post I am going to do on Prince Shotoku.





On p. 198 Lurie writes:

..numerous inscriptions…support the foregoing outline of written culture in the peninsula from the fifth through seventh centuries. Some of these inscriptions show signs of reading and writing ‘in’ Korean rather than ‘in’ Chinese: that is, they strongly suggest the existence of Korean kundoku.

Here, in order to put the overall concept of kundoku into perspective, I'd like to point out that Lurie mentions toward the end of his book a couple of things about the adoption of Chinese characters by the Vietnamese, in respect of which at least one of the features I have discussed in terms of general observation about kundoku above would seem to be apparent. 

On p. 343-344:

…the first direct evidence for the adaptation for Chinese characters to write Vietnamese is from the twelfth century. The chu Nom system used some characters for their sound and others to write Vietnamese words; there was also formal innovation, in which characters were combined to form new graphs (Nguyen 1959; DeFrancis 1977).

A simple Internet search reveals, however, that Lurie short shrifts the Vietnamese with respect to having developed basically the same set of practices that were developed in Japan and Korea There are several websites that discuss the chu Nom system, and Wikipedia cites works that directly draw analogies between Japanese and Vietnamese. Perhaps Assistant Professor Lurie wasn’t aware of the work of the researchers cited.

Wikipedia page:

The Wikipedia contains a number of relevant passages, as follows:

Usually only the elite had knowledge of chu Nom, which was used as a tool for teaching Chinese characters (DeFrancis 1977:30).

…Zhou (1998:223) gives some examples of kun reading in chu Nom.

Note that Lurie does cite the book by DeFrancis (1977), but not the point about chu Nom's role "as a tool for teaching Chinese characters". Given his emphasis on kundoku, that would seem to be a conspicuous oversight; meanwhile it's importance is demonstrated by the fact that it is included on a much more general reference such as the Wikipedia page. Perhaps Assistant Professor Lurie simply didn't read the whole book. Incidentally, the book "DeFrancis 1977" does not appear in Lurie's bibliography however, but that was probably just an oversight, as two other titles by the author do appear.

According to Wikipedia the title is, Colonialism and Language Policy in Vietnam, and it is out-of-print. Here is the amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Colonialism-Language-Vietnam-Contributions-Sociology/dp/9027976430/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346523842&sr=8-1&keywords=defrancis%2C+colonialism 

Lurie does not cite the book by Zhou, but that book does appear to be in Chinese:
Zhou Youguang 周有光 (1998). Bijiao wenzi xue chutan (比較文字学初探 "A Comparative Study of Writing Systems"). Beijing: Yuwen chubanshe.

Fortunately I have found a resource to help readers that aren't literate in Japanese understand the somewhat recondite concept of "kun reading" mentioned above in relation to chu Nom as well. When you read the information on the following webpage, bear in mind that Lurie has stated the following in the above-quoted passage, which I take to be an implicit acknowledgement of kun reading:

        The chu Nom system used some [Chinese] characters for 
        their sound and others to write Vietnamese words...

Here is the link to a webpage that has a brief and easy to understand section that introduces the aspect of modern Japanese called kunyomi (literally, "kun readings"). The section introduces characters and their corresponding Japanese vocabulary and pronunciations. The more archaic phenomenon of kundoku also comprised sentence level syntactical aspects of reading. Refer to the section called "Kun readings":
http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writjpn.html


Back to p. 198 of Lurie’s book:

    The best known of the sources that shows such signs of influence by Korean languages is…cut into once face of a …stone tablet that was found in Kyongju (the former capital of Silla) in 1935. The cyclical date of this inscription could correspond to dates between the mid-sixth and late eighth centuries. As in the case in the Japanese sources surveyed in the preceding section, the primary signs are reversal of Chinese Verb-Object order and employment of grammatical markers in way contrary to literary Chinese usage.
    It is clear that this text was written, and presumably read, in an early Korean language (probably that of Silla) with pronounced syntactical differences from literary Chinese. Object-Verb order is present…

In a footnote on p. 199 Lurie specifies that the cyclical date of the above-described Kyongju inscription:

…could correspond to 552, 612, 672, 732, or 792.

Lurie, however, seems intent on dating it to the “early Silla” period, as per his statement on p. 199:

… non-Chinese syntax of this inscription is powerful evidence of the use of kundoku in early Silla [my emphasis], although unfortunately it is impossible to specify when in the sixth through eighth centuries CE it was written.

The early period of Silla, however, ends in 667, and the late period ("Unified Silla") ran from 668 to 935. In other words, he cannot both claim an "early Silla" date and then declare in the same sentence that it is not possible to definitively date the artifact to a year that falls within the time frame of "early Silla". 

The text of the inscription itself sets forth vows of loyalty to protect the state and achieve the Confucian Way, so it is highly probable that this stone tablet was engraved following the unification of the peninsula after Silla defeated Paekche in 660 and Koguryo in 668. Moreover, though Lurie asserts that writing didn’t arrive in Silla until relatively late,  he does not question when Confucian texts would have received a lot of attention, as per the emphasis in the inscription.

Lurie quotes from the text of the inscription as follows, also on p. 199:

“…we made a great vow to obtain the way of the Book of Odes, the Book of History, the Book of Rites, and the Zuo commentary…”

Those are all works from the Confucian canon. Once again, to refute Lurie’s paper thin arguments, one only has to go as far as Wikipedia for a little basic fact checking.
The Wikipedia page on Silla is at:
The pages states:

With Silla unification Buddhism came to play a less perceptible role in politics as the monarchy attempted to adopt Chinese Confucian institutions of statecraft to govern an enlarged state and to curb the power of the aristocratic families.

The Wikipedia page on Unified Silla is at:
The pages states:

    A national Confucian college was established in 682, and around 750 it was renamed the National Confucian University.

Perhaps the stone tablet bearing the Kyongju inscription was inscribed by some students about to enter the college. Or perhaps it was inscribed to commemorate the establishment of the college to motivate students, or alternatively, at the time that the college became the National Confucian University; if such circumstances are taken into consideration, the respective dates of 672 and 732 would seem most plausible. In any case, the circumstantial evidence seems to indicate that the inscription dates to Unified Silla (i.e., late Silla), not to “early Silla”, as Lurie asserts in a somewhat surreptitious manner. 

It is fair to take this opportunity to call attention to the possibility that Lurie appears to have attempted to employ a number of such rhetorical devices that might confuse or mislead the reader as to what is actually at stake in the text. With respect to the above-describe passage, it could be seen as an attempt to lend support to the overblown assertions about contributions to the development of the Japanese writing system by Koreans.

On pp. 196, Lurie writes:

    Comparatively little written material remains from early Korea. But extant inscriptions, unearthed artifacts, Chinese historical sources, and later Korean works make it possible to see the roots of early Japanese writing in the Korean peninsula, especially the ‘Three Kingdoms’ of Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla during the sixth and seventh centuries. Evaluating the role of Korean practices in the development of early Japanese writing and literacy means taking into account: (1) plentiful evidence of involvement of scribes and refugees from the peninsula, from the age of the Sakitama-inari and Eta-Funayama swords, though to the seventh century transition to widespread written communication; (2) limited by nonetheless convincing evidence of Korean use of kundoku for writing and reading in the sixth and seventh centuries, predating the Japanese evidence of the practice; and (3) later evidence from the ninth century onward , in the form of Korean annotations of equivalent transpositions, and mixed use of logographs and phonographs.

I've already looked at the question of the early sword inscriptions with respect to Lurie’s unsubstantiated assertions relating to those scribes, and it seems to me that the question of the role of scribes is less significant than asserted by Lurie, and was perhaps somewhat more varied than Lurie's implies. 

Of the other two “points” Lurie asserts, the second is also unsubstantiated and simply does not hold up under even provisional scrutiny, and the third seems absolutely ludicrous when considered in light of the fact that the Japanese had developed a full-scale phonetic writing system by the ninth century. 

It is interesting in this passage that Lurie places the “involvement of scribes” at the top of his list. While it is clear that scribes were employed by the Yamato court, Lurie provides no substantial account of the activities of even a single scribe upon which to base his claim; furthermore, he makes dubious assertions about others, as I have shown in the first post on this book in relation to the Chinese name inscribed on the Eta-Funayama sword.

Moreover, he would also seem to attribute work to scribes that might be taken to insinuate that the contemporary aristocrats of Yamato Japan were illiterate; more specifically, he seems to imply that maybe some of them were unable to write down their own poetry, of the vernacular sort no less.

Next, he talks of “convincing evidence of Korean use of kundoku…predating the Japanese evidence of the practice”; however, on the basis of the evidence he presents, as I have examined above, there is not a single piece of such evidence that can be reliably dated to precede the corresponding usage in Japan. Even the somewhat advanced forms of study tools found in the Kita-Otsu and Kannonji-Temple mokkan date to the latter part of the 7th century.

With regard to the topic of scribes in general, I will point out one example where Lurie would seem to assign the status of scribe to an individual referred using the characters representing a title of something akin to “scholar”. This begs the question of whether or not scholars served in the capacity as both teachers and scribes, for example, and further as to how long there was an actual need for scribes in Japan with the increase of literacy.

In reference to a mokkan discussed on p. 190 in relation to kundoku, an endnote (4.13) on p. 394 states:

… Tono Haruyuki argues that the characters 博士 in the concluding “house of Tanba no Fubito” 旦波博士家, which also appear in a 694 Horyuji inscription (K1 7), do not literally denote “scholar”, but rather a kabana title equivalent to, and probably read as, the later fubito (Tono 1996a, 287-95). This title was primarily used by scribal lineage groups (though not all of them) and other lineage groups claiming descent from immigrant scribes.

The above-suggested reading for those characters gave me reason for pause, and the first impression I had after a little searching was that the word “fubito” 「史人」evolved from the term “fumibito” 「文人」. I have found no other reference to a reading for the first character of the compound that could be construed as even close to “fu”, including the Nelson character dictionary. Etymologically, there could be a correspondence between the compounds 「文人(史人)」and 「博士」 but that would rely on an extension of the meaning of the first beyond the scope of “scribe” taken in the strict sense. That is a feasible scenario, given the evolution to “fubito” 「史人」 from “fumibito” 「文人」, but would call into question Lurie’s construal of the role of scribes and literacy in general. 

By that I simply mean that the aforementioned evolution from "fumibito" to "fubito" can be construed as an evolution from a more narrowly defined occupational title to a title reflecting a more broadly defined occupational scope. Etymologically, the Nelson gives the definition of the character 「文」 when read as "fumi" to mean "letter, note". Accordingly,  「文人」 would translate to something like "one who composes letters".  The the Nelson gives the definition of the character「史」 when used with respect to a person as "historian" with the reading "fu" being archaic, apparently. Accordingly, the occupational title 「史人」 as "historian" would seem to be of a higher order than "one who composes letters". At any rate, the variegation of related nomenclature itself would seem to be an indication of a corresponding differentiation of occupational status and type with respect to "scribes".


The reading Lurie translates, on the basis of the suggestion by Tono, as "house of Tanba no Fubito" might be translated more literally as simply “the house of Tanba, the scholar”. If we take the suggestion literally that the reading was indeed fubito and indicated rank, then it would follow that the mode of address on the mokkan was made in terms of  rank. That would presume that there was only one scribe with the surname Tanba in the specified locale. On the other hand, if it was made in terms of occupation, then it would translate more literally to something like "the house of Tanba the scribe". Bearing in mind that the mokkan relates to the collection of rice sheaves in relation to taxation, and that the communication is a letter between officials, it would seem that the notion of an occupational status of scribe being conflated with a court rank is somewhat incongruous. They were obviously all capable of reading and writing, so were they all scribes? And if there were more than one "lineage group" using this title, it would seem to be prone to cause confusion.


On the basis of the characters used, the compound 「博士」 would seem to represent an even more exalted title than 「史人)」, indicated broader learning than simply history, for example. On the other hand, if it is a kabane rank title then it would likely simply be a matter of convention during the period in question. It is clear that one of the highest ranking  courtiers took the title of Fuhito during the Nara period (i.e., Fujiwara no Fuhito), although the characters used to write the homonym were different 「不比等」. With this "spelling", however, though there may a degree of resonance with the nuance of the homonym of the above-described two-character compounds meaning something like "man of letters", were I to venture a more literal translation of the three characters, it would be  something like "of incomparable rank", or perhaps "incomparable among equals". The final character can be meshed with the other two to produce a similar homonym with two different nuances, so it is a somewhat sophisticated "spelling", as it were, but it is not related to a scribal lineage or occupation, and I'm not sure whether it would be considered a kabane rank in this case. But I digress.

Here are some web-based references (Japanese) for the term fubito and relating to actual scribes:

In all fairness, after some further searching, I found a several Japanese web-based references relating to the mokkan in question. One such valuable reference also includes the reading described in the above-quoted endnote, but the author is not Tono, but Inukai (appears on last page in series).  Here is the amazon link to his most recent book (2011).
http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E6%9C%A8%E7%B0%A1%E3%81%AB%E3%82%88%E3%82%8B%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E6%9B%B8%E8%A8%98%E5%8F%B2%E3%80%902011%E5%A2%97%E8%A8%82%E7%89%88%E3%80%91-%E7%8A%AC%E9%A3%BC-%E9%9A%86/dp/4305705680/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3

The following Japanese webpage dates the mokkan to the year 680, incidentally. My reason for bringing this up is simply that I find Lurie's continual referring to scribes to be somewhat superfluous and distracting. At least it has led me to the work of someone who appears to be a substantial amount of work in this field. 

http://www.manabi.pref.aichi.jp/general/10005980/0/kouza/section5.html

At any rate, it also discusses the Kyongju inscription with reference to kundoku. The author does not attempt to date the inscription, choosing instead to restrict the scope of the point he makes. He points out that the text on Japanese mokkan from the 7th centuries employ more kundoku type Japanese syntactical arrangement, whereas the 8th century mokkan demonstrate a more proper Chinese syntax in terms of "kanbun" (see the passage I quote from Ishigami toward the end of this post). He then asserts that the reason more kundoku was used in the 7th century was because Japanese first imported Chinese characters and writing via Korea, and that the reason Japanese less kundoku appears in the 8th century is due to the fact that the Japanese had in the interim learned to write in proper (Chinese style) kanbun directly from the Chinese. 

However, the example of Korean use of kundoku he sites is the Kyongju description, which cannot be accurately dated at present. It is significant that the scholar in question does not date that inscription, because that is indicative of the problematic with respect to that date as addressed above. 

Moreover, Inukai points out that the writing in Paekche appears to have been much more faithful to standard Chinese, and indicates that no stone stele inscriptions have been found in Paekche that show an influence of kundoku. This further problematizes the scenario, which should be apparent from the earlier discussion in relation to the transmission of Chinese character based writing to Japan from Paekche, etc. 

At any rate, I'm being drawn further into researching this subject matter than was my intent, so I'm going to leave Inukai's theories, interesting nonetheless, without further comment. I will say that at least Inukai provides his readers with a clear line of reasoning upon which he bases his assertions, whether we agree with them or not. Below I have provided more links to the webpages (which appear to be under the umbrella of the government of Shiga Prefecture) presenting some of his findings, followed by a link to an English article regarding a fairly recently discovery mokkan that contains a poem included in the Manyoshu anthology and dates to the later part of the 7th century.

http://www.manabi.pref.aichi.jp/general/10005980/0/kouza/section4.html
http://www.manabi.pref.aichi.jp/general/10005980/0/kouza/section7.html 

http://heritageofjapan.wordpress.com/inception-of-the-imperial-system-asuka-era/the-cultural-heritage-the-art-of-asuka/the-cultural-heritage-of-asuka-manyoshu-poems-and-other-legacies-of-asuka/in-the-news-wooden-strip-with-manyoshu-poem-believed-oldest-of-its-kind/ 



One further reader-resource related quote before moving on, however, I've decided to restructure this post a little by introducing a passage by Eiichi Ishigami (Tokyo University). I had this passage integrated toward the very end of the post, but seeing as it relates to the present discussion and will help the uninitiated further understand what is at stake in these inscriptions on the syntactical level with respect to kundoku, I've decided to put it here.

This passage is from the book Centrality and Marginality of Ancient Documents, entitled, “The World of Ancient Japanese Documents”, and it sets forth in a very concise and succinct manner categories of Japanese text that evolved through the course of the adoption and adaption of Chinese characters in Japan until the full-blown Japanese system was developed. On p. 43:

1.2.2 Kanbun, hentai kanbun and wabun
    In simple terms, the ancient written language of Japan embraced three partial systems.
1.    Kanbun or Chinese writing. This consists of its grammar, characters (Chinese characters – henceforth to be referred to, according to Japanese practice as kanji – and their Chinese pronunciations), and vocabulary.
2.    Hentai kanbun or modified Chinese writing (otherwise Japanized Chinese writing). This consists of its grammar, kanji (including kokuji [Chinese characters conceived in Japan], the Japanese method of using characters, and Japanese pronunciations), and vocabulary (including the Japanese method of using words).
3.    Wabun or Japanese writing. This consists of its grammar, kanji, the katakana and hiragana syllabaries, and its vocabulary (both Chinese and Japanese words).


The government of Yamato Japan definitely included scribes, but it would appear that they held various statuses, ranging from those who were highly literate and worked closely in connection with the inner circle of the court, such as O Shinni, whose exploits are described and praised directly in the Nihon shoki, to those that were dispatched to lesser administrative posts in the provinces. The Nihon shoki mentions scribes being dispatched to regional outposts to record local sayings and happenings, etc. Lurie calls attention to the anachronistic quality of some exaggerated claims of the Nihon shoki relating to emperors whose reigns occurred before the advent of literacy, but literacy did spread far and wide and relatively rapidly, so the claims probably do reflect the reality of later periods to a certain degree.

At any rate, the two-character compound 「博士」 that he has cited someone else as arguing for a reading of ‘fubito’ as a kabane (type of rank) name, and not the literal meaning of scholar is a compound that is still widely used today (pronounced “haka-se”), and is most commonly seen as the title for someone with a PhD. Even if such a person may have been a descendent of a scribe lineage, the title of “scholar” could possibly suggest a degree of social mobility, in line with the Caps-ranks meritocracy-based system. 


-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The first paper from the book Centrality and Marginality of Ancient Documents that I would like to quote from below is by Tokio Shinkawa, entitled “Culture and Ideas Carried by Chinese Characters in Ancient East Asia, the Japanese Viewpoint”.

On pp.67-9 Shinkawa writes:

    The site as a whole, and thus the wooden tablets, dates approximately to the late seventh and early eighth centuries AD, largely to the reign of emperor Tenmu. It consists of the ruins of the Asukaji temple and its annex, south-eastern Zen-In. The temple is known to be one of the oldest in Japan, and its sanctuary the most extensive, while the annex was founded by Do-sho (629-700) and other scholars who returned to Japan after completing their studies in China under Gen-jo (?-664), one of the most famous scholar-monks of the Tang dynasty. Thus we may expect to find a strong Chinese cultural influence on the Asian periphery where these temples were located.

    I begin with three passages written in sumi, ‘Indian’ ink, on three faces of four of a long wooden block.
    1) is obviously a reference to the Kanzeon-bosatsu sutra, the chapter of the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy within the Lotus sutra, one of Buddhism’s most important and popular texts. 2) is difficult to interpret, but may be based on a phrase typical of Buddhist sutras… 3) contains a phrase often used in the Analects, the most important Confucian text. …we think they belong to writing exercises in Chinese characters, but it should also be noted that the writer did not hesitate to inscribe the name of a Buddhist sutra and a common Confucian phrase on the same wooden material.

And on pp. 74-5:

    Let us return to the Asukaji-Ike tablets. They contain many medical allusions, for example…
   
Text 3) is a note of how to pronounce a series of medical terms, the first word [Chinese character] being pronounced as the next [two Chinese characters] ‘ha-i’… This indicates the process of learning how to pronounce Chinese characters, in other words, how the Japanese first responded to the use of unfamiliar Chinese characters…

The points made by Shinkawa in relation to pronunciation are relative to the discussion of kundoku.

Ishigami makes a concise statement that relates to the question I have briefly touched on relating to Lurie’s attempt to assert “realms of literacy” in terms of “multiple literacies”, “diverse literacies” or the like. On p. 42:

1.2 The diversity and plurality of written language
1.2.1 Analytical approaches
    In general terms, when written source material is to be used as evidence of the culture of a particular region or society, we must consider the following methods and analytical approaches.
1. The diversity and pluralism of different phases of language within a certain region or society (i.e., class, occupation, gender, age, place, and space).

Ishigami goes on to list a total of seven such approaches, but the point that I would like to emphasize from his list is the above, as it relates to degrees of literacy rather than segmented “literacies”, and implicitly recognizes the learning process that facilitates the transition between degrees of literacy among members of a particular region or society. There is a contrast with what appears to me to be a certain hypostacized Balkanization of individuals and groups within society, with no learning process that connects to mobility within that society.

The last passage I would like to quote in this post is another from Borgen’s above mentioned essay, in light of the foregoing discussion by Shinkawa, and in consideration of a thought that occurred in relation to mokkan after considering this passage in the overall context of mokkan usage.

On pp. 203-4, Borgen writes:
… In 600, when the Japanese court was dominated by the sinophile Prince Shotoku (574-622), it sent its first formal diplomatic mission to China, subsequently, perhaps as many as twenty missions went first to the Sui and then to the Tang court; the last Japanese envoys returned home in 839. These missions contributed to Japan’s ever increasing knowledge of Chinese culture. The Japanese took advantage of the opportunities offered, selecting as their representatives, men trained in the Chinese classics who could make a good impression on their Chinese hosts and who also had the background needed to appreciate what they saw and gather useful information. In particular, these representatives brought back books. By the ninth century, Japan possessed excellent collections of Chinese writings, including literary works. Popular texts were introduced with remarkable speed.

First of all, in light of the fact that so many of the mokkan that have been found have been of the “commodity tag” variety used to label packages and cargo, it dawned on me that there might have been a connection with trade. Considering that the use of mokkan in Japan doesn’t seem to occur until after the advent of interchange with t Sui dynasty China by Prince Shotoku, as described above by Borgen, it might be the case that goods brough back to Japan from China had been labeled with mokkan as packing tags, and that the Japanese subsequently adopted the practice. 

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Citizen power - A courtesy call

The following email was sent to the consulate around the time I encountered Eric Bray, the title line of the email being: Eric Bray, The Irish connection, etc.

This was several days before I finally received a response from the DOJ. And that was a couple of months before the next encounter with intelligence officers, namely David Dalsky and David Chandler (of Doshisha University) from the UK, whose daughters were attending the same nursery school in which we had managed to enroll our son after filing a lawsuit.

Note that the incidents in question, again, occurred after I had received the deceptive response from the officials and functionaries at the DOJ intent on covering up the allegations and misdirecting me, and before I had reported that fact here.


Dear Ms. Kennedy,

I assume that you have taken note that I have been escalating the PR counterinsurgency against the MI6 and CIA cretins in this town.

You people seem rather intransigent, and you can’t afford to be. I on the other hand, have little alternative than to be just that, and displace all of the people that have tried to displace me. The historical magnitude of this conundrum is evident, and I understand that people like the ambassador, who probably has a very high opinion of himself, think that they have the right to determine policy. Well, let me put it to you this way, Ms. Kennedy, ambassadors come and ambassadors go—almost as frequently as Citizens’ Services officers—but I will be on the scene in perpetuity.

So, I’m going to take you to task, and put you out to pasture.

You should also be aware of the fact that it struck me as somewhat odd that Marc Snider was replaced so fast, even though things appeared to have been moving in a direction preferable to me. After you came on, Mr. Paquette’s information reappeared on the Kyoto university website, and you people seem to have become somewhat brazen and emboldened, with the MI6 promoting Dougill’s so-called guide book on their facile blog, etc.

Is it the case that your appointment and Mr. Snider’s reassignment coincided with the change of the Directorship of the CIA? You’ll have to excuse my paranoia—self preservation.

OK, well, at any rate, I’ve exposed these dastardly ploys, and yet you people persist.
It may be a bit taxing, but I believe I’m up to taking the CIA and MI6 propaganda team down the hard way, if they don’t simply go peacefully.

I’m not sure whether you are trying to keep Mr. Paquette on the back burner, but since you haven’t been as forthcoming as necessary vis-à-vis yours truly, I am going to release an expose on the problems that I had with Mr. Paquette very soon, thereby making sure that he is not simply retired from Kyoto University temporarily, but permanently—and perhaps from the CIA, too.

After that, I’m going to deal with the cases of Mr. Roughan, the Irish American, and the fairly large number of Irish pubs and people that I’ve met here.

Kennedy, that’s an Irish name, right?

Well, even I am purported to have a wee bit of the Irish in me, but I won’t dwell on that. Hey, me alma mater is in a city named after the good bishop.

I don’t know that I’ve ever had to think about the Irish question in depth before, and actually have other questions on which I’ve been focusing for much longer that require my attention. It does seem to me that there is a preponderance of Irish folk in public service, so maybe we have an LA Confidential type scenario here. Hey, Callahan, that’s an Irish name, too, right?

Is it the luck o’ the Irish, or Murphy’s Law?


Regards,

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Lurie: 2 - History of writing。。。 Harvard who?

Since it has been quite some time since the last post, I've decided to upload a portion of what I've been working on in relation to the book in question. Note that I've had to procure four books that he cites in order to facilitate this analysis and critique, three of which I've read all of or the relevant portions, and one of which has just recently been delivered.


Because the book itself is all over the place, it is difficult to collate the information, as there is a tendency for the boundaries to fade into each other at the disciplinary frontiers.
In any case, the main topics relate to a somewhat archaic matter called kundoku, the ongoing China vs Korea influence bias, the status of Prince Shotoku, and the notion of an East Asian cultural sphere, which is probably the main topic addressed in the first installment of this post. Even the content of this post is somewhat disjointed and far from its destination, but it is time to present it in a provisional manner.


I have about twenty more pages to edit, and will have to figure out how to collate the information into these two posts, limiting the critique of this book to two posts, and devoting a post to Prince Shotoku in the near future.




Lurie mentions Robert Borgen in passing on p. 330 of his book in a footnote addressing “social and gender dimensions of the stylistic writing in Heian Japan. That’s all well and politically correct of Lurie; however, the paper cited by Borgen, which is called “The Politics of Classical Chinese in the Early Japanese Court”, has much more than that to say on matters pertinent to points I am addressing in this critique of Lurie’s book. The essay appears in the following volume:
Rhetoric & the Discourses of Power in Court Culture

The following passage, for example, touches on two pertinent themes taken up by Lurie in relation to the adoption of the Chinese character writing system by countries on China’s periphery: phonetics; and the role of the transmission of cultural texts written in Chinese in the formation of a broader, regional intellectual community, which is an issue I address below in terms of an East Asian cultural sphere. I quote one further passage from the paper by Borgen toward the end of this post.

On p. 229, Borgen writes:
When Japanese first started to learn the Chinese writing system, they faced the same problems that confront modern students whose native language is not Chinese. The system is complicated, and the phonetic clues it offers are of limited value until one has learned a considerable amount of the system. On the other hand, the system could be, and was, mastered, despite its complexity. Knowledge of classical Chinese gave one access to a massive corpus of materials—literary, philosophical, and practical—including works that are still read and admired, at least in translation, throughout the world. Knowledge thus acquired had practical benefits, not the least of which was that it made Japan part of a larger intellectual community.

With respect to the vocalization of Chinese characters (i.e., pronunciation), that is to say, the sounds with which to render graphical characters, which are representations of words instead of sounds, i.e. logographs, the people of ancient Japan and other lands on China's periphery faced even greater difficulties than we do today in learning Chinese characters. The reason for that is because they had no way to represent the sound of an approximation of the pronunciation of the characters in spoken Chinese, which we of course have the luxury of recourse to the English transliteration system of Pinyin, for example, and they had no way to represent the meaning of the characters in terms with which they could be described in spoken Japanese.

The second of the above-described problems encompasses both an inherent dimension with respect to the pedagogical issues faced by anyone in learning a non-phonetic writing system, as well as to the additional problems faced by the people of a country that has no writing system and has a spoken language that is not the spoken language represented by the character system that is being learned in order to be adopted (and adapted) as a writing system.

This, in turn, relates to the concept of “kundoku” (which is related to present day kunyomi readings), which is a major focus of Lurie’s, and I will address that issue in terms of how such converted readings relate to both the learning process, and methods for pronouncing the characters using Japanese phonemes and vocalizing sentences in Japanese syntax. In other words, the problems addressed by kundoku are basically two-fold, from what I gather: first, the problems of rendering the meaning (i.e., semantic content) of the Chinese characters appearing in a text intelligible in Japanese; and second, the problems of converting the Chinese syntax into Japanese syntax.

The practice of annotating Chinese character texts with stand-in characters borrowed for their phonetic association is a related issue. That practice led to the development of the Japanese phonetic syllabaries called kana.

There are several papers presented in the book Centrality and Marginality of Ancient Documents that are relevant to the topic at hand, and it should be noted that the book contains essays by two scholars that Lurie cites in his book with relation to works published in Japanese only. It also contains the only papers published in English for several authors with respect to whom Lurie cites works published in Japanese only. Included are essays by: Sung-Si Lee (cited in Lurie’s bibliography as Yi, Song-si [Ri Sonshi/Lee Sungsi]), who teaches at Waseda University, Tokio Shinkwawa, also of Waseda University; Yasuhiro Terasaki, who teaches at Nara University; Eiichi Ishigami, who teaches at the University of Tokyo, and is not cited by Lurie; and Minami Hirakawa, who is affiliated with the National Museum of Japanese history, and is not cited by Lurie. 

The Japanese version of this book was published in 2006, five years before the publication of Lurie’s book, and the English version in 2010. It seems unlikely that Lurie would not have been aware of the work by these authors before submitting his manuscript for publication, raising the question as to why the contents of this volume were ignored, particularly in light of his multiple references to Lee’s (Yi’s) works, and his emphatic mentioning of the wooden slips (mokkan) that are the topic of Lee’s only essay published in English as predating any of the wooden slips found in Japan.

Centrality and Marginality of Ancient Documents


Before I take up the issues in that book however, I think I should address a comment Lurie makes directly in his text in relation to a Japanese-only publication by Lee from 2000. I can read and translate Japanese, so I have procured a copy of the book in question to see what it had to say (the translations are mine), because Lurie makes a rather cryptic and uninformative citation in relation to it, not even mentioning any page numbers or the like, let alone providing any details in relation to his citation. But before making it to that passage...

 On p 348, Lurie asks:
…what exactly is the connection between culture and writing? Do particular writing systems incorporate or encode cultural differences? Do they cause them?
    Such questions are raised, though usually not addressed directly, by the dominant metageographical concept in Japanese scholarly discussion of an East Asian cultural region: the notion of a “cultural sphere of Chinese characters” (kanji bunkaken). 

Here, Lurie asserts that the “dominant metageographical concept” is a “cultural sphere of Chinese characters”. However, the book of Lee’s that Lurie mentions directly in the text of his book addresses the question of an East Asian cultural region in terms of an East Asian Cultural Sphere. In fact, the title of Lee’s book translates to:
The Formation of the East Asian Cultural Sphere.
Here is the amazon link to Lee’s book (2000) in Japanese.

東アジアの文化圏の形成


In the abovementioned book Lee asks how the cultural sphere of East Asia should be defined: in terms of economics, Chinese character culture, and several other cultural attributes. Although Lee includes the attribute of Chinese character culture, it is only one of many that he considers. Lee addresses the work of several scholars, including an individual named Nishijima whose theory that Chinese culture was by and large spread throughout East Asia through the mechanism of the system of tributary relations between the Chinese dynastic courts and the states on China’s periphery is examined by Lee. Lee criticizes that theory, in one case pointing to the transmission of the Chinese character writing system to the Korean kingdom of Silla through the Korean kingdom of Koguryo instead of directly from China.

In any case, Lurie would seem to conflate the concept of an East Asian cultural sphere, as discussed by Lee, with that of the “cultural sphere of Chinese characters”. The immediate problem with such a characterization is that the places where the Chinese character writing systems has been adopted can be physically mapped. That makes it a fallacy to characterize the “cultural sphere of Chinese characters” as a “metageographical concept”. It is a category that transcends the borders of any single country, but it can be geographically defined, at least for the period in question. I don’t know if his intent is simply to attack Japanese academia, but the concept of an East Asian cultural sphere is obviously more appropriate, as sphere used in this sense is more abstract, in the same way as we use the term in referring to a “public sphere”, for example. This issue is taken up again below.

On pp. 349-50 of his book, Lurie writes:
The primary conceptual difficulty of the notion of a Chinese character cultural sphere, and of any regional concept of East Asia supported by a cognate notion, is the nature of a ‘character culture’ (kanji bunka). This could be taken to mean the technical nature of writing surrounding the character system; physical practices and artifacts, brushes, calligraphy, ink, paper, and so on—and a bit more broadly, the exegetical network and other metalinguistic/metagraphical components. As argued in the preceding section, it is hard to establish where the ‘system’ ends and ‘independent’ cultural practices begin, but regardless the preceding could be taken as the more narrow sense of a culture of writing permeating and surrounding Chinese characters. However, kanji bunka could also be taken to mean, much more expansively, the common culture of the entire region, of all the countries that have used the Chinese writing system or derived their systems from it.

There are a couple of points in this passage that are problematic. The first relates to Lurie’s mentioning of a “cognate notion” and a ‘system’. He initially characterizes the ‘system’ in a provisional manner in terms of the physical properties and practices of writing the characters as well as the body of texts produced thereby. He then suggests that the concept of ‘character culture’ could be expanded to encompass the “common culture of the entire region”. Regardless of the characterization, with respect to the “cognate notion” and ‘system’, because the Chinese character writing system comprises a complex set of abstract and physical components that is not simply adopted uniformly by each culture into which it is introduced, but is adapted, and would therefore likely produce a degree of idiosyncratic difference in each place, it would appear that the attempt to limit the definition of a cultural sphere to solely the nature of the writing system is inadequate to the task. Moreover, Chinese culture is not monolithic, and all one has to do is examine the history of any of the countries included in the Eat Asian cultural sphere to see that various doctrines held sway in different periods. 

On p.74, Lee writes:
Nishijima, as discussed above, places more emphasis on the role of the system of tributary relations between the Chinese dynastic courts and the various countries on China’s periphery as the conduit for the transmission of Chinese culture such the writing system of Chinese characters, Confucianism, Buddhism, legal codes, and so on.

It is apparent from this sentence that while Lee (Nishijima) places Chinese characters, while at the head of the list, account for a single dimension of the socio-cultural attributes that contribute to the constitution of societies within the East Asian culture sphere. Granted, the Chinese character writing system is a prerequisite to literacy, which is a prerequisite to receiving the transmission of cultural texts.

Lurie ends the preceding paragraph quoted above with the following sentence (p.350):

… One might express the central question about the regional place of writing as: what is the relationship between these two potential meanings of character culture?

Though I tried to ignore the distinction, Lurie comes back to it with a reified vigor. To reiterate, Lurie seems to be intent on pressing ahead with the unduly constrained notion of “character culture”, and then breaking that down into two categories which, on the one hand represent a disconnected set of physical practices and texts, and on the other hand a disembodied “common culture of the region”. As far as I can tell that makes the “central question” relating to “the regional place of writing” not only unintelligible but irrelevant. So I will leave it unanswered and proceed.

Lurie cites Lee’s book (2000) directly in the following passage from p. 350 Lurie writes:

    Another difficulty with the concept is that the notion of a ‘sphere’ implies a region with clearly defined edges, and most definitely with a center. Of course, there are real and important ways in which China served as a center for early Koreans, Japanese, and so on. But overemphasizing its centripetal attraction makes it difficult to think through relations with other cultural complexes… The implication that China sits at the center of a homogenous sphere makes it harder to conceptualize the differences among the various ‘participants,’ and it also overprivileges a hierarchical model of China transmitting culture outward to individual, mutually isolated recipients—a model that, not coincidentally, mimics the traditional Chinese diplomatic / administrative structuring of center and periphery that was discussed in Chapter 2. Such a model is not a good starting point for analyzing the historical role of writing and language in the region, as Yi (2000) shows in his discussion of how innovations from the Korean states influenced early Japanese writing.

I have already discussed problems relating to his use of the term “sphere” in the above passage. There are a number of further problems with the above paragraph, but I will limit the discussion below simply to his appropriation of Lee’s book without providing any discussion of substance. In fact, the gist of what Lee says in his book does not support most of Lurie’s claims, and there are aspects that run counter to some of Lurie’s assertions.

The book itself is rather short (a mere 90 pages, with numerous photos), and is academic in orientation; that is to say, it is not a theoretical treatise per se, but addresses more theoretical work by other scholars, with its intended audience appearing to be students and researchers working on the ground level in the field.

Lurie emphasizes the fact that the adaptation of Chinese characters on the Korean peninsula happened earlier in Paekche and Koguryo than Silla, but that Chinese writing was introduced into Japan through Paekche, starting at least one-hundred years before the developments described by Lee with respect to the use of Chinese writing in Silla. To a certain degree, it would appear that Lurie avoids discussing Lee’s book because some superordinate points in Lee’s arguments contradict points in Lurie’s arguments, whereas Lurie seeks to appropriate from Lee’s arguments simply the fact that Silla didn’t receive its transmission of the Chinese writing system directly from China through the conduit of a tributary relationship with the dynastic court of China. One way which Lurie can be seen as attempting to get around this problem is by attributing the contributions to “Korean states”, but Lee assigns credit only to Silla, claiming that the relationship with Silla should not be overlooked or made light of (in the manner Lurie does) with respect to the development of Chinese character related practices in Japan.

On p.69, Lee writes:
… these examples would seem to compel us not to disregard as insignificant the relationship between the Chinese character culture of ancient Japan and Silla.

There are problems with Lee’s assertions, which I will turn to eventually below; however, his research is at least presented in a manner such as to provide food for thought, and are supported with actual, though scant archaeological evidence.

On p. 64, Lee writes:

There is one mokkan that has been excavated from the site of the Iseongsanseong Fortress (Kyongi Prefecture, Hanam City), which was in the northern part of ancient Silla, that is from an even earlier period and is of great interest because of what it contributes to our understanding of the relationship between Silla and Japan with respect to Chinese character culture at the beginning of the seventh century.

Link to English website:

Lee cites the date of the mokkan in question as 608, but according to the following excellent Japanese blog, the cyclical date could correspond to either the year 608 or 688.

The point that Lee seems to take as most important relates to a find he portrays as representing a connection between Chinese character culture in Silla and Japan on the basis of the appearance of a particular usage of a single Chinese character [「前」~に宛てる] (see pp. 65) to identify the addressee of a shipment (commodity package) to which the wooden slip (mokkan) bearing the inscription in question was attached.

Lee notes that there are examples of similar usages have already been found in Japan and China. He states that an example of a similar usage found on a mokkan excavated from the site of the Fujiwara palace [「其の前に申す」]  (see pp. 65), which served as the imperial capital from 694-710, demonstrates the influence of a phrasing from the Six Dynasties period of China. I’m not really sure what to make of the overall thrust of his presentation of this point on p. 65, so I won’t post a translation of the sentences containing this information. 

I will, however, clarify that the Six Dynasties period was from 222-589 CE, and the site of the Fujiwara palace has demonstrated construction there from 682 (Wikipedia). Considering that the date of the mokkan from the Korean site is in question, and that the mokkan from the Japanese site is said to be influenced by Chinese precedents, it is not clear what point Lee is trying to make regarding the relationship of this usage with respect to its adoption in Japan and Korea. Certainly such a usage would have been rudimentary by the end of the seventh century, considering the fact that literacy in Japan had advanced significantly by that point among the elite, and the use of mokkan was fairly widespread. Therefore, it would seem hard to believe that Lee means to suggest that the usage in question was transmitted to Japan from Silla.

The point in relation to the usage of the single character in question is a point that is significant only in terms of the kundoku question; that is to say, the usage of the character is logographic and is not related to phonetics or vocalization. Moreover, the find will have to be correlated with further archaeological evidence excavated in the future in order determine the significance of the usage in question to the overall developmental trajectory of Chinese character usage in Korea and Japan.

Lee also discusses the occurrence of a particular character used to mean "key" that he cites as appearing on a mokkan from Japan 「二条大路木管」(Nijo-oji-mokkan) and on a mokkan from the Anapchi garden pond at a palace in Kyongju. The character in question was originally a character used for a metal weight unit, but is used to mean "key" on the Korean mokkan in question, while both the mokkan from Japan and Korea are related to the delivery of provision packages to guard posts. 


Lee gives no information on the dating of the 「二条大路木管」(Nijo-oji-mokkan), but there is information on the following Japanese website:
Basically, it too would appear to be from around the middle of the eighth century. 

Lee makes what is perhaps a somewhat exaggerated claim on p. 62 to the effect that it is "probably not possible to ignore Silla when talking about the development of the use of Chinese character culture in Japan" on the basis of the occurrence of the use of the single character in question. I suggest that it may be exaggerated because is based primarily on the usage of a single character as a noun, with no relation to the practice of kundoku or adaptive phonetics.

In all fairness, however, although the linguistic evidence of a connection between the Chinese character culture of Silla and Japan is very thin, Lee does states that prior to the discovery in Korea it had been thought that said usage was unique to Japan. Therefore, he appears to be trying to establish a connection in relation to common practices with respect to guard posts and the like, which are peripheral to the practice of writing itself. In this respect too, however, much is left unsaid, perhaps because there is too little evidence to propose that there may have been some practices--maybe even lock-related technology--that were specific to Japan and Korea, and developed independently from China. 

On the other hand, with the possible exception of the fact that a character originally having a different meaning in China was adapted to represent a different meaning in common in Japan and Korea, there would appear to be little at stake in the terms of a linguistic "innovation" of the sort being addressed by Lurie. Lee would appear to have introduced this occurrence as another example of the development of writing practices using Chinese characters that was conducted without the direct influence of China, in this case, a development that exists between Silla and Japan. 

It is not clear whether Lee means to imply that the use of the term originated in Korea and was then adopted in Japan, but there is no evidence for that, and the dating of the Korean mokkan is perhaps slightly later than that of the Japanese mokkan. Other mokkan from the Anapchi pond have cyclical dates from the middle of the eighth century, and the pond itself wasn't constructed until 674. 

On p. 17 of the Introduction of the book Centrality and Marginality of Ancient Documents:

      ...Some fifty wooden slips were discovered in the 
      Anapchi pond at Kyongju, the ancient capital of 
      Silla, in 1975.
      This artificial pool was constructed in the palace 
      in c. A.D. 674... The Anapchi wooden slips had 
      been used...in the reign of King Kyong-dok (A.D. 
      742-65). According to Sung-shi Lee, 
      some slips are imperial order...modelled on the 
      Chinese practice; others are directives 
      relating to defence, like the wooden slips from 
      the Heijo Palace.       


That being the case, there is a possibility that the use of the character in question occurred first in Japan. 

Aside from the above two instances of character usage, Lee’s discussion is limited to the occurrence of common placements of a hole on some mokkan, and slots on others, which apparently played a role in the fastening of the mokkan to the parcels they were used to label.

Given the rather tenuous nature of the points that lee presents, Lurie’s attempt to appropriate Lee’s arguments in terms of, “as Yi (2000) shows in his discussion of how innovations from the Korean states influenced early Japanese writing” rings hollow, and would appear to be baseless. Lee's discussion merely points to the possibility of some confluence, but establishes nothing conclusively in terms of Korean innovation, let alone a transfer of such innovation from the Korean kingdom of Silla to the Japanese archipelago.

What Lee suggests in the chapter in question is that since Silla derived its usage of Chinese characters through the Korean kingdom of Koguryo and not through a tributary relationship with China, the development of Silla’s Chinese character culture was not directly influenced by China. The most obvious problem with the assertion, however, lies in the fact that there had been Chinese garrisons in the areas of Korea that subsequently became the Korean kingdom of Koguryo, so it can be assumed that the Koguryo Koreans had indeed acquired their knowledge of Chinese characters as well as the practical application associated with their use in administration directly from the Chinese contingent garrisoned at the commanderies in Leland and Daifang. Here, I’ll turn to Lurie’s book for the background information.

On pp. 196-7, Lurie writes:
Owing to the subsequent history of the peninsula, more is known about the language of Silla, commonly thought to be the source of modern Korean, than about those of the other two states, though the language of Paekche seems to have been close to that of Silla than that of Koguryo…
As discussed in Chapter 2, the first appearance of writing in the general area of the Korean peninsula probably dates as far back as early contacts between peoples in the north (the area that later became Koguryo) and the Chinese state of Yan during the late Zhou period. However, the first major influx of written material came after 108 BCE, when the Han wiped out the Wiman Choson state in that area and established commanderies at Lelang and on the Liaodong peninsula. Excavations by of tombs in Lelang by Japanese during the colonial period yielded much written material. There are arguments about how many of these objects belonged to Chinese administrators and how many of them should be attributed to acculturated ‘Koreans,’ but at any rate they attest to the presence of writing at this early period. The last of the commanderies, at Daifang (established 220 CE), lasted until 313 CE, when it was wiped out byt the newly expanding state of Koguryo.

Perhaps I’m overlooking something here, but having read the relevant sections of Lee’s book, I can’t understand why Lurie would attempt to appropriate that book in light of the fact that Lee’s assertions about the role of Silla would seem to run counter to the arguments Lurie presents vis-à-vis Paekche (p.84, etc., see previous post), and furthermore that Lee apparently has chosen to simply ignore the relationship between the Koguryo kingdom and the Chinese commanderies with respect to the acquisition of the system of writing in Chinese characters, which Lurie details in the above quoted passages.



In the course of the forgoing discussion I decided to abandon Lurie’s question relating to the “central question about the regional place of writing”. As an aside, however, in pondering these questions some interesting associations came to mind. There are some worthwhile comparisons to be found between the relationship of Chinese characters to Japanese and the relationship of ancient Greek and Latin to English. For example, in present day Japan, the relationship of the terms that have been incorporated into the language from abroad are readily apparent in the form of both kanji (Japanese term for Chinese characters), particularly as used as Sino-Japanese compounds, and the phonetic syllabary called katakana.

The presence of the kanji themselves continually imparts the notion that the country is part of a larger community of countries that uses Chinese characters. Perhaps this is the proper context to discuss something like a “Chinese character cultural sphere”. However, in the case of English, for example, the presence of Greek and Latin in the languages is not readily apparent to anyone that has not studied Greek or Latin. And the notion of belonging to a “cultural sphere” with respect to written language is also not as strong, even though all of the countries use basically the same alphabet, with variations and additions here and there. A Japanese person that travels to China can communicate through writing with Chinese characters. An Englishman that travels to Italy will not be able to communicate by means of written language, even though both countries use the same script. Furthermore, the Japanese are closer in touch with the diverse origins of their cultural heritage deriving from Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism and other aspects of Chinese culture as well as Shinto, whereas in the West, the connection to ancient Greece and Rome has become highly obscured, with more people than not identifying their cultural sphere in terms of a connection to a Judeo-Christian tradition than the classical period of the development of Western civilization in ancient Greece and Rome. Plato who?

Oh, but did I forget to mention the Freemasons? Who?