The second season of the reboot of Perry Mason is now doing the rounds. It’s much tighter and more focussed than the first and really very good. Lots of good sub themes of the time – Hoovervilles, segregated housing, underground lesbian bars, gay blackmail, gauging grocers, gambling ships. One interesting aspect of season two was the recurring warnings of the impending Sino-Japanese War.
I don’t think an exact date for the events occuring in the plot are ever given but the internet tells me that one of the lead actors in the show, Perry Whigham told the press, “We’re in ’33 in Perry Mason,”. This makes sense as we have several references to Japanese agression towards China, a shot or two of a newspaper front page highlighting this and I assume that is the invasion and occupation of Manchuria.
We do see one of the baddies doing a business deal with the Japanese Ambassador Debuchi – Katsuji Debuchi was indeed Japanese Ambassador to the United States between 1928 and November 1933. We also see same baddie getting a bee sting treatment accompanied by Kikutaro Takahashi’s Sendo Kawaiya, a popular ryukoka (“popular song”) – though I think that song was first released in 1935.
Katsuji Debuchi (on the left) and businessman Yasuzaemon Matsunaga in America, 1929
And then we have the Los Angeles judge, in his chambers, feet up on the desk, reading Pearl S Buck’s The Good Earth – released in 1931 and a best seller which most curious readers of the time would have dipped into. The judge finds it a bit flowery… Anyway, a nice sub theme of events showing that, alongside the contiuing and grinding Depression in California, the rest of the world is heading to hell in a handbasket too in 1933! But the theme of tensions in China is also very much a homage to Perry Mason’s original creator Erle Stanley Gardner…
The Good Judge reads The Good Earth
Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) created the investigating lawyer Perry Mason. As well as being a professional attorney, enthusiastic wildlife photographer and constant traveller most people don’t know that he was also “fluent” in Chinese. After growing up in Massachusetts and Oregon the young Erle made a brief living arranging unlicensed wrestling matches before being admitted to the bar in 1911. Business was slow and to make ends meet he defended Chinese clients who didn’t have much money but did have a lot of friends. Volume rather than value defined his law practise. He claimed he picked up Chinese (though what version of Chinese and how much is not altogether clear) through his clients and when he turned to pulp fiction writing used a lot of stereotypical Chinese villains such as Soo Hoo Duck, The King of Chinatown. Gardner written stories in China without ever having visited the country. So, with some income from his fiction in 1931 Gardner and his wife made a six-month tour of the country.
David Martin, the Curator for the Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds, Washington spoke on Pictorialist Photography: Soichi Sunami and his Issei Contemporaries at the Daiwa Foundation in London last month. It was a great talk and is now up on youtube –
Japanese “Boxer Rebellion” War Medal created on 21 March 1901 for the members of the 5th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army and of the Japanese Imperial Navy who were part of the eight-nation alliance forces. The Japanese forces consisted of 20,300 soldiers, 540 marines and 18 warships. This is apparently now considered one of the rarest Japanese medals…
A simply question – did anyone ever live better in Peking’s hutongs than aesthete extrordinaire Harold Acton – with a beautiful courtyard home, amazing friends, celebrity visitors, his dogs…it’s hard to imagine. I wrote about Acton’s 1930s home on Kung Hsien Hutong in my colerction Destination Peking (Blacksmith Books)…but thought these photos from his Memoirs of an Aesthete(so clearly images Acton himself thought showed his home to best advantage) might seal the case…
Now called Gongjian Hutong, Kung Hsien Hutong remains in a relatively decent state of repair, including its many xiongs (or adjacent side alleys) running from Dianmen Street, north to south down the side of Beihai Park. It is close to the tourist attraction of Nanluoguxiang Hutong. Gongjian is an interesting hutong as it has a bend in the lane at either end, presumably to afford some additional privacy to the lane as well as prevent it becoming a wind tunnel.
An interesting little find in the London Library. Comte Carlo Sforza’s 1928 book L’Enigme Chinoise (The Chinese Enigma). And a small tale therein. Sforza was an Italian diplomat, head of the country’s foreign affairs ministry till Mussolini and then in exile till after the war as an anti-fascist. He was first in Peking as a consular attache in the early 1900s before returning as Italian ambassador from 1911 to 1915 where he both witnessed the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and then negotiated Italy’s concession in Tientsin (Tianjin). It seems that even as his career progressed back in Rome he retained an interest in China. More on his eventful life here.
This copy of his thoughts on China, published in 1928 in French, was gifted to the London Library in November 1946 by Lewis Einstein, an American diplomat and historian. I believe Srofza and Einstein knew each other from around 1908 when both were stationed in Constantinople during the Young Turk Revolution. More on Einstein here.
I’m hopeless with handwriting – and expect a reader here better – but Sforza inscribed the copy with a message to Einstrein: something like to a reader with Orient interests in common or something??
Book #20 on The China Project Ultimate China Bookshelf is the stylish, witty and ever-sophistcated L:in Yutang’s 1935 My Country and My People, a book that introduced China to so many western readers and in a time of mutual curiousity and friendship almost unimaginable now…click here.
By the way, Internet Archive has a downloadable version of the book (which has been out of print for some time now) for free – here.
In Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim excavates the transnational linkages between women of North Korea and a worldwide women’s movement. Women of Asia, especially those espousing communism, are often portrayed as victims or pawns of a patriarchal Confucian state. Kim undercuts this standard analysis through detailed archival work in the international women’s press, and finds that North Korean women asserted themselves in unexpected places from the late 1940s—just before the official beginning of the Korean War—to 1975, the year designated by the UN as International Women’s Year.
By centering North Korea and the “East,” Kim defies convention to offer an entirely new genealogy of the global women’s movement. Women of the Korean Democratic Women’s Union (KDWU), as part of the global left women’s movement led by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), insisted family and domestic issues must be part of both national and international debates, highlighting how race, nationality, sex, and class connect to form systems of colonial and capitalist exploitation. Their intersectional program claimed that there is “no peace without justice,” that “the personal is the political,” and that “women’s rights are human rights” many decades before activists of the West embraced such agendas. Among Women across Worlds is an archaeology of forgotten movements and ideas that became the foundation for those that have come to define our era.
“Fortune’s Bazaar – The Making of Hong Kong” is a re-drawing of the history of Hong Kong which takes it far beyond being a British colony, or just another Chinese city. Instead, this history connects Hong Kong into a network of Asian port cities, directly through the people who first settled around the deep-sea harbour and made a cosmopolitan community. These are the in-between people, those of mixed origins, mixed motives and mixed relationships. What started as a history of the Eurasians of Hong Kong grew into new definitions of human categories as well as new levels of crossover between diverse diasporic networks.
After years of research — in archives, attics, and interviews with descendants of some of Hong Kong’s first families — an inescapable conclusion is that without the Armenians, Parsis, Jews, Portuguese and above all the Eurasians, this place would not have worked. So real was this community of people from around the world that it was their sacrifice – of Eurasian soldiers during World War Two, of Portuguese, Chinese and other agents behind the lines, of Bohra traders protecting western bankers, Parsi women feeding all comers – that laid the groundwork for post-war Hong Kong.
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