Category Archives: Japan

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 | 29 February 2004 · 11:35 am

Photographs from the Japanese Colonial Period in Korea

To commemorate the 85th anniversary of Korea’s March First Independence Movement in 1919, the Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) has published two articles on photographic archives from the colonial period.

The Japanese Colonial Period Through Photographs I

The Japanese Colonial Period Through Photographs II

A tip of the moja to The Marmot

UPDATE: The Korea blogs Budaechigae and KamelianXRays both offer retrospectives on the events of 1 March 1919. And the Marmot notes that South Korean President Noh took the opportunity to do a little extemporaneous bashing of Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi–to the consternation of the South Korean Foreign Ministry.

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by | 24 February 2004 · 10:11 pm

The Legal Status of the Japanese Wife, 1915

According to “The New Japanese Civil Code” by Professor N. Hozumi, the present Civil Code proceeds upon the equality of the sexes, and makes no distinction between men and women in their enjoyment of private life so long as a woman remains single. She may become the head of a house and exercise authority as such. She may exercise parental authority over her child if her husband is dead. She may adopt children either alone, when she is single or a widow, or in conjuction with her husband when married. She may make any contract or acquire or dispose of any property in her own name, provided she remains single.

When she marries, however, she enters the class technically called “incapacitated persons” treated of in Section 2 or Chapter I of the Civil Code. Under this section are four classes–minors, incompetent persons, quasi-incompetent persons and wives, or more explicitly, as it is explained under the “meaning of capacity,” “such persons as minors, wives, lunatics, and spendthrifts do not possess complete capacity.” A touch of nature makes the whole world kin! The next paragraph is still more illuminating.

Under the heading “Reasons for protecting incompetent persons,” we find, “minors are protected because of the insufficient development of their intelligence; incapacitated persons are protected because they are, like lunatics and idiots, intellectually deformed; and quasi-incompetent persons are protected because they are either physically deformed or intellectually imperfect, like the blind, the deaf, the dumb, and spendthrifts; while wives being bound to follow their husbands, the rights of the latter are protected in order to maintain the peace of the household.”

SOURCE: “The Legal Status of the Japanese Wife,” by A. Caroline Macdonald, in The Christian Movement in the Japanese Empire, including Korea and Formosa, a Year Book for 1915 (Conference of Federated Missions, Japan, 1915), pp. 324-325.

In sharp contrast are the presuffrage wives of the Southern Baptist Convention missionaries listed on p. 611 of the same work, all of whom appear either to be named Wanda, Wendy, Wilhemina, Wilma, Winifred, and the like–or else not to be worth naming:

Bouldin, Rev. G. W. & W., Tokyo

Clarke, Rev. W. H. & W., (A)

Dozier, Rev. C. K. & W., Fukuoka

Medling, Rev. P. P. & W., (A)

Mills, Mr. E. O. & W., Fukuoka

Ray, Rev. J. F. & W., Shimonoseki

Rowe, Rev. J. H. & W., Nagasaki

Walne, Rev. E. N., D.D. & W., Tokyo

Willingham, Rev. C. T. & W., Kokura

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by | 24 February 2004 · 9:03 pm

The Omi Mission in Japan, 1915

February 1915, the tenth anniversary of the arrival in Hachiman of Mr. W. M. Vories, marked the beginning of the second decade of the Omi Mission.

The distinctive features of this Mission consist in its being financially self-supporting; undenominational–advocating and practising co-operation in all Christian efforts; administered entirely on the field; international–having voluntary supporters in America, Europe, and Japan, and both American and Japanese workers on equal terms, the general secretary this year being Japanese; rural from choice and conviction; aimed at the establishment of a model Kingdom of God, rather than at individual conversions alone; many-sided in its approach–preaching, Sunday Schools, railway and Student Y.M.C.A., with hostels, farm, motor cruiser (Galilee Maru) on Lake Biwa, physical work in the embryo antituberculosis camp, two monthly publications, newspaper evangelism, loan library of evangelistic books, many types of women’s work, and architectural office–for support and for training self-supporting mission workers; and finally, in its compromising a practical Laboratory of Mission Methods, where new lines of evangelistic and institutional effort are being tried out–and the results open to any mission in the Orient.

Beginning without resources and with only one green young worker in 1905, the Mission numbered in 1914 thirty workers, eight of whom were Americans.

The first ten years were marked by the complete alteration of the attitude of the community, from that of open and violent opposition and persecution to open and cordial favour; the building up of a staff of native workers–which is the hope of any mission enterprise; and the crystalization of aims and methods adapted to peculiar conditions, after experimentation.

The direct achievements, though sounding well in report, are, we trust, merely suggestions of real harvesting in the next decade.

SOURCE: “The Omi Mission,” by W. M. Vories, in The Christian Movement in the Japanese Empire, including Korea and Formosa, a Year Book for 1915 (Conference of Federated Missions, Japan, 1915), pp. 136-137.

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by | 23 February 2004 · 9:47 pm

Syncretism vs. Hybridity vs. Creolization

The November 2003 issue of The Journal of Asian Studies (vol. 62, no. 4) contains a review by Tom Havens of the book, The Age of Creolization in the Pacific: In Search of Emerging Cultures and Shared Values in the Japan-America Borderlands, edited by Takeshi Matsuda (Hiroshima: Keisuisha, 2001). The book offers an interesting application of the notion of creolization. The following extract is from the review, which quotes from two chapters by David Blake Willis.

Long ago, the discourse on Japan’s relations with the West emphasized cultural assimilation or syncretism. In the 1950s, Katô Shûichi recast the interaction as hybridity–still a powerful concept in literary and cultural criticism, although Willis believes Katô’s formulation continues “to privilege a Japanese essence” (p. 6). As anthropologists and world historians use the term, “creolization” is a dynamic, interactive process based on “more even-handed horizontal relations” than in the somewhat static notion of hybridity. Creolization involves “a leveling and a borrowing that is two-way,” creating “a new shared culture” that is “open-ended, eclectic, flexible, and mobile” (p. 6). Creolization facilitates transnational and transcultural (rather than international or intercultural) synergies, thus de-emphasizing states and national communities as units of analysis. Simultaneous multiple processes of creolization in various world regions today show that, “the globalization of culture is not the same as its homogenization” (p. 23)….

Willis offers an empirical chapter on the transcultural experiences of creole “JAmericans” educated at CA [my alma mater!], a well-known international school in Kobe barely masked as “Columbia Academy.” He argues that cultural, not necessarily genetic, hybridity often leads to true creolization, concluding hopefully that “Pacific Creoles are the cross-fertilizing currents of new directions, the lubrication for the global cultural landscape” (p. 195).

EXEGESIS: Assimilation models imply you either remain who you are beneath the layers of outside influences (good, unless you were bad to begin with), or you lose your soul and become someone else (bad, unless you were bad to begin with). Hybridity models allow “in-betweeners” and “half-castes” but also imply the existence of purity at the cultural poles. For most people, I suspect (not me! not me!), purebreds are willy-nilly superior to mongrels, whether we’re talking dogs, or cultures, or cultures gone to the dogs. Creolization models acknowledge the creation of uniquely new structures, with their own internal consistencies, arising out of a mixture of cultural (or linguistic) components, but shaped both by universal patterns and by new functions that none of the old structures adequately served.

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by | 5 February 2004 · 5:31 pm

Japanese Occidentalism, 1942

Via Arts & Letters Daily comes this link to an essay in The Chronicle of 6 February 2004 by the always interesting Ian Buruma on “The Origins of Occidentalism.” It’s a rich topic, but I’d like to highlight a few paragraphs early in the essay.

What, then, is the Occidentalist idea of the West?

That is the problem that vexed a group of prominent Japanese intellectuals who gathered for a conference in Kyoto in 1942. The attack on Pearl Harbor was not the ostensible reason for the conference, but the underlying idea was to find an ideological justification for Japan’s mission to smash, and in effect replace, the Western empires in Asia. The topic of discussion was “how to overcome the modern.” Modernity was associated with the West, and particularly with Western imperialism.

Westernization, one of the scholars said, was like a disease that had infected the Japanese spirit. The “modern thing,” said another, was a “European thing.” Others believed that “Americanism” was the enemy, and that Japan should make common cause with the Europeans to defend old civilizations against the New World (there would certainly have been takers in Europe). There was much talk about unhealthy specialization in knowledge, which had fragmented the wholeness of Oriental spiritual culture. Science was to blame. So were capitalism, the absorption into Japanese society of modern technology, and notions of individual freedom and democracy. These had to be “overcome.”

All agreed that culture — that is, traditional Japanese culture — was spiritual and profound, whereas modern Western civilization was shallow, rootless, and destructive of creative power. The West, particularly the United States, was coldly mechanical, a machine civilization without spirit or soul, a place where people mixed to produce mongrel races. A holistic, traditional Orient united under divine Japanese imperial rule would restore the warm organic Asian community to spiritual health. As one of the participants put it, the struggle was between Japanese blood and Western intellect.

An Occidentalist view of the West seems to require an Orientalist view of the East (or the Rest).

(Filed under Plus ça change)

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by | 3 February 2004 · 11:17 pm

Cultural vs. Situational Factors in East Asian Industrialization

In 1991, Ezra Vogel published a slim volume that attempted to analyze for lay audiences some of the reasons why certain East Asian nations achieved notable success in industrializing. He compared Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, which he labelled the “Four Little Dragons.” Here are some highlights, from a book review published in 1994.

British and American advocates of minimal government interference in the marketplace will be countered not just by how different the role of Hong Kong’s government has been from the other little dragons, but by the historical perspective offered in the introductory chapter, where Vogel notes that only the earliest wave of industrialization, in England and later the United States, had the luxury of a rather leisurely pace of industrialization with relatively little government direction. The later waves in continental Europe and then East Asia had to rely much more heavily on government to secure the ever larger amounts of capital, complex technology, and skilled labor needed to leap the ever-widening gap between preindustrial and industrial society. Each new entrant in the race to industrialize had a clearer view of the finish line and ran down a better-trodden path to get there.

East Asian nationalists who, like European and American imperialists before them, tend to credit their success primarily to their own harder work and superior cultural heritage, will be forced to consider Vogel’s lists of the many situational factors that aided their efforts. And anti-American nationalists will object to the prominent position of U.S. aid on those lists. Vogel enumerates new global opportunities offered by the postwar world: (1) The United States, supremely self-confident and fervently anticommunist, was willing to open its markets and universities and share industrial technology with its allies to an unprecedented degree. (2) Thanks to the demise of colonialism and to bitter lessons learned during the prewar depression, international trade was far less restricted than before. (3) The growth of mass consumption enabled smaller countries to achieve manufacturing economies of scale that their domestic markets could not have supported. (4) Large Western corporations acquired a multinational outlook that placed loyalty to profits above loyalty to country of origin, making them willing, for profit, “to buy, sell, and lend anywhere in the world” (p. 11).

Vogel also lists more particular situational advantages East Asia enjoyed during the postwar period: (1) The U.S. poured in massive amounts of aid to build a bulwark against communism. Just as the Japanese economy benefited from U.S. procurement during the Korean War, the other regional economies benefited during the Vietnam War. (2) Confucian conservatives were discredited and large landowners were dispossessed. The postwar governments were not beholden to the traditional elite, so they were free to concentrate on production of new goods, not control of existing assets. (3) A keen awareness of external military threats and of inadequate land and natural resources lent an urgency that made leaders more willing to cooperate and citizens more willing to sacrifice for the common good. (4) Each country had large numbers of refugees and displaced people who comprised an “eager and plentiful labor force” (p. 88) dependent on their labor, not their land, for income. (5) Japan’s pioneering effort provided the little dragons with a goal, a way to get there, and the confidence that they could succeed in their drive to industrialize. As wages rose in Japan, corporations there were willing to transfer limited technology and manufacturing capacity to the other East Asian countries. However, some of those countries, most notably South Korea, succeeded in transferring more technology than Japan intended.

Did particular cultural traditions shared by East Asian societies confer any advantages? Vogel begins his chapter on explanations by downplaying the role of Confucianism in the spread of industrialization. He asks whether the ongoing industrial transformations of Islamic Malaysia and Turkey, Buddhist Thailand, and Roman Catholic Brazil and Mexico will not utterly invalidate cultural tradition as an explanatory factor. He further notes that Confucianism was blamed just as frequently during the 1940s and 1950s for retarding modernization, and asks why China, the heartland of Confucianism, has been slower to industrialize than the periphery, even before the socialist era. In answer, Vogel offers a tantalizing suggestion:

“If anything, just as Max Weber found that the greatest drive to industrialize in his time came in areas located far from Catholic orthodoxy, so in East Asia industrialization prospered in areas far from the centers of traditional Confucian orthodoxy, where trade and commerce were most highly developed. And successes occurred not under the old Confucian-style governments but in societies that had cast them aside for new governments, with very different political systems.” (p. 84) …

It is long past time to lay aside such vague, chauvinist notions as the Protestant ethic, the Confucian ethic, or the samurai spirit, and examine instead the more specific cultural traditions that aided industrialization. Vogel identifies four such traditions shared by Japan and the little dragons: (1) a “meritocratically selected bureaucracy” (p. 93) that not only implemented policy decisions, but formulated them; (2) an entrance examination system that afforded the means to overcome feudal favoritism and channel the most talented people into key leadership positions; (3) an emphasis on group loyalty and subordination of individual to group demands that well suited the level of centralized coordination needed to effect a modern industrial transformation; and (4) a tradition of lifelong self-cultivation.

Of course, the challenge today is not just to find a way for all nations to climb onto an industrial plateau, but to find ways to keep scaling new heights of innovation and growth in a postindustrial world. Orthodoxies of all kinds still seem to be among the primary obstacles.

SOURCE: Review of The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia, by Ezra F. Vogel (Harvard U. Press, 1991).

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Filed under China, economics, industry, Japan, Korea, labor, Vietnam

by | 2 February 2004 · 7:54 pm

A Female Empress in Japan? Why Not?

The Japanese Diet appears to be moving ahead at its normal, glacial pace to provide for the possibility of a female empress. The Guardian reported the story soon after Princess Aiko’s second birthday in December.

Japan is preparing to revise its succession law to allow women to ascend the 2,600-year-old Chrysanthemum Throne for the first time in more than two centuries.

The change could see Princess Aiko, the two-year-old daughter of the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Naruhito, become only the ninth female to head the world’s oldest monarchy.

“We are planning to accept a reigning empress in our final report,” Taro Nakayama, who chairs a parliamentary committee on constitutional issues, said in an interview published yesterday in the Sankei Shimbun newspaper.

Mr Nakayama said the revision could be made as early as next year. “Since Japan had eight reigning empresses in history, succession by a new empress would not be strange,” he said.

Now the Associated Press has gotten around to reporting the same story. Perhaps we’re just seeing a slow release of trial balloons.

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by | 1 February 2004 · 8:08 pm

The German Pacific "Gutpela Taim Bipo"

Germany acquired its colonial empire in the Pacific beginning in the 1880s and lost it abruptly in 1914. Conventional wisdom usually assumes that one colonial administration was as bad as another and that colonial transitions usually made little difference to the indigenous population. However, the new military administrators who took over from the Germans in Micronesia, Samoa, and New Guinea ran so roughshod over their new territories that the inhabitants of all three regions soon began to look back on German times as the good old days–at least according to a meticulously researched revisionist history of that transition entitled The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the Influence of World War I, by Hermann Joseph Hiery (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1995).

While Germany’s African colonies were governed by aristocrats, often with the aid of sizable contingents of Schutztruppe (colonial troops), the farflung Pacific colonies were governed by administrators drawn from the middle class, with the aid of tiny police forces.

In New Guinea they replaced the “Perpetuum Bellum Melanesicum” with a Pax Germanica, which attracted more and more unpacified Melanesians. But they also generally let Melanesian villagers settle their own disputes in traditional ways, often by compensation for damages rather than by the trial and conviction of offenders before German courts. This was in marked contrast to the later Australian administration, under whom flogging, the pillory (“Field Punishment No. 1”), and public executions became not only far more common, but far more arbitrarily applied. The Australians also began to dispossess indigenous plantation owners and to impose new restrictions on native dress and education. (For instance, New Guineans were prohibited from speaking proper English and from wearing nonnative garments on the upper half of their bodies.)

In Micronesia, the laissez-faire attitude of the German administration gave way to the much more hands-on approach of the Japanese, who modernized the island economies with unprecedented force and speed. By 1921, the value of exports from Micronesia had already exceeded the value of imports. (And by 1940, the population of Micronesia was over 50% of foreign origin.) The islanders were forced to assimilate to Japanese norms in every respect.

Perhaps the most incompetent new administrator, however, was Col. Robert Logan, New Zealand’s military governor of German Samoa. Whereas Wilhelmine Germany and oligarchical Samoa had shared basic values about social hierarchies and ritual forms of behavior, “the Samoans perceived the ‘democratically’ undifferentiated behavior of New Zealanders as an insult and expression of open disregard for Samoan mores” (p. 250). During the war years, New Zealand bled dry the Samoan treasury, and the fiercely anti-Chinese and anti-American Logan also issued discriminatory edicts against their representatives in Samoa. Worst of all, Logan allowed an influenza-infected ship from New Zealand, the Talune, to dock in 1918, then stubbornly refused either to implement strict quarantines, as the American administrator had done in eastern Samoa, or to accept American medical aid. “Rarely would anti-American prejudice have more disastrous consequences than in Samoa under New Zealand occupation” (p. 174). As a result, about 20% of the population of western Samoa died, while eastern (American) Samoa escaped virtually unscathed. (New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark issued an apology to Samoa in 2002.)

Among the many other gems Hiery’s archival research unearths is a dispirited quote from Woodrow Wilson recorded in the minutes of a meeting at Versailles on 28 January 1919: “the question of deciding the disposal of the German colonies was not vital to the world in any respect.” He seems to have anticipated by exactly half a century Henry Kissinger’s alleged comment about Micronesia in 1969: “There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?”

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by | 17 January 2004 · 9:35 pm

Asian Acronyms: Did you teach at GWYX or at Guangwai?

Discriminating linguists sometimes distinguish between acronyms pronounced as if they were a word, like NATO and UNICEF; and initialisms pronounced as a series of letters, like IBM or the UN. This distinction breaks down in orthographies that write whole syllables at a time, like Chinese.

In Chinese, for instance, acronyms are composed of the initial syllabic characters of (usually) two-syllable words. So, Peking (= Beijing) University, or Beijing Daxue [lit. ‘NorthCapital BigSchool’] becomes Beida [lit. ‘NorthBig’]. In Korean, Korea University, or Koryo Taehak [lit. ‘HighBeautiful BigSchool’] becomes Kodae [lit. ‘HighBig’]. In Japanese, it’s a bit more complicated. Chinese characters can be pronounced not just in their Chinese loan forms, but as native Japanese words that mean (more or less) the same thing. This is what makes Japanese far and away the most complex, least efficient writing system on earth. In either case, each character is usually pronounced as two syllables, since Japanese had to add final vowels to one-syllable Chinese roots in order to pronounce any final consonants, most of which have been lost in modern Mandarin Chinese. (The same thing happens to current Japanese borrowings from English: ranchi < lunch, setto < set, beisubouru < baseball, and so on.) So the acronym for Hiroshima University, or Hiroshima Daigaku [lit. ‘WideIsland BigSchool’] becomes HiroDai [lit. ‘WideBig’]. The name Hiroshima is native Japanese (the Sino-Japanese pronunciation would be Koutou = Ch. Guangdao), but Daigaku is Sino-Japanese [= Ch. Daxue].

After China adopted the supplementary Latin-based alphabetic pinyin writing system, which is increasingly used in computer input, you could begin to see alphabetic abbreviations, some of them rather alarming and most of them quite unpronounceable. Very few Chinese syllables start with vowels: a- is not uncommon, but e- and o- are rare, and i- and u- are nonexistent. Even worse, initial q-, x-, y-, and z- are way too common.

So, if you were to take the first pinyin letter of each syllable, Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute would be abbreviated GZWGYYXY < GuangZhou WaiGuo YuYan XueYuan [lit. ‘WideState OutCountry SpeechTalk LearnYard’]. You would do better to take the first letter of each two-syllable word rather than the first letter of every single syllable, in which case the same school would end up as GWYX < Guangzhou Waiguo Yuyan Xueyuan [lit. ‘Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute’]. However, most Chinese acronyms are more economical than that. The common name for this particular school was equivalent to “GuangFor” (Guangzhou Foreign), namely, GuangWai [lit. ‘WideOut’]. (It has now merged into GDUFS, the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, which would still qualify for the acronym GuangWai in Chinese. The unfortunate English acronym must certainly be guh-doofs.)

These syllabic acronyms aren’t unique to Chinese. Indonesian (or Malay) uses a Latin-based alphabetic writing system, but is chock full of syllabic as well as alphabetic acronyms (and initialisms). Acronyms seem to proliferate under big bureaucracies–especially if the military has a free hand. Examples of syllabic acronyms in Indonesian include the names of provinces like Sulsel < Sulawesi Selatan [‘south’], Sulut < Sulawesi Utara [‘north’], and Sulteng < Sulawesi Tengah [‘central’] on the island of Sulawesi (Celebes); schools like UnHas < Universitas Hasanuddin in Sulawesi and UnPatti < Universitas Pattimura in Maluku (Molucca); and terms like tapol < tahanan politik [‘political prisoner’].

UPDATE: Like Japanese and Korean, Vietnamese used to be written in Chinese characters and has lots of Chinese loanwords. Judging from the website of Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnamese seem to abbreviate by taking the first letter of each separately written syllable. Thus, (ignoring diacritics) Dai hoc Quoc gia Thanh pho Ho Chi Minh [lit. ‘University National City Ho Chi Minh’] is abbreviated DHQG-HCM. Ho Chi Minh City is also abbreviated TP.HCM, which I’m pretty sure is often pronounced Saigon. Otherwise, I don’t have a clue how these abbreviations are pronounced.

FURTHER UPDATE: Korean usage of taehak seems to be diverging from that of its cognates in Japanese (daigaku) and Chinese (daxue). While each term applies to a variety of institutions of tertiary education, Korean now distinguishes between taehak ‘college’ and taehakkyo ‘university’ very much long the lines of American usage. Taehakkyo indicates a larger institution that offers graduate education. So Kodae now stands for Koryo Taehakkyo, as the Chinese characters and Korean title on their homepage shows. I don’t think the cognate forms, Jp. daigakkou and Ch. daxuexiao, even exist, much less serve a similar function.

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