EASC Newsletter: Print-Ready Version

EASC Newsletter: October 2002

FROM THE DIRECTOR
Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Dear Colleagues,

Let me begin by saying how honored I am to have been selected as the Center's new director. I thought that because I had served on the Center's executive committee at various points since arriving at IU in 1991, I had a pretty good sense of what EASC was and what its staff was doing. This was not the case, however, and the three months I have spent as director have been genuinely eye opening ones. I can honestly say that I have learned new things during each of my 12 weeks at Memorial Hall. To take one example, before I started, I thought of the Center as having an unusually congenial and hard-working core of staff members. I have learned that while this assessment is accurate as far as it goes, it does not go nearly far enough. The people I am privileged to be working with - both those who have been at EASC for years and those who have just been hired - bring very special skills and enormous energy to the myriad projects (some of which are described elsewhere in this newsletter) in which they are involved. The Center is also more varied in its activities than I had imagined. A sense of just how wide-ranging EASC activities are at present is provided by the reports and stories included in this and previous newsletters.

We have more potential to reach out in new directions both within and beyond the Bloomington campus. I hope in future newsletters to be able, via these letters from the Director and in other ways, to make clearer my thoughts about what can and should be done. If you have been able to come to either of the first two events in the 2002-3 academic year colloquium series, you have a preview of some of the paths I hope to follow in the future. These are paths that can only be followed effectively if we build new bridges between the East Asian studies community and scholars working on other parts of the world, East Asianists based in Bloomington and other parts of the Midwest, and different IU schools and departments. Thanks to the efforts of my predecessor, George Wilson, a solid foundation for creating these new bridges exists. Along with everything else I have learned, one more lesson needs to be noted: to appreciate more fully than I did before just how big a debt of gratitude all of us involved with the Center and with East Asian studies here at IU owe to George for providing the leadership he did during his tenure as Director.

SPOTLIGHT ON...

Freeman Grant Opens the Door to New Courses

Thanks to the $2 million grant from the Freeman Foundation to enhance undergraduate education about Asia at IU, many new developments are underway. There are on-going searches for three new faculty positions, one each in the School of Education, the Kelley School of Business, and the College of Arts and Sciences. The purpose of these new positions is to pursue the grant's theme, which is called "Communicating East Asia." The various departments involved in these faculty searches hope to have the positions filled in time for the 2003-2004 academic year. In the meantime, current professors at IU are involved in either redeveloping old courses or creating new ones to provide a wider selection of East Asia-related classes in a variety of departments. On the whole, it is an exciting time to be pursuing East Asian Studies at IU.

A New Take on Old Courses
Rick Wilk in the Anthropology Department and Art Alderson in the Sociology Department are each re-working one of their courses to provide East Asian content. Rick Wilk's new class is "Food and Culture," an extension of a course he regularly teaches called "Global Consumer Culture" (E418/618). The course will be offered in Spring 2003 to graduate students and upper level undergraduates. Half of the work done in the course will be on Japanese and Chinese food culture. Rick explains that most of the best food scholarship in the last few years has been done in Asia, so the students will have a lot to work with. He is very enthusiastic about the chance to study this rapidly-growing field in depth.

Art Alderson's class, "Social Inequality" (S217), open to all students, has decided to make this year's course a systematic comparison of the U.S. and Japan. He believes that Japan will be a useful point of comparison on issues such as social stratification. Professor Alderson has been teaching this class for a few years, but he believes that the incorporation of Japan provides an exciting new direction, and one which will be of great interest to his students.

A New Business Chinese Course

Some current faculty are developing all-new courses as a result of the initiative. Jennifer Liu, the Chinese Language Program Coordinator at EALC, will be teaching a new Business Chinese course in the Spring. She explained that since the political and economic situations in mainland China and Taiwan are changing rapidly, so are the interests and backgrounds of the IU student body. A significant portion of the students taking Chinese have business-related majors (e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, finance). While the exploration of general cultural phenomenon or literary texts has its value, as emphasized by our current third-year and fourth-year Chinese curricula, business-minded students want a language course that takes into account their existing knowledge of the subject matter and equips them with linguistic as well as conceptual tools to handle business interactions with Chinese-speaking communities.

In fact, lower-level business courses (1 credit) were piloted during 1997-1999, and they were well received. However, due to the limited proficiency of students and the minimum contact hours, few topics could be covered and consolidated. Now that our program has a faculty member specializing in China's political economy, and as well as newly hired professional language lecturer, we are appropriately equipped to offer this course.

Students are encouraged to take this course and C302 Third-Year Chinese II concurrently, or at least to finish C301 Third-Year Chinese I before they take this course. Liu expects it to be offered every other year during the spring semester with an enrollment of between 10-15 students. If China keeps growing at the current rate in the world economy, however, we can anticipate an even greater demand in the years to come.

Japan and Business: Two New Courses
Another new class on tap for the spring is "Japan Study Tour, Spring 2003" (D496/E496) a combined East Asian Languages and Cultures and Kelley School of Business class, proposed by Marc Dollinger, Professor of Management and co-taught by Marc and Yasuko Watt, Assosciate Professor in EALC. This class, which will be open to ten students each in the School of Business and EALC, marks the first combined effort between the Kelley School of Business and EALC and looks to be fun and challenging for all involved. The purpose of the course is to enable students in both programs to travel to Japan to study the culture, language and business environment. Students taking part in the class will be able to travel Japan at a greatly reduced cost thanks to the generosity of the Freeman Foundation.

The idea for this course originated several years ago when Professor Dollinger took a group of MBA students to Japan for ten days. During that trip, he began to consider how the effects of such an experience would be different for students who are younger. When he became the Chair of Undergraduate Studies in the Kelley School of Business last year, he realized that even though a short-term undergraduate study tour course had never been done before, it was possible, provided there was additional supervision and preparation by the faculty involved. With the teaching support of Yasuko Watt and funding from the Freeman grant, Dollinger is looking forward to seeing this course become a reality.

Though many of the students in the class will be coming from vastly different backgrounds, Professor Dollinger thinks that two important factors will unite them. The first is that they will all be self-motivated and eager to do well in their quests for a "great spring break". The second is that because most (or all) of these students will be going Japan for the first time, they will experience the sights, smells, and sounds of this unique country together. Watt explains, "It's exciting because it is a course where the students will be able to experience what they have learned and compare their classroom knowledge with life experience. I think I am as excited about this course as the students are!" Dollinger and Watt believe that their greatest challenge will be to help the students realize that they will encounter in Japan much more than they are initially able to process, and that their Japan experience will be one which impacts and shapes them for years to come.

Professor Watt will teach the sections of the course which cover Japanese culture, and Professor Dollinger will teach the students about aspects of Japanese business. It was Professor Dollinger, who has spent time as a visiting professor in Japan, who suggested they use the travel guide Lonely Planet Japan as the main text for the course. He believes it will give the students the points of reference they will need when encountering Japan for the first time. While they have also included important academic texts about Japan, they know that the students' actual experiences in Japan will be the true substance of the course.

A separate course "Management and Popular Culture" is being developed for EALC and LAMP (Liberal Arts and Management Program) by Professors Sumie Jones and Thomas Keirstead and will be offered beginning in Fall 2003. The course will be designed to train upper-level undergraduates in debates and public presentations focusing on issues of economics, management, environment, and trade in relation to contemporary Japanese culture. Because there is a strong tendency in Japanese popular arts to teach the public about the operations and goals of various forms of business, popular culture can be an accessible gateway to understanding the ways in which Japan's business and economy are thought to move. Students will explore this connection between popular culture and business by doing team research, taking field trips, and listening to presentations given by Japanese professionals.

A Chinese Film and Music Course
A new course called "Chinese Film and Music: Sounds and Images" will also be offered in the Spring 2003. The objectives of the course are for the students to become able to "read" Chinese film in relation to its musical components, and for students to be able to "read" Chinese films and listen to their soundtracks in relation to their representations of Chinese culture. Taught by Sue Tuohy in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, the course will be offered for undergraduate and graduate students through the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology (FOLK F300 and F600) and cross-listed in the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture.

The course begins with an introduction to Chinese music and film industry and to techniques for analyzing films. From there, students will view and discuss films produced in China from the 1930s to the present as well as Hollywood films about China. The course focuses on films that feature music and musicians as their primary topic or as a primary component. The films and music will be contextualized within the social-historical conditions of their production as well as the conditions which the films portray. Using a variety of media, the course will move from the portrayals of Chinese life within the films to discourse about the films and to other types of representations of Chinese culture and music. A portion of the course will rely on multimedia materials, coordinated through a website and CD-ROM. The development of these materials was made possible by a course development grant from the Freeman Foundation that is administered through the East Asian Studies Center.

Welcome to Professor Soek-Fang Sim
The Freeman Undergraduate Initiative has led to one new hire. While the College of Arts and Sciences carries out a search for an East Asianist in either sociology or anthropology, the Freeman grant is being used to support a one-year hire in the Department of Communication and Culture; the cost of which will be picked up by COAS in the future. Soek-Fang Sim, who did her undergraduate studies in Sociology/Anthropology in Singapore, her PhD in Media Studies/Cultural Studies at the University of London and taught at UC San Diego for a year before coming to IU, has been asked to bring her Asian expertise to Bloomington. During her year at IU, she will be teaching two Asia-specific courses, one in the fall and one in the spring.

This fall, she is teaching a course called "Nationalism and National Identity in Asia and the West." In this class students study questions such as what is a "nation" and why does the "nation" command so much of our identity? In this course, Professor Sim encourages students to think of the concept of nation as being a product of culture and to look at how this concept is produced by the state, disseminated by the media and consumed by the citizens. Sim explains that in Asia we see many good examples of problematic nation-states (Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet) as well as national fractures within the state(Indonesia) that students can use as the basis for discussions about national identity. She also points out that because very few Asian countries have been culturally homogenized, we are still able to see active processes of government-sponsored nationalization being carried out.

In the spring, Sim will teach a course called "Media, Market and Democracy in Asia." The goal of this course is to systematically and thematically understand the various forms of media and ideological control. Students will investigate how market privization, professionalization of journalism and cultural nationalism have become tools of the government and focus on the nature of "Asian Journalism," and they will consider how "Asian-ness" may be used to legitimize certain forms of government and market systems.

EASC EVENTS

EASC Enjoys a Busy Summer

2002 Teaching about Asia Participants Travel to Japan and Korea
Touching down at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on July 8 ended the trip but not the journey for twenty teachers who participated in the EASC’s inaugural three-week NCTA study tour to Japan and South Korea. The journey began in February with assigned readings, plans for post-trip teaching projects, group e-mail and website activities, and pre-departure orientations in April and June. The journey continued in-country with visits to historic and cultural sights, four school visits, formal Q&A’s with local teachers, and immersion into World Cup fever in both Korea and Japan! The journey continues even now as teachers collaborate on a group photo collection, finalize and implement teaching projects, and prepare to report back to EASC on their project successes next spring. The next trip to East Asia is planned for summer 2003.

Fourth Annual Literature Workshop Held at IU
Laden with books, notes and questions, twenty-seven high school literature teachers from around the world (as far as Taiwan, Guam, and Ecuador!) gathered at the Indiana Memorial Union for the fourth annual Teaching East Asian Literature in the High School Workshop July 21-26. Made possible by generous support from the Freeman Foundation, the workshop included history lectures, literary analysis, pedagogy exercises, cultural activities, and films. The day devoted to Korean literature, the visit to the East Asian collection at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the dinners at local Chinese and Japanese restaurants were especially popular. For more information on this year’s program, see www.indiana.edu/~easc.

East Asian Summer Internships Give Students New Opportunities
Two IU undergraduates participated in the first East Asian Studies Center-sponsored internship program. The particpants were Andrew Sobol, a sophomore majoring in Business Finance and soon to declare a second major in Japanese, and Ko-Woon Kay Lee, a senior majoring in Marketing Distribution Management and Business Process Management. Both students spent three months this summer working in Chicago; Sobol worked at the Japan National Tourist Organization, while Lee spent her time at the Korean Trade Center. These internships gave the two students the opportunity to learn about the culture and business practices of East Asian companies firsthand, while being required to use the target language all day. "The internship allowed me to learn all sorts of things about the many distinct regions of Japan, as well as how to navigate economically around the country; I learned a great deal about public relations and promotional activities," Sobol explained. Though they were still in the United States, Lee and Sobol were able to experience complete cultural immersion. "The most challenging part of my internship was getting accustomed to Japanese professional practices. Even some of the Japanese workers said they did not understand why certain measures were taken, explaining that 'it is just the Japanese way.' And appropriately using the honorary and humble forms of Japanese speech was also quite challenging," he said. It was a positive experience for the employers as well as for the students. In fact, because of the success of this summer's internships, the EASC has forged an alliance with the Indiana Department of Commerce Trade Office in Yokohama, Japan, and will begin to develop in-country internships for the summer of 2003. Students doing internships in Japan next summer will have the chance to live with Japanese families, providing students with even deeper cultural immersion. Andrew Sobol has already been selected as one of the students to take part in the 2003 Japan internship. "A professional experience in Japan has been my goal since I began studying Japanese language my freshman year of high school. I know it will be a life-changing experience for me, much more so than my internship in Chicago. To be so close to reaching this goal is an indescribable feeling; and to have the opportunity to represent Indiana University and the United States of America in Japan is literally the chance of a lifetime for me."

High School Exchanges Off and Running
This past June, thirty students from Bloomington High School North and South and North Central High School (Indianapolis) spent three weeks in Japan doing homestays, sightseeing in Kyoto and Nara, and attending classes at high schools in Tokyo and Morioka. Their trips complete the first part of an EASC/Freeman Foundation-sponsored program to facilitate study exchanges with Japanese high schools. In March of 2003, all three schools will host their Japanese counterparts. In addition to the travel/homestay component, American students participated in pre-departure cultural orientations and designed research projects to carry out while in Japan. Students will present their finished projects to their classmates, the community or other local schools this fall.

New Faces at EASC

The Outreach Division at the East Asian Studies Center continues to grow. This August, we welcomed three new members to our staff. Anne Prescott will serve as an Outreach Coordinator. She comes to us from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois where she was a member of the Asian Studies and Music departments, teaching East Asian music and Japanese Culture, and directing the Augustana Koto Ensemble. She lived in Japan for eight years and received a Monbusho (Japanese Ministry of Education) scholarship to study and do dissertation research at Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku (Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music) on koto performer and composer Miyagi Michio. She received her Bachelor of Music degree in music education from Cornell College (Iowa), her Master of Music degree in performance and Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Kent State University. While living in Japan she performed in numerous concerts on koto and shamisen.

Susan Westhafer Furukawa will split her time working on both outreach and public affairs for the Center. Susan is back in Indiana after five and a half years in Japan. She studied Japanese literature and psychology at DePauw University before heading to Japan on the Japan Exchange and Teaching program (JET), sponsored by Monbusho. In 1998, she returned to the U.S. to earn her M.A. in East Asian Studies (with a focus on Japanese literature and society) from Stanford University. Most recently, she was teaching English and American culture to Japanese undergraduates and Japanese literature to international students at Saga National University in southern Japan.

Jeff Payne will work as the Outreach Assistant for Mary Hayes, the veteran Outreach Coordinator. Jeff is from Terre Haute, Indiana. He earned a B.A. in Political Science and International Studies from Butler University. He has done fieldwork on community development in the People's Republic of China through the ASIANetwork Student-Faculty Fellows Program funded by the Freeman Foundation. Prior to coming to IU, he worked as the Outreach Director for Near North Community Development Corporation in Indianapolis. Jeff is in a first-year Ph.D. student in the Political Science where he plans to continue his research on civic and community development in the People's Republic of China.

Introducing the 2002-03 East Asian Film Series

Over the course of the current academic year, EASC will be sponsoring both a fall and spring East Asian film series. The films for the fall series have already been scheduled and bring together a mixture of films from Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea in a diverse fall lineup. The film series is a way for the East Asian Studies Center to bring East Asia’s visual media to an audience that would generally not have access to such films. These films focus on such issues as reality vs. perception, love in a modern society, family relationships, and the dangers of the human mind. The East Asian Studies Center selects films we hope will generate discussion in the IU and wider Bloomington community.

The film series schedule is as follows:

October 12: Chunhyang. Korea, 2000, Dir. Im Kwon-Taek, 120 min.
October 26: Onibaba. Japan, 1964, Dir. Shindo Kaneto, 103 min.
November 9: Interview. Korea, 2000, Dir. Byon Hyok, 107 min.
November 23: The Personals. Taiwan, 1998, Dir. Chen Kuo-fu, 104 min.
December 7: From Beijing with Love. Hong Kong, 1994, Dir. Stephen Chiau Sing-Chi and Lee Lik-Chi, 89 min.

All films are free and open to the public, but are not intended for a young audience. All films are shown on Saturday evening at 7:30pm in Woodburn Hall 101, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. A brief analytical introduction given by a film studies student from the Department of Communication and Culture will precede each film. For questions regarding the Fall 2002 Film Series, contact Jeff Payne at jespayne@indiana.edu.

2002-03 East Asian Colloquium Series Begins

The 2002-03 East Asian Colloquium Series got off to a strong start with a lecture entitled, "Identifying a Muslim Terrorist? Stories from 18th/19th Century China" given by Zvi Ben-Dor, who teaches in the History Department at Boston University. Jeffrey Isaac, Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, provided a comparative comment. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, the new director of EASC, moderated the second colloquium, a session devoted to looking at where the Center has been and where it is heading as it strives to facilitate research and teaching on China, Japan, and Korea here in Bloomington, while also engaging in a broad range of outreach activities locally, state-wide and around the country. There were presentations by Associate Director Jacques Fuqua, Outreach Coordinators Mary Hayes and Anne Prescott, and Outreach Assistant Susan Westhafer Furukawa, as well as some audio-visual samples of activities linked to the Center. On October 11, the Center will welcome Taylor Atkins from Northern Illinois University, who will give a lecture on "Korean P'ansori and the Blues: Art for Communal Healing." Richard Bauman, Distinguished Professor of Folklore and Anthropology and Director of the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies at Indiana University will provide a comparative comment. Two weeks later, Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth, both professors in C.R.A.F.T. (Center for Research into the Anthropological Foundations of Technology) will speak. November 15th, Anne Prescott, an Outreach Coordinator at the EASC will give a talk titled "Continuity and Change: Miyagi Michio and Shin Nihon Ongaku." December 6th, Rebecca Nedostup, Assistant Professor of Chinese at Purdue University will give a lecture on "Civic Faith and Hybrid Ritual in Nationalist China." We hope you will join us on these dates at 12:30 pm in Ballantine 004 on the Indiana University Bloomington campus. For more information on upcoming lectures, visit: http://www.indiana.edu/~easc/eaq/.

Buddhist Literature, Volume 2 Available

The second volume of the journal Buddhist Literature, with articles written by William L. Ames, Gregory Schopen, Paul L. Swanson, and Jan Nattier, is now available. Subscriptions are $25 a year for individuals, $15 for students, and $35 for institutions. International orders require an additional $5 for shipping. Please send orders to Buddhist Literature, c/o Scholars Press, P.O. Box 15399, Atlanta, Georgia 30333-0399.

Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising
Linda S. Lewis
(University of Hawai'i Press, 2002)

Linda Lewis, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the East Asian Studies Program at Wittenberg University, may be remembered best from the semester she taught at Indiana University as a visiting professor. Recently, her book Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, which is part of the Hawai'i series on Korea, has hit the shelves, forcing us to reconsider the ramifications of what occurred during those ten days in May more than twenty years ago.

The Kwangju Uprising -- "Korea's Tiananmen" -- is one of the most important political events in late twentieth-century Korean history. What began as a peaceful demonstration against the imposition of military rule in the southwestern city of Kwangju in May 1980 turned into a bloody people's revolt. In the two decades since, memories of the Kwangju Uprising have lived on, assuming symbolic importance in the Korean democracy movement, fueling the rise in anti-American sentiment in South Korea, and shaping the nation's transition to a civil society. Nonetheless, it remains a contested event, the subject still of controversy, confusion, international debate, and competing claims.

As one of the few Western eyewitnesses to the uprising, Linda Lewis is uniquely positioned to write about the event. In this innovative work on commemoration politics, social representation, and memory, Lewis draws on her fieldwork notes from May 1980, writings from the 1980s, and ethnographic research she conducted in the late 1990s on the memorialization of Kwangju and its relationship to changes in the national political culture. The chronological organization of the text is crisscrossed throughout with commentary that provocatively disrupts the narrative flow and engages the reader in the reflexive process of remembering Kwangju over two decades. Highly original in its method and approach, Laying Claim to the Memory of May situates this seminal event in a broad historical and scholarly context. The result is not only the definitive history of the Kwangju Uprising, but also a sweeping overview of Korean studies during the last few decades.

One World, Many Voices, Vols. I and II
The Indiana University International Vocal Ensemble, Mary Goetze, Director
(May 2002)

Mary Goetze of the Indiana University School of Music, has two new CDs out that include some music from East Asia. These two CDs feature music from 19 countries, geographic regions, or ethnic groups. The group which performs them, the International Vocal Ensemble at Indiana University, specializes in songs from around the world and is comprised of students from many different countries. The songs on the CDs are performed in their original languages. The CD liner notes state that "As a means of building bridges and understanding culture through music, the International Vocal Ensemble recreates music from outside the western art tradition." Wherever possible, native informants are used to teach the performers proper pronunciation of the lyrics, the vocal style of the culture in question, and the cultural context of the song. The arrangements are remarkable in their attention to detail and adherence to the musical style of the culture.

Volume I has a total of 27 tracks from 10 countries, and Volume II has 24 tracks from 12 regions. East Asia is represented with one song from Japan in Volume I, while Volume II features two works each from China and Japan. One of the highlights of Volume I is the "Balinese Kecak: Excerpts from a Ramayana Monkey Chant." The Ensemble gives a remarkable performance of this skillful arrangement of the well-known Balinese ritual in which voices imitate the sounds of gamelan instruments. Molly Adkins Jeon, a Japanese minyo (folk song) singer trained in Japan, demonstrates her breathtaking skill as the soloist on "Kokiriko-bushi" in Volume II. These CDs could have many applications, from an elementary classroom to an international festival to just pure listening enjoyment. They are available through the Ensemble's website at www.indiana.edu/~ive

Goetze and Jay Fern are also developing an interactive CD-ROM about Japan, which will be available in early 2003. It is preceded by similar volumes on South Africa and Hungary, with volumes from Aotearoa/New Zealand and Azerbaijan underway. Miyako Furiya of Miyagi University is assisting with the Japan volume, which includes materials for the re-creation of traditional Japanese songs, games and dances, and an introduction to Japan. In the music section of the CD-ROM, the song text is pronounced and sung phrase by phrase, the instruments are demonstrated individually, and the dances are presented in isolation and in slow motion--all that is needed to re-create the songs. In the culture section there is information on song origins, geography and traditions, as well as a language section with some simple phrases in Japanese.

EALC's Newest Addition

In some ways, you could say that teaching language is in Zhen Chen's blood. Both of her parents are renowned Chinese linguists, and teaching is something that she turned to almost naturally when she was a college student in Beijing. She went to the University of Hawaii, Manoa from Beijing seven years ago to pursue her dream of becoming a Chinese language educator. Before moving to the U.S. Zhen taught English at two universities in Beijing, where she found that the teaching style was in many ways predetermined. Every aspect of the classes she taught was spelled out in teachers' manuals which she was expected to follow word-for-word. While teaching English in this way provided her with a valuable introduction to the world of foreign language teaching, she realized that there had to be a better way to engage and challenge her students. Zhen's seven years at the University of Hawaii, where she is finishing her Ph.D. in Chinese linguistics, provided her with the methodological background and experience necessary to become a dynamic teacher. "Knowing the theories and methods behind teaching a foreign language makes teaching a lot more fun for me," she explains.

While she believes that success in learning any foreign language is directly tied to the skill of the teacher and the commitment of the students, Zhen also recognizes that Chinese characters and mastering the various tones one needs before becoming skilled at Chinese can be daunting at first. "Sometimes in the beginning of first-year Chinese, the students look like they want to cry," she admits. Many of her friends tell her that teaching Chinese sounds like such an easy job. After all, she is already a native speaker. Learning how to teach in a way that is both challenging and easy for students to understand has taken time, however. She believes that learners should be encouraged to get involved in learning rather than being passive observers or note-takers, and that language is most easily taught in the context of culture and most easily learned in a meaningful context which is close to real life. "A few words that characterize my Chinese language and culture classroom are not only instructional, but also informational, intellectual, innovative, interactive, interesting and inspiring."

Zhen Chen has been in Indiana for about two and a half months now, and she admits that her two goals for her first year at IU are to survive her first winter here (after seven years in Hawaii, she expects that this winter will feel exceptionally cold!), and to survive the heavy workload, which is much different than what she imagined when she was a student. Most days she works in her office for 10 to 12 hours before heading home to work 2 or 3 more. At the University of Hawaii, full-time language teachers have at most 45 students per semester, but Zhen Chen currently has more than 140 students. That's a lot of names and faces to remember. She's excited about the challenge, though, and looks forward to adapting the skills she developed in Beijing and Hawaii to the Indiana University classroom. In her free time, "some time next summer," she plans to continue working on her dissertation, "The Diachronic Development and Synchronic Diversity of The Double-Directional Complements in Chinese - A Corpus-based Cross-linguistic Study on the Grammaticalization Pathways and Semantic Change of the Double-Directional Complements," a massive project she is doing with the support of her advisor Professor Ting-Che Li. Zhen is strongly committed to helping students who are in lower-level classes to develop a deep interest in Chinese, so that they will pursue other courses such as Chinese literature, history, religion and politics. Zhen is excited to make the most of her time here at IU, "to contribute with what [she] has learned, learn what's new to [her], and take on new challenges."

Masanobu Kimura, EALC's Visiting Scholar

In Japan in recent years, there has been increased coverage of stories about bullying and school dropouts. Whether these are new concerns or ones that have been newly recognized, the media is filled with panel discussions on education, and bookstore shelves are lined with books focusing on solving the problems of today's youths. Many of these discussions are centered on the breakdown of the nuclear family, overemphasis on academic success, lack of emphasis on creativity, and hyper-materialism. Masanobu Kimura, a Visiting EALC Scholar from Chikushi Jogakuen University in Fukuoka, Japan believes that the origins of these issues go further back.

When he considered the issues facing the Japanese education system, he decided to go back to the beginning to look at education in the Tokugawa period. By starting his research where modern Japanese education began, he reasoned, he would be able to put the problems into a historical and social context which might make them easier to solve. Kimura believes that we can learn the most about current Japanese education by studying how it developed and how the system came to be structured as it is. "School is a very important aspect of every Japanese person's life. In many ways it determines what that person becomes. Therefore, I believe it is very important to study and understand how this strongly influential system came into being," Professor Kimura explains.

Professor Kimura did his undergraduate and graduate study in the Department of Education at Kyushu University in Fukuoka. Now, he teaches in the Education Department at Chikushi Jogakuen University and has taught courses such as "Fundamental Theory of Education," "History of Education," and "History of Culture." Recent publications by Professor Kimura include The Development and Change of Education in Early Modern Japan published by Tokyo Horei in 1995, and The History of the Education of Japanese People edited by Tuneo Ishijima and Kayo Umemura and published by Azusa Shuppan in 1996.

He has been living in Bloomington with his wife and two daughters (ages 8 and 12) since April. EALC Professor Richard Rubinger first heard of Kimura when he read an article Kimura had written about the possibility of using Shumon popular registers to measure literacy in Japanese history. Rubinger was so impressed by what Kimura had written that he sought Kimura out at the annual meeting of the Nihon Kyoikushi Gakkai (National Association of Historians of Japanese Education) in 2000. Because both men share an academic interest in the history of modern Japanese education, specifically, education as it emerged in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), they decided that Professor Kimura would come to IU to study for a year. On every Friday throughout the semester, Professor Kimura is meeting with students to read 17th century Japanese texts about the development of education in the Tokugawa period. While in Bloomington, he is also taking courses in comparative East Asian history and the history of early modern Japan. He spends his spare time talking about Tokugawa education with Rubinger and EALC students and looking into his other interest, current literacy in America.

This interest in literacy is closely tied to his interest in Tokugawa-era education, a time marked by a shift to universal literacy. Kimura has researched the social mechanisms which enabled the spread of literacy, and how the spread of literacy then changed society. As part of his interest in literacy in contemporary society, Professor Kimura heads a volunteer literacy development center in Fukuoka. Once a week, people come to the center to practice reading and writing. Kimura explains that many of these people are either Koreans who have grown up in Japan or Japanese people in their sixties and seventies who were unable to receive proper education due to the effects of World War II. While he is in Bloomington, Professor Kimura is also looking at the case of illiteracy in the United States and examining the meaning of literacy in modern society.

Outstanding Undergraduate

Joseph (Lawton) King, a Louisville, Kentucky native, is one of Indiana University's outstanding undergraduate students of East Asian studies. Currently a junior, Lawton came to the EALC at IU with the intention of studying Chinese. He has pursued his interest in the region with an enthusiasm, commitment and maturity rarely seen among his peers. Lawton became interested in China by accident when his parents bought a package vacation to Beijing, even though they had promised him a trip to the Virgin Islands. Though he offered to buy his way out of the trip to China, his parents made him go anyway. Thanks to the perseverance of his parents, by the time he got back to Louisville, Lawton was determined to enroll in Chinese his senior year of high school. He was immediately inspired by his teacher, Mr. Rick Ayres, who "bequeathed to me an appreciation for all things Chinese and persistently encouraged me to consider majoring in Mandarin."

Lawton's language instructors praise him for the energy and dedication he brings to class and his efforts to discuss ideas and topics from his other courses. He has performed equally admirably in East Asian studies courses, which have covered subjects ranging from early Daoism to business lobbying in China. Lawton admits that it is hard for him to choose one aspect of Chinese studies on which to focus. "Anything related to China stimulates my interest," he explains. A sign of Lawton's strength is that he was admitted into a graduate seminar on Chinese politics even though an undergraduate course on the topic was offered during the same semester. He hopes to pursue his diverse interests in China in graduate school. Beyond his scholarly abilities, ten minutes with Lawton will impress anyone with his engaging, inquisitive and polite demeanor. It is no surprise then that Lawton was awarded a Uehara scholarship this past spring by EALC in recognition of his excellence. Lawton credits his success to the strong EALC faculty. "Every single one of the EALC professors I have taken courses from has cordially entertained me during office hours and selflessly provided supplementary resources to quench my curiosity." The feelings are mutual. His advisor, Scott Kennedy says, "Lawton is a student and person of whom we can all be proud and from whom we expect many great accomplishments in the future, whether they be in East Asian studies or elsewhere."

Christopher Atwood (CEUS) has a new book out. Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia's Interregnum Decades, 1911-1931 has been published by E.J. Brill (Leiden, 2002) as volume 6 in "Brill's Inner Asian Library."

Christopher Beckwith (CEUS) received a Japan Foundation research fellowship, which ran from August, 2001 to August, 2002, to work on a book project entitled The Koguryo Language and Japanese. He spent the year in Tokyo at the Research Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. He gave lectures at the Institute, at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, and at Kyushu National University in Fukuoka, and he presented a paper at the 47th International Conference of Eastern Studies held in Tokyo and Kyoto in May, 2002.

Stephen Bokenkamp (EALC) is on leave this term on a President's Arts and Humanities grant. He is finishing a book with the provisional title Early Medieval Daoism and the Threatened Family.

Eugene Eoyang (CMLT & EALC) gave a paper titled, "The Uses of the Useless: Comparative Literature and the Multinational Corporation" as one of the keynote addresses at the 7th Triennial Conference of the Chinese Comparative Literature Association in Nanjing on August 15, 2002. He presented another paper "Tongue-tied and Close-mouthed: 'Language' and 'Literature' in the 21st Century," at the 22nd Triennial Congress of FILLM (Federation of Internationale des Langues et Litteratures Modernes), held at Assumption University in Bangkok, Thailand on August 19, 2002. He recently prepared two manuscripts for publication; Borrowed Plumage: Polemic Essays on Translation and Two-Way Mirrors: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Chinese-Western Comparative Literature (see review in "What to Read"). A third book, A Liberal Arts Education: Lingnan University and the World, which he edited, and to which he contributed several essays, was published in September. Eoyang has also been re-elected to another three-year term as the Vice President of FILLM.

Gregory Kasza (EALC & Politics) was a fellow at Hitotsubashi University's Economics Research Institute from December 2001 to June 2002, supported by an Abe Fellowship from the Center on Global Partnership. On the same grant, he will be a fellow of the U.S.-Japan Program at Harvard University this coming spring semester (2003). He is working on a project titled "Japan in Comparative Politics." He has recently published "Japan's Kakushin Right in Comparative Perspective," in Stein Ugelvik Larsen, ed., Fascism Outside Europe; "The Illusion of Welfare 'Regimes,'" Journal of Social Policy (April 2002), and "War and Welfare Policy in Japan," Journal of Asian Studies (May 2002).

Scott Kennedy (EALC) presented the paper "China's Political Economies: An Economic Explanation for Patterns of Government-Business Relations" at the International Symposium on Political Science and China in Transition, held at Renmin University, Beijing, July 15-16, 2002. He also gave a lecture, "America's Middle Kingdom Complex," at Tongji University, Shanghai, July 9, 2002.

Hyo Sang Lee (EALC) was selected as a member of the College Board Committee that develops the SAT II Korean exam for the academic year 2002-2003, joining four other members. He also gave an invited talk entitled "Korean Language Education and Teaching Methodology in American Universities: Is there a magical way to teach Korean?" at the 12th International Conference of the International Association of Korean Language Education, in Seoul, Korea, Aug. 10-11, 2002. Lee gave a lecture entitled "A theory of grammaticalization as an explanatory tool for synchronic variation with reference to Korean," at the Language Research Workshop of Department of Linguistics, Seoul National University, August 12, 2002. He gave a presentation entitled "Grammaticalization, recategorization, and lexicalization: with reference to the development of some adjectives in Korean," at the New Reflections on Grammaticalization Symposium 2, April 4-6, 2002, Amsterdam.

Jan Nattier (REL & EALC) was invited to speak at the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture at UCLA in February 2002. Her talk was titled "Gender and Enlightenment: Sexual Transformation in Buddhist Scriptures." She gave another lecture "A New Look at Buddhist Translations of Zhi Qian" at the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University, Tokyo (Hachioji), Japan, May 2002.

Michael Robinson (EALC & History) was promoted to Full Professor beginning with the 2002-2003 school year. This summer he traveled to Korea, where he was hosted through the university's exchange program with Yonsei University, and he did research for his current project on Korean Broadcasting. From June 15 through July 8 he served as the scholar in residence for the 2002 Japan/Korea Study Tour sponsored by the East Asian Studies Center and the Freeman Foundation

Richard Rubinger (EALC) has been invited by the University of Paris to give a series of three lectures in May 2003. A response to his essay on illiteracy in Japan (Monumenta Nipponica, Summer 2000) appeared in Monumenta Nipponica in the fall of 2001 along with his response to the response. Kimura Masanobu, a guest scholar invited by Professor Rubinger, is visiting IU from Chikushi Jogakuen in Fukuoka Japan. Kimura will be at IU until March 2003. He is meeting with graduate students on Fridays to read old documents and any interested student or faculty member is invited to join the group. You can read more about Professor Kimura in Profiles.

Natsuko Tsujimura (EALC & Linguistics) was invited to the Lexicon Workshop at the Linguistics and Phonetics 2002 conference held at Meikai University in Chiba, Japan, from September 2 to September 6. She gave a paper entitled "Lexical Conceptual Structure and Telicity: A view from event cancellation in Japanese."

Sue Tuohy ( FOLK & EALC) participated in an international symposium, "Nomads, Traders, and Holy Men Along China's Silk Road," in Fall 2001. The symposium was sponsored by the Asia Society and was held in New York City in conjunction with the 2001-2002 museum exhibition, "Monks and Merchants: Silk Orad Treasures from Northwest China, 4th to 7th Century." Tuohy's paper, "Musical Intersections: Local Festivals as Cosmopolitan Centers of Exchange," will be published this year in an edited volume of symposium papers.

In 2001, Tuohy also travelled to University of Heidelberg to participate in a symposium on the culture of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Her paper, "Making Sense of Chinese Revolutionary Music: Standards, Covers, and Crossovers," will be published along with others on the arts and culture of the Cultural Revolution in a volume titled Rethinking Cultural Revolution Culture. Her article, "The Sonic Dimensions of Nationalism in Modern China: Musical Representation and Transformation," was published in 2001 in Ethnomusicology, the journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Jeff Wasserstrom (History & EALC) has recently written commentaries on China for Current History and the international edition of Newsweek. His new edited volume, Twentieth Century China: New Approaches, will be published by Routledge next month.

Yasuko Ito Watt (EALC) received an ISS Active Learning Grant to enhance kanji learning through crossword puzzles. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) collaborated with The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) for the first time this year. Watt was one of the first five people nominated by ACTFL and has become a member of the NCATE Board of Examiners after intensive training. She will serve as a Board member for three years. Watt also participated as a co-organizer of a workshop for secondary school Japanese language teachers at Earlham College on June 15, 2002.

Margaret Yan (EALC) recently retired from 27 years of teaching Chinese language and linguistics at IU. She received a Trustees Teaching Award for her lifetime teaching achievements. She is now an EALC Professor Emerita.

Katherine French Dudley presented the paper "Revealing Performances in Ito Hiromi's Poetry" at the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs hosted by Wittenberg University and held in Springfield, OH, Sept 27-29 2002.

Terry Jackson has a one-semester appointment with DePauw University's history department to teach two sections of Modern Japan and China and an upper-level course on "Family, Gender, and Sexuality in Japanese History."

Greg Johnson, on a fellowship to Kyoto University this year, announces the birth of daughter Erica Satomi Johnson. She was born in Japan on June 9th.

Margaret Key was awarded the 2002-2003 Russell A. Havens Scholarship by the College of Arts and Sciences.

Sara Langer defended her dissertation "Sentimental Fictions: A Study of Gender Politics in Selected Writings of Hanasanjin (1790-1858)" on September 27, 2002.

Joanne Quimby has accepted a Japan Foundation Doctoral Dissertation grant and will conduct research at Ritsumeikan University (Kyoto) from March 2003-May 2004. She will focus on the narrative performance of gender in contemporary fiction by women.

Gil Raz is completing his dissertation and teaching Classical Chinese I (C306/506) and Chinese Literature in Translation (E331) at I.U. this semester. Next semester he will teach Classical Chinese II, and a history class (E232)

Kate Edgerton has obtained a tenure-track position teaching in the History Department at San Diego State University.

Sarah Stevens is the new Associate Director at the Office of International Programs at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon. The Office of International Programs handles study abroad programs, international students, international internships, faculty exchanges, and more. SOU has study abroad programs to over 40 countries on all continents and about 200 international students a year.

Keysha Webb has moved to Washington D.C. to work in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon.

And in other news...there are 11 new students joining EALC this year. A number of the new students are interested in Chinese thought and religion, reflecting IU's particular strength in that field. Also noteworthy is the number of new graduate students interested in the East Asian Studies M.A. This program is less focused on language than the EALC PhD degrees; it's also generally a "terminal" MA. Among the students in this group is one who teaches at the secondary level, and three who are interested in political science or other social sciences. A Chancellor's fellow, Stephen Kory, and the first McNutt Fellow, Michael Stanley-Baker, also started their graduate studies in EALC this fall.