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Executive Editor, Journals Dept. University of Hawai‘i Press
by | 25 April 2004 · 9:00 pm

Buddhism and the Rise of Written Vernaculars

Why are there so many writing systems in India and and so few in China? In 1994, Victor H. Mair addressed this question in an article in the Journal of Asian Studies. Here’s the abstract.

The premise of Victor H. Mair’s wide-ranging article is that written Chinese emerged not as transcribed speech, but rather as a special, radically shortened cipher with its own grammatical and expressive conventions. He calls this written form Literary Sinitic (LS) and finds the disparity between it and any form of spoken Chinese, which he refers to under the general heading of Vernacular Sinitic (VS), is of a wholly different nature than the contrast between written Latin and any modern written or spoken Romance language. Indeed, he argues, Literary Sinitic remained incapable of serving as a means of recording spoken Chinese or any other language. Thus, for Mair, the question becomes: How did vernacular written forms emerge in a milieu in which Literary Sinitic dominated intellectual life? He finds the earliest instances of written Vernacular Sinitic occur typically in Buddhist texts. He believes the Buddhist emphasis on teaching through the local dialect (desa bhasa) was a major impetus for the development of written vernacular, but concludes it is difficult to determine exactly which aspects of Buddhism had the greatest influence on the slow maturation of written Vernacular Sinitic.

And here’s Mair’s conclusion.

We have seen how, under the probable influence of the Indian concept of desa bhasa brought to China by Buddhism, numerous peoples in East Asia created a whole series of written vernaculars. While Chinese authorities stubbornly resisted recognition of any of their own vernaculars as a national language–probably due to the extremely high prestige and power of LS–the Buddhists used the vernacular liberally in their own writings. Once proffered as a functional alternative written language, use of the vernacular steadily grew until, by the late Ming-early Ch’ing [= Qing], it is likely that as many books were being printed in vernacular or a heavily vernacularized literary style as in LS, not withstanding the censure and ridicule of strait-laced scholars. Finally, even the Manchus, who already had their own written national language, which was swiftly dying out because of pervasive sinicization, yielded to the idea that their Sinitic subjects, too, needed a national language keyed to one of the spoken vernaculars. After the agitation of the May Fourth Movement [in 1919] led by progressive Chinese intellectuals and students, many of whom were exposed to radical ideas about language and other aspects of culture and society through the window of Japan, kuo-yü [= guoyu, Mandarin] was publicly proclaimed the official written language of the nation. This marked the formal end of the multimillennial separation between book language (shu-mien-yü [= shumianyu]) and spoken language (k’ou-yü [= kouyu]) in China.

That Buddhism played a crucial role in the evolution of the written vernacular throughout East Asia is beyond any doubt. The question remains, however: Which aspect of Buddhism was responsible for these momentous changes? Was there some religious doctrine belonging to Buddhism that fostered the written vernacular? Was it the fondness for storytelling, preaching, and public speaking by the early Buddhists in the language of the people? Did the ostensible orality of Buddhist scripture have anything to do with the origins of the written vernacular in China? Was the fact that most of the early translators of Buddhist texts into Sinitic were foreigners with a poor command of the literary language a significant factor? And did the phonological sophistication of Indian linguistical science lend credibility to the spoken vis-à-vis the written? What of the elaborate, rigorously defined Indian traditions of chanting and recitation? And may the social values, institutions, and position of Buddhism have contributed to the rise of the written vernaculars? Last but not least, did Buddhist practice have anything to do with the validation of the vernacular? Perhaps I have entirely overlooked some vital facet of Buddhism that contributed to this process. In the end, Buddhist support for the written vernacular may best be identified as a complex combination of diverse factors, all of which were determined by an integrated socioreligous ideology.

SOURCE: Victor H. Mair, “Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages,” Journal of Asian Studies 53 (1994): 705, 707-751

UPDATE: The comment thread on this at Language Hat is most interesting.

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by | 24 April 2004 · 7:19 pm

How Stalin and the Cultural Revolution Preserved a Chinese Tradition

In the 16 & 23 February issue of The New Yorker, Peter Hessler’s “Letter From China” (not available online) hints at how close the PRC came to abandoning Chinese characters for an alphabet.

In 1936, as the Communists were gaining power, Mao Zedong told an American journalist that alphabetization was inevitable. When Mao finally took control of China, in 1949, many expected the government to replace characters with Latin letters, as Vietnam had done earlier in the century. But in the summer of 1950 Mao handed down a surprise decision, calling for linguists to develop a “national-in-form” alphabet–a new writing system, whose letters would be distinctively Chinese.

John DeFrancis, a linguist at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, has studied this period, and he told me that the inspiration for Mao’s order has always been a mystery. DeFrancis recommended that I speak with Zhou Yougang, a ninety-seven-year-old linguist who had worked on the writing reform committee … [which] considered more than two thousand proposed writing systems. Some were derived entirely from Chinese; others used Latin or Cyrillic alphabets; a few combined fragments of Chinese characters with foreign letters. There were Chinese alphabets in Arabic…. In 1955, the committee narrowed the field to six alphabetic finalists: Latin, Cyrillic, and four completely new “Chinese” systems….

In 1956, Mao and other leaders concluded that the Chinese alphabets weren’t yet usable. They sanctioned the Latin scheme, known as Pinyin, for use in early education and other special purposes, but not as a replacement script. And they decided to simplify a number of Chinese characters. This was described as an “initial reform stage”: Mao, it seems, wanted more time to consider the options.

But writing reform soon became entangled in politics. In April of 1957, the Communist Party launched the Hundred Flowers campaign, during which intellectuals were invited to speak their minds, however critical…. Then, after only five weeks, Mao abruptly terminated the … campaign. By the end of the year, more than three hundred thousand intellectuals had been labelled Rightists….

I asked Zhou what had happened to the four Chinese alphabets, and he told me that all records had apparently been destroyed. “It was easy to lose things like that during the Cultural Revolution,” he said.

The Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, represents the climax of China’s disillusionment with its traditions. But, ironically, the upheaval helped protect the characters. When the chaos finally ended, the Chinese no longer had an appetite for radical cultural change, and both the public and the government rejected further attempts at writing reform. Today, almost nobody advocates alphabetization, and Zhou predicts that China won’t give up its characters for at least another century, if ever. Even the simplificiation didn’t get very far. It reduced the number of brushstrokes that make up some of the most commonly used characters, but the principles of the writing system remain the same. Essentially, it’s the equivalent of converting an English word like “through” to “thru.” Zhou and others believe that simplification hasn’t had a significant effect on improving literacy rates. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and many overseas Chinese communities don’t use the simplified system, and traditionalists despise them.

In hindsight, Mao’s 1950 command doomed writing reform; without the search for a national-in-form alphabet, China likely would have adopted Latin script before the Cultural Revolution. When I asked about Mao, Zhou said that the turning point was the Chairman’s first state visit to the Soviet Union, in 1949. “Mao asked Stalin for advice about writing reform,” Zhou said. “Stalin told him, ‘You’re a great country, and you should have your own Chinese form of writing. You shouldn’t simply use the Latin alphabet.’ That’s why Mao wanted a national-in-form alphabet.”

NOTE: The impetus to blog this (after losing track of it) came from reading a post on the fascinating blog Muninn (discovered via Language Hat) about Chinese character reform in Taiwan, where both Chiang Kai-shek and a solid majority of Taiwanese favored it as late as 1954. I wonder if it was abruptly abandoned precisely because Mao adopted it after letting alphabetization–and any intellectuals who opined about it–fall by the wayside.

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by | 23 April 2004 · 9:01 pm

The Perpetually Invisible Crisis in Darfur, Western Sudan

On 26 July 1985, The Times (of London) reporter Paul Vallely wrote a story about aid efforts in western Sudan entitled “Riding the Lifeline Lorry.” Here’s what Robert Kaplan has to say about it in his book, Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (Vintage, 2003): “To my mind, it was the best single feature story I ever read about the famine. It’s too bad the U.S. public never got to see it.” And here’s Kaplan’s retelling of the story in his chapter entitled “Aid: Rolling the Rock of Sisyphus” (pp. 195-196).

For weeks the requests had been trickling into the old British garrison post of El Geneina, the furthermost town in the west of Sudan….

These particular requests came from the chief of police at Beida, through the cursive handwriting of the little border town’s scribe. At first they were for food. Then last week came a plea for shrouds.

“We have nothing in which to bury our dead, and 15 children died yesterday,” said the letter addressed to Peter Verney, the Save the Children (SCF) representative in Geneina.

As Vallely related the story, so little food was coming into Geneina from Khartoum on account of floods and other difficulties that there was not enough to send onward to Beida, about fifty miles south along Sudan’s western border with Chad. Those dying of starvation in Beida were all Chadian refugees, and the local Sudanese commissioner Sherife was not cooperating in the release of emergency grain. Finally, however, Verney managed to secure 150 sacks of food and seed. Then the head of the Sudanese haulage firm doubled and tripled the price. Verney did not have enough cash on hand to pay for the lorry and in desperation went to the local army brigadier in Geneina, Ibrahim Muhammad, who told Verney, “This is the situation everywhere. No food is reaching the extremities. It reaches the hands but not the fingers. Of course you can have one of my trucks.

Three hours after leaving Geneina for Beida, the food lorry got caught in a torrential rain. Vallely and the driver whom Verney had rented were stuck for nine hours in the mud; sixty peasants helped to dig the two men out.

It was two days before we reached Beida…. We were welcomed by Muhammad Ahmed Bashir, the local chief of police. Over sweet tea on the rafia mat before his office he was effusive in his thanks for the food.

“I will put it straight into the store with the other food.” The other food? “Yes, we already have 140 bags in store but we have had no authority from Sherife or his nephew Ali Mansour to release it.”

Because of Sudanese bureaucracy, Chadians were starving to death with food only a few feet away. The next day, Ali Mansour, the executive officer of the rural council, agreed to distribute the grain. “You will take my photograph,” he said to a news agency photographer with Vallely. “This will be good for me.”

The distribution caused a riot among the refugees. Sudanese soldiers responded by lashing at the crowd with whips in all directions. The news agency photographer started snapping away, even though editors had become bored with pictures of starving Africans. The photographer confided to Vallely that starving Africans being whipped had novelty value that would result in his pictures gaining wide distribution. Sure enough, the photos of the riots in Beida were picked up in Europe.

Nearly two decades later, we’re still “rolling the rock of Sisyphus.” The Washington Post editorialized on 3 April 2004:

ACCORDING TO THE United Nations, one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises now afflicts a Muslim people who face a horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing driven by massacre, rape and looting. These horrors are unfolding not, as Arab governments and satellite channels might have it, in Iraq or the Palestinian territories, but in Sudan, a member of the Arab League. Maybe because there are no Westerners or Israelis to be blamed, the crisis in Darfur, in northwestern Sudan, has commanded hardly any international attention. Though it has been going on for 14 months, the U.N. Security Council acted on it for the first time yesterday, and then only by issuing a weak president’s statement. More intervention is needed, and urgently.

The victims of the ongoing war crimes are non-Arab African people who have lived in the Darfur region for centuries. In February 2003, as the Sudanese government began to negotiate a peace agreement with rebel movements representing the non-Arab peoples of the south, an insurgent movement appeared in Darfur demanding more government resources and power-sharing. The Khartoum-based government responded by sending troops and by enlisting Arab tribes in the region as allies. Early this year, after the breakdown of a cease-fire, it launched a scorched-earth offensive in the region that, according to the United Nations and human rights groups, has taken on the character of an ethnic war.

According to a report issued this week by Human Rights Watch, “the government of Sudan and allied Arab militia, called janjaweed, are implementing a strategy of ethnic-based murder, rape and forcible displacement of civilians.” More than 750,000 people have been forced from their homes, and 100,000 more have fled across the border to neighboring Chad, an area of desperate poverty and little water. The dead number in the tens of thousands, though no one knows for sure how many: Humanitarian aid groups have had almost no access to the Darfur region.

For years Sudan’s government, a dictatorship headed by Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Bashir, waged a similarly ruthless campaign against the rebellious south. At last, under considerable international pressure — much of it from the Bush administration — it agreed to a cease-fire and negotiations that now inch toward a peace settlement. Some of the governments that pushed for that accord are concerned the deal may be disrupted if the international community also presses Mr. Bashir about Darfur. They should take a lesson from the 10th anniversary this month of the Rwandan genocide, which the United Nations failed to stop: Political and diplomatic calculations should never prevent the international community from intervening to stop mass murder.

As usual, the best coverage for this type of out-of-the-way story is not in the international media, but in blogs such as Head Heeb, who has been assiduous in covering Darfur: on 21 April, 18 April, 25 March, 19 March, 16 February, 10 February, 4 February, 30 January, 7 January, and elsewhere.

UPDATE: Foreign Dispatches offers a blistering assessment of the statement by the U.N. “Human Rights” Commission on this tragedy.

Absolutely incredible! Instead of condemning Sudanese actions, the UN “Human Rights” Commission actually decided on a message of solidarity with the Sudanese government! …

UPDATE: This VOA article entitled “Human Rights Commission Losing Credibility, NGOs Warn” is also worth reading; frankly, I’d say the Human Rights Commission and the parent UN lost their credibility a very long time ago, and only now are the NGOs belatedly waking up to that reality.

UPDATE, 4 May 2004: Sudan has just been re-elected to the UN “Human Rights” Commission. What purpose does this serve?

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by | 22 April 2004 · 8:35 pm

A Growing Malaria Problem

In honor of Earth Day, last night’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS showed a segment about the possible danger of global temperatures rising enough to permit bird malaria to wipe out unique endangered species at higher elevations in Hawai‘i. As one who has experienced repeated bouts of human malaria (P. vivax, not the dreaded P. falciparum variety), I thought I might mark the occasion by reminding readers yet again that the human malaria problem is already here and growing fast, and that we do not lack the means to fight it, if we are persistent and careful and rethink old shibboleths about DDT.

Most of what Ellen Ruppel Shell wrote about the Resurgence of a Deadly Disease in The Atlantic back in 1997 still applies.

All but obliterated in the developed world half a century ago, and suppressed in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s [thanks to DDT!], malaria has since returned in full force to North Africa, India, Southeast Asia, China, South America, and the Caribbean. Worldwide incidence of the disease has quadrupled in the past five years, and resistance to available drugs for prevention and treatment is growing rapidly. Nearly 40 percent of the world’s population lives in regions where malaria is endemic, and millions more live in areas that are encountering the disease for the first time in decades….

Nonetheless, the United States has shown little interest in the problem. Malaria is transferable in blood, yet it is not screened for in the American blood supply. The country’s Anopheles mosquito population has gone unmonitored for more than fifty years. “We just don’t know the potential for transmission,” says John Beier, a professor of tropical medicine at Tulane University. Temperature and humidity may well be among the most important factors in the rate of spread of the disease, yet we have only a vague notion of what effect, if any, climate change will have on malaria transmission — if, for example, global warming can be expected to bring malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases north from Mexico. Most Americans seem to think the disease has been eradicated or, at worst, is confined to the tropics. In fact there are few places on earth that cannot sustain a malaria epidemic.

A much more iconoclastic take on Earth Day appeared in the San Francisico Chronicle, coauthored by Patrick Moore, apostate cofounder of Greenpeace who left to become chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit, and Nick Schulz, editor of TechCentralStation.com.

Ironically, the very movement that made its presence felt in rallies across this country in 1970 and that thrives in the developed world today must shoulder much of the blame for the developing world’s sorry state. It is impeding both economic and environmental progress due to an agenda that is anti-development, anti-technology and, in the final analysis, anti-human.

For example, today’s eco-activists boast that they have blocked more than 200 hydroelectric projects in the developing world over the past two decades. It is true that hydro power has a large ecological footprint, creating lakes and filling valleys. But it is a renewable energy that makes it possible to read after the sun goes down, boosting literacy in poor areas. It provides controlled irrigation for better crop yields and mitigates flooding and the loss of life and property damage….

Or consider that the pesticide DDT has been proven to radically reduce malaria in South Africa, while activist groups such as the World Wildlife Fund push for a total ban on its use. It only needs to be sprayed inside houses, where it poses no threat to the external environment, to make it effective. Despite the ability to stop malaria in its tracks with DDT — as the United States had already done before its use was prohibited here — 300 million people will become infected every year and at least 1 million will die, according to the World Health Organization.

UPDATE: Abiola Lapite’s Foreign Dispatches and Virginia Postrel’s Dynamist blog jumped on this story before I did: Abiola on 11 April (where I found the NYT article); Postrel on 19, 20, 21, and again on 21 April (where I found the Atlantic article).

UPDATE 2: Now the Washington Post has weighed in.

A large portion of the blame for the increased incidence of malaria can be laid at the feet of WHO itself, as well as other aid agencies such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

These agencies’ mosquito-prevention and drug-treatment policies in Africa are in tatters. A group of prominent malaria experts has even charged the agencies with malpractice for their reluctance to supply new, more expensive and better drugs for treatment [like artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs)], and for sticking instead with essentially ineffective medicines [like chloroquine and sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine]. But if WHO and its partners are serious about reducing the malaria threat, they need to reconsider their approach and start using all the weapons available to combat malaria — and soon.

While AIDS gets all the attention for destroying the young adults of Africa, few Westerners are aware that malaria kills more children than any other disease….

Preventing malaria means creating a barrier between the mosquito, which is the carrier of the malarial parasite, and the parasite’s primary host — humans. Since malarial mosquitoes bite only between dusk and dawn, WHO’s campaign has promoted bed nets, which can protect those who sleep beneath them. But this policy has had limited success. Nets for a whole family are expensive, and mosquitoes can take many blood meals between dusk and bedtime. Also, nets work best if treated with insecticide. But a recent survey in Kenya found that 21 percent of households had one single bed net, and only 5.6 percent of these were insecticide-treated. Moreover, mosquitoes are growing resistant to the type of insecticide with which the nets are coated.

By contrast, South Africa — which is rich enough to fund its own public health programs and doesn’t need to rely on WHO’s largess — has reduced malaria transmission by 90 percent in recent years, by a combination of returning to an old insecticide and investing in a new drug. It chose to spray insecticides, especially DDT, on the inside walls of dwellings to prevent mosquitoes from entering the buildings. This protects everyone inside all the time, not just when people might be sleeping.

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by | 21 April 2004 · 7:55 pm

Indonesia’s Golkar Nominates Possible War Criminal for President

Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, UPI Business Correspondent, reports a troubling development for this summer’s Indonesian presidential elections:

SINGAPORE, April 21 (UPI) — The nomination of General Wiranto as presidential candidate for the leading party in the Indonesian general election is adding a new layer of uncertainties for investors in Indonesia.

Wiranto faces a U.N. indictment for crimes against humanity and is partly responsible for a U.S. congressional ban on military ties with Jakarta after mass killings by Indonesian troops in East Timor in 1999.

But on Tuesday, the retired general won the nomination of the Golkar party (former President Suharto’s party), pushing ahead of expected winner Akbar Tandjung, the party’s chairman. He won by promising “strong leadership” and an end to corruption….

Golkar is leading the results of April 5 voting, with 21.1 percent of the vote, followed by President Megawati’s party Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) with 19.5 percent, Former president Wahid’s party the National Awakening Party (PKB) with 11.89 percent, the Islamic party of Vice-President Hamzah Haz’s United Development Party (PPP) with 8.33 percent and the newly formed party of retired general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Democratic Party (PD), with 7.52 percent.

But, a survey by London-based Taylor Nelson Sofres indicated that 28 percent of the surveyed voters will chose Susilo as president.

For more on the legislative election results, see below.

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by | 21 April 2004 · 7:46 pm

Nauru: Once Rich in Phosphates, Now Broke

The island nation of Nauru, which once had the highest per capita income in the “developing” world, is now broke. The New Zealand News reports:

Australia has declined to bail out the island nation of Nauru, which is facing almost certain bankruptcy this month.

As receivers moved in on Nauru’s key international property assets, President Rene Harris is understood to have approached Canberra for a short-term rescue package….

The tiny island republic is facing both a constitutional and financial crisis, following a deadlock in its Parliament when the Speaker resigned in protest at the Government’s failure to pass a budget.

A spokesman for the Harris Government said they were still trying to find a refinancer for a A$236 million loan with America’s General Electric Capital.

The loan used the last of Nauru’s once $1 billion-plus property portfolio as security.

Nationmaster.com profiles Nauru’s economy.

Revenues of this tiny island have come from exports of phosphates, but reserves are expected to be exhausted within a few years. Phosphate production has declined since 1989, as demand has fallen in traditional markets and as the marginal cost of extracting the remaining phosphate increases, making it less internationally competitive. While phosphates have given Nauruans one of the highest per capita incomes in the Third World, few other resources exist with most necessities being imported, including fresh water from Australia. The rehabilitation of mined land and the replacement of income from phosphates are serious long-term problems. In anticipation of the exhaustion of Nauru’s phosphate deposits, substantial amounts of phosphate income have been invested in trust funds to help cushion the transition and provide for Nauru’s economic future. The government has been borrowing heavily from the trusts to finance fiscal deficits. To cut costs the government has called for a freeze on wages, a reduction of over-staffed public service departments, privatization of numerous government agencies, and closure of some overseas consulates. In recent years Nauru has encouraged the registration of offshore banks and corporations. Tens of billions of dollars have been channeled through their accounts. Few comprehensive statistics on the Nauru economy exist, with estimates of Nauru’s GDP varying widely.

But Air Nauru says it will keep flying.

UPDATE: Head Heeb has more.

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by | 21 April 2004 · 8:51 am

An Anthropologist’s First Impressions of Occupied Japan

The Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at the Ohio State University has made available online a wonderful collection, “Doing Photography and Social Research in the Allied Occupation of Japan, 1948-1951: A Personal and Professional Memoir,” described thus:

Photographs taken by anthropologist John W. Bennett in occupied Japan, 1948-1951, (a few were made in the 1960’s during his term at Waseda University), with comments on the photos by Bennett. Also included are extensive selections from Bennett’s professional journal of the period, and other documents. Consisting of a personal and professional memoir, this site is also a record of a unique experiment in social analysis and research that focuses on a period of particular significance in the development of Japanese and international history, politics, economics, and culture.

Here’s an excerpt from First Impressions: A Letter to Kathryn Bennett Composed at Intervals During 1949.

let us list some preconceptions of the writer, which have since been scrapped. More than that, he was totally unaware that they existed, and he an anthropologist, too. But we know that anthropologists are on the whole naïve and eager people, who rarely examine their own prejudices. I discovered after two days that I entered Japan with the unconscious assumption that all Japanese speak in high voices. This is false. 2. I entered Japan with the notion that all Japanese would be embarrassed when spoken to. This is false. 3. I had a half baked notion that Tokyo looked like a large park with museum-like buildings scattered through it (really kind of surrealist dream). This is false. 4. I believed that although most Japanese could read, only a few were literate. This is mostly false. 5. I believed that Japan was amazingly homogenous in physical appearance and behavior. This is completely false and true–see earlier confused remarks. 6. Finally, I had the firm belief that a careful reading of Benedict, Sansom, Embree, et.al. would provide one with the basic knowledge for research here. Maybe– but today I discovered that my most pressing need for information concerns government bureaus and the patterns of population movement.

To conclude this session, let us ask the question: What is the “Oriental” here? Is this the Orient? The initial Yokohama impression was negative–the damn place looked like part of Seattle, and the docks were so packed with Americans that one could hardly feel strange and eastern. In to Tokyo the impressions were so confused that I can hardly say what I felt; after a while in Tokyo and outside the Orient came in a physical sense–the “Japanesy” look as my dear mother used to say when she saw some bamboo bric-abrac; that is, delicacy, intricacy, retiring-ness, vistas of people in hedged fields, etc., etc. Japanese gardens and prints. For a couple of days I drank this in–every glimpse I could get. Concrete highways and western buildings and railroads didn’t figure–I simply didn’t see them. I recall one trip into town with Herb Passin in the AM and the only thing that I remember seeing on that trip was an ancient house on a farm with old style thatched roof. Well, all this will return when we go to Kyoto and similar places which retain the traditional appearance, but by now the Japanese feeling and visions have about disappeared, and all I see are the familiar sights of the urban world – the streets look like streets again. “Oriental” becomes not of the bric-a-brac dish garden business but the urban and rural world of the Japanese nation. I regret that I didn’t see Japan in my mystic and impressionable teens, when the garden view would have persisted. Not of course that I don’t see the differences–this communication is full of them–but the special naïve physical “oriental” look is about gone.

via The Marmot’s Hole (in turn via Neilbarker’s Seoul)

I suspect I’ll have more to post as I explore the archives. Takes me way back to my early childhood in Occupied Japan.

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by | 21 April 2004 · 7:49 am

South Korea’s New Hybrid News Organization: OhmyNews!

Donata Communications has posted an article about a new type of media organization that apparently helped drive greater participation by normally apathetic younger voters (the “2030” generation, those in their 20s and 30s) during the recent elections in South Korea, the most “wired” society on earth. The article by Terry L. Heaton has a grandiose title–TV News in a Postmodern World: The Genius of OhmyNews–but is well worth a full read.

Whether it was genius, luck, timing or all three, OhmyNews! has become a very powerful media entity in South Korea, and the amazing thing is that its principal tool is a Website. OhmyTV is a very slick streaming online TV station, and their election night coverage would’ve stunned even the so-called “experts” at the network level in the U.S. The graphics and sound effects alone were enough to make any producer drool. OhmyNews! also publishes a Saturday print edition now, but its bread and butter is the Internet.

According to the UCLA Center for Communications Policy World Internet Report, there are two noticeable differences between U.S. and Korean Internet users. Seven in ten Korean users believe that most or all of the information on the Web is accurate or reliable. That’s compared to a little over half of Internet users in the U.S. Secondly, Internet users in Korea spend considerably more time online and less watching television than their U.S. counterparts.

Updates and bulletins can happen at any time, but OhmyNews! “publishes” its content three times a day, 9:30 a.m., 1:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. It is, therefore, targeting a largely working audience. It also provides news via cell phones and other mobile devices.

Staff reporters (80% of whom began as citizen reporters) now number over 50 with almost 27,000 citizen journalists contributing. The American-educated Oh has a history of rejecting traditional journalism, having worked for alternative media outlets before founding OhmyNews!.

We do not regard objective reporting as a source of pride. OhmyNews does not regard straight news articles as the standard. Articles including both facts and opinions are acceptable when they are good.

And “good” is in the purview of his editors. It harkens back to the days before the elite “professionalism” took hold in the early 20th century, and it’s obviously resonating with the citizenry in South Korea.

via Bill Hobbs via Instapundit

UPDATE: The Marmot’s Hole comments, and promises more to come.

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by | 19 April 2004 · 9:05 pm

2004 Indonesian Legislative Election Results So Far

On 20 April, the Jakarta Post reports the ongoing Indonesian vote tally as of last Friday, with something like 75% of the votes counted.

JAKARTA (JP): Provisional vote tally from the General Elections Commission (KPU) as of 2:45 a.m. on Friday is as follows:

Rank – Party – Votes – %

1. (20) The Golkar Party: 19,287,067 (21.11%)

[former President Suharto’s old party]

2. (18) The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P): 17,814,035 (19.49%)

[current President Megawati’s party]

3. (15) The National Awakening Party (PKB): 10,886,977 (11.91%)

[former President Gus Dur’s (= Abdurrahman Wahid’s) party]

4. (5) The United Development Party (PPP): 7,615,482 (8.33%)

[former rural Muslim party]

5. (9) The Democratic Party (PD): 6,879,372 (7.53%)

[Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s spinoff from PDI-P]

6. (16) The Prosperous Justice Party (PKS): 6,549,961 (7.17%)

[“Caring and clean”–and peaceful]

7. (13) The National Mandate Party (PAN): 5,918,636 (6.48%)

[Amien Rais’s urban-based reform party]

8. (3) The Crescent Star Party (PBB): 2,345,426 (2.57%)

[sectarian pro-syariah party]

9. (17) The Reform Star Party (PBR): 2,099,182 (2.30%)

[sectarian pro-syariah party]

10. (14) The Concern for the Nation Functional Party (PKPB): 1,945,837 (2.13%)

[Suharto clan party headed by his daughter “Tutut”]

Below the 2% threshold: the Prosperous Peace Party (PDS), which aims to represent the Christian minorities. It seems a good sign that, in a country 88% Muslim and riven by religious strife, the most highly sectarian parties garnered such tiny fractions of the vote.

The parties who win a minimum of 20% of the votes for the parliamentary elections are eligible to nominate their candidate for the presidential election on 5 July 2004.

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by | 18 April 2004 · 10:05 am

Holy Warriors vs. the Salvation Army in Poso, Sulawesi, Indonesia

Yet another outbreak of violence hit the area around Poso in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, over the Easter weekend.

At 7:15 pm, April 10th, three masked men in Ninja-like costumes arrived on motorcycle and stormed the Protestant congregation, opening fire on hundreds of Christians who were celebrating Easter. Seven people were injured, including a four-year old girl who was shot in the right leg. The assailants escaped to a nearby forest.

Three previous shootings in the last month have claimed the lives of three Christians and injured another. The deaths of Rosia Pilonga, a 41-year old dean of Law at the Siontuwunu Maroso University and Jhon Christian Tanalida, who were shot dead by unknown gunmen earlier last month, were followed by the shooting death of a local clergyman, Reverend Freddy Wuisan, in his own home late one evening.

These anonymous attacks have targeted the Christian population in the Poso region even after the 2001 Peace accord was established by the government to end two years of fighting which killed some 2000 people. In the worst bloodshed last October, gunmen killed 10 people in attacks on mainly Christian villages.

Christians so far have not retaliated to any of the attacks with violence.

The violent outbreaks in 2000-2001 were attributed to the Laskar Jihad holy warriors, which officially disbanded in the wake of the Bali bombing in 2002, but is more likely to have relocated to West Papua, well away from international media TV cameras. The most recent violence has been attributed to the Jemaah Islamiya terrorist group apparently responsible for the Bali attack.

One odd irony of the conflict in Poso is that Christianity first came to Central Sulawesi by means of the Salvation Army, which describes itself in military terms but, as far as I know, has never sanctioned violence as a means of spreading its message. A good, concise account of the origins of the Salvation Army and its arrival in Central Sulawesi can be found in the chapter, “Onward Christian Soldiers: The Salvation Army in Sulawesi,” in the book Fields of the Lord: Animism, Christian Minorities, and State Development in Indonesia, by Lorraine Aragon (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 116-118. (Author-date references are omitted in the following extract.)

The Salvation Army began as the East London Christian Revival Society in 1865, when a Wesleyan Methodist preacher named William Booth took his message to the street people of East London. Booth quickly discovered that these lower-class individuals, often alcoholics or scofflaws, were unwelcome in established English churches. When their roving street evangelism was discouraged by Methodist Church institutions, Booth and his wife, Catherine, founded their own sect…. They recognized that their prospective audience was not attracted to the staid atmosphere of conventional churches and organ music, so they created a circus-like environment of tents thrown up in public squares with vivacious music played on guitars, banjos, trumpets, and bass drums…. In this context, Booth and his wife preached eternal salvation through Christian faith and discipline to individuals who were considered the most sinful members of British society.

Booth remained doctrinally faithful to Wesleyan principles: faith in both Old and New Testament scriptures, the Trinity, original sin, and the atonement of Jesus Christ…. It was less a matter of doctrine than Booth’s constituency and approach to them that made the Salvation Army a distinctive sect apart from Methodism.

Because many of his original followers were alcoholics, Booth eliminated the sacraments, which he saw as tempting his followers with sips of wine. Salvation Army members are forbidden alcohol and tobacco in order to purify their physical and spiritual selves from sinful habits. Booth also encouraged, yet disciplined, the charismatic expression of penitence among his followers by restricting their confessions of faith to moments in the service when all were called upon to volunteer their “witness” to the greatness of the Lord….

The East London Christian Revival Society changed its name to the Christian Mission and then, in 1878, to the Salvation Army. Booth found military references in the Bible evocative of the kind of energetic and disciplined movement that he envisioned…. [This was the heyday of the YMCA and “muscular Christianity.”] Hence the organization’s chosen processional hymn became “Onward, Christian Soldiers!” Once the Salvation Army name was chosen, the way to structure and clothe the organization’s members became clear to “General” Booth, who began to assign military ranks and adopt used British Army garments that later were altered to create a distinctive Salvation Army uniform.

By the late 1880s, Salvation Army congregations, or “corps,” were opened in other parts of the British empire and European continent. Given the organization’s early statement that “[t]he Salvation Army makes religion where there was no religion before” …, missionization in Europe’s overseas colonies was a natural next step for the Salvation Army’s expansion. Methodists already disavowed the high Calvinist view of strict predestination, which made missionary work more purposive, merely another extension of the desired corpus Christianum….

In 1909, A. W. F. Idenburg, the newly stationed governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, contacted Gerrit Govaars, the first Dutch Salvation Army [Du. Leger des Heils] officer ever commissioned and the newly assigned Indonesian territorial “commander.” Govaars was assigned to travel from an established Salvation Army headquarters in Semarang, Java, to assess the possibility of opening missions among the “pagan Toradjas” of Central Sulawesi. A 1970s interview with Govaars indicates that once he arrived in the Palu Valley, he met a German named Zuppinger. Zuppinger, who was married to a “native” woman and could speak some local language, accompanied Govaars on a journey to Kulawi‘s pagan temple, where Govaars became “the first Christian to preach the gospel in Kulawi” …. Of his travels into the interior farther south, Govaars said:

From place to place we hired carriers, and so traversed the country. We spoke to the heads of the tribes. One of them listened interestedly to what I told him about Christ, serving the Lord and not doing bad things. Then he asked, “Are we allowed to eat pig’s meat?”

Upon my affirmative he said, “Oh well, that is all right. Wild pigs eat our harvest, so we ought to be allowed to eat pigs.” …

These comments, familiar to all missionaries in Indonesia, encapsulate one of the primary objections that highlanders have to Islam. By initial comparison, the Christian religion seems less of a dietary hardship. Unlike the coastal Kaili, most of whom gradually gave up eating pork to forge alliances with Muslim merchants from South Sulawesi, highland Kulawi people never found a sufficiently good reason to renounce their major feast food in favor of a foreign religion.

UPDATE: Indonesian police say they have “found 17 bombs and scores of home-made guns, knives and bows and arrows in an extensive search of Indonesia’s Poso district. Hundreds of police conducted door-to-door searches and combed fields in the Central Sulawesi district from Wednesday to find illegal weapons.” … Local residents “gave police a lot of information.”

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