A copy of the 1891 Tourist’s Guide and Interpreter – Being a Comprehensive Guide to all the Interesting Places to Visit…to which is added General Information for Travellers in Japan published in Yokohama by Kelly & Walsh. The book included a folding map of Kobe, 29 colour plates of Tokyo, Mount Fuki, Nikko, Osaka, Nara, Lake Biwa etc , a folding map), numerous period adverts. This copy was the property of Henrietta Tayler (1869-1951), a Scottish scholar of the Jacobite period and WWI nurse.
In putting extraterritoriality into practice in the treaty ports, the British state did not simply withdraw rights from the Chinese state; it inhabited the space made by extraterritoriality by building institutions and engaging in practices which had consequences for the development of the treaty ports, and which need to be at the forefront of any attempt to understand colonialism in China. Through a focus both on the creation of law and institutions, and also on the management of British ‘problem populations’ – violent Europeans and ‘martial’ Indians – this book provides a revision of the history of empire and colonialism in China, explaining important features which have to date been glossed over in studies of other aspects of treaty port colonialism. Colonialism in China casts a long shadow, but key aspects of the British state’s central role in this history have before now been little understood.
A choice memory from the memoirs of the Netherlands Ambassador to China – who first went to Peking in 1894 at just 19 years of age – Willem Jacobus Oudendijk’s Ways and By Ways in Diplomacy (1939).
Here Oudendijk is recalling the Legation Quarter just before the Boxer Uprising raised it mostly to the ground. It was a less protected, less enclosed space then than after 1900. The Spanish Legation was just to the south of the Japanese Embassy on Canal Street (Zhengyi Road) by the corner with Legation Street (Dongjiaomin Xiang). It’s hard to imagine such pratices occuring after the rebuilding of the Legation Quarter, and certainly not now in what is a heavily policed and surveilled, often quite desolate area. But Oudendijk here gives us a nice vignette of an early, more raw, Legation district in the late nineteenth century.
Eve J. Chung is a Taiwanese American human rights lawyer focusing on gender equality and women’s rights. Daughters of Shandong is published by Penguin….
In 1948, civil war ravages the Chinese countryside, but in rural Shandong, the wealthy, landowning Angs are more concerned with their lack of an heir. Hai is the eldest of four girls and spends her days looking after her sisters. Headstrong Di, who is just a year younger, learns to hide in plain sight, and their mother—abused by the family for failing to birth a boy—finds her own small acts of rebellion in the kitchen. As the Communist army closes in on their town, the rest of the prosperous household flees, leaving behind the girls and their mother because they view them as useless mouths to feed.
Without an Ang male to punish, the land-seizing cadres choose Hai, as the eldest child, to stand trial for her family’s crimes. She barely survives their brutality. Realizing the worst is yet to come, the women plan their escape. Starving and penniless but resourceful, they forge travel permits and embark on a thousand-mile journey to confront the family that abandoned them.
From the countryside to the bustling city of Qingdao, and onward to British Hong Kong and eventually Taiwan, they witness the changing tide of a nation and the plight of multitudes caught in the wake of revolution. But with the loss of their home and the life they’ve known also comes new freedom—to take hold of their fate, to shake free of the bonds of their gender, and to claim their own story.
Bill Lascher on A Danger Shared: the photography of Melville Jacoby (available from Blacksmith Books) at Long Brothers Fine & Rare Books, Seattle, June 26 at at 7:30 p.m.
Explore never-before-published photographs of World War II-era China, Vietnam, and beyond captured by American foreign correspondent Melville Jacoby. Author Bill Lascher will discuss his new book, A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War, which features hundreds of previously-unseen images Jacoby captured as he bore witness to an oft-neglected, transformative, and cataclysmic conflict that engulfed Asia after China and Japan went to war. Lascher will also share one-of-a-kind documents and artifacts from Jacoby’s five years as an exchange student in Guangzhou, as a freelance reporter in Shanghai, Chungking and Hanoi, and, finally, as the Manila-based “Far East” bureau chief for Time Inc. who witnessed the first dramatic months of war between Japan and the U.S. The event will also revisit Jacoby’s daring escape from the Philippines capital with his new wife and fellow journalist, Annalee Jacoby, which began minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1941 as the pair leapt from a burning Manila waterfront to begin the adventure described in Lascher’s critically-acclaimed 2016 book, Eve of a Hundred Midnights: The Star-Crossed Love Story of Two WWII Correspondents and Their Epic Escape Across The Pacific.
Jacoby’s photographs — which Lascher curated, digitized, and contextualized for A Danger Shared — and Lascher’s accompanying writing together connect present-day readers with the pivotal yet often overlooked subject of the war’s devastating impact on Asia as well as the broader ramifications of the conflict between China and Japan still felt today.
Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 3:30 AM – 4:30 AM (your local time)
With more than 150,000 Japanese restaurants around the world, Japanese cuisine has become truly global. Through the transnational culinary mobilities of migrant entrepreneurs, workers, ideas and capital, Japanese cuisine spread and adapted to international tastes. But this expansion is also entangled in culinary politics, ranging from authenticity claims and status competition among restaurateurs and consumers to societal racism, immigration policies, and soft power politics that have shaped the transmission and transformation of Japanese cuisine. Such politics has involved appropriation, oppression, but also cooperation across ethnic lines. Ultimately, the restaurant is a continually reinvented imaginary of Japan represented in concrete form to consumers by restaurateurs, cooks, and servers of varied nationalities and ethnicities who act as cultural intermediaries.
The Global Japanese Restaurant: Mobilities, Imaginaries, and Politics uses an innovative global perspective and rich ethnographic data on six continents to fashion a comprehensive account of the creation and reception of the “global Japanese restaurant” in the modern world. Drawing heavily on untapped primary sources in multiple languages, this book centers on the stories of Japanese migrants in the first half of the twentieth century, and then on non-Japanese chefs and restaurateurs from Asia, Africa, Europe, Australasia, and the Americas whose mobilities, since the mid-1900s, who have been reshaping and spreading Japanese cuisine. The narrative covers a century and a half of transnational mobilities, global imaginaries, and culinary politics at different scales. It shifts the spotlight of Japanese culinary globalization from the “West” to refocus the story on Japan’s East Asian neighbors and highlights the growing role of non-Japanese actors (chefs, restaurateurs, suppliers, corporations, service staff) since the 1980s. These essays explore restaurants as social spaces, creating a readable and compelling history that makes original contributions to Japan studies, food studies, and global studies. The transdisciplinary framework will be a pioneering model for combining fieldwork and archival research to analyze the complexities of culinary globalization.
Austin Coates’ 1976 City of Broken Promises– The city is Macao, the Portuguese settlement on the China Coast, as it was more than 200 years ago. The promises are those made by Englishmen to marry their Macao mistresses, only to leave them abandoned and their children bastards. Martha Merop and her English lover are unique in this period. He, son of the founder of Lloyd’s and cousin of the philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, was one of the first merchants to oppose the trade in opium. She, Chinese, abandoned at birth and sold into prostitution at the age of thirteen, became an international trader in her own right, the richest woman on the China Coast and Macao’s greatest public benefactress. Coates’s novel is based on oral tradition handed down through generations in Macao, and on documents that survive about them in Macao, Lisbon and London.
Only very late in 1941 the Fruchter family fled from Vienna via Berlin, occupied Poland, the Soviet Union and Manchukuo to Shanghai shaken by war and colonial conflicts. By then, the city had already received around 18,000 mostly Jewish Nazi refugees, including an above-average number of musicians. Despite all the hardships, the Shanghai music life offered a wide range of fields of activity. Paula Fruchter (1896-1983; speaker teacher, pianist), her husband Josef (1900-1976; singer, vocal teacher, cantor) and her daughter Frieda (1933-2020) arranged themselves. He made a name for himself accompanied by his wife as a concert singer and later as a cantor. Privately and at the Shanghai Conservatory, they gave vocal lessons together. In 1949 they emigrated to Israel, but soon returned to Vienna. There, Josef Fruchter became choral singer of the cult community and the Vienna State Opera. Music historically remarkable is that the Fruchters regularly sent letters to their family and friends in Vienna between 1941 and 1949. Unlike concert programs and critics, they reflect social history aspects of music life in the extreme situation of Shanghai, they integrate emotional sensitivities, private views and everyday moments – directed to addressees in Vienna, who lived in fear of persecution, deportation and war. Correspondence from Shanghai, where exile specific communication can be shown, is rare. The present edition makes the letters of the Fruchters accessible for the first time. Edited by the music historian Sophie Fetthauer with critical view, including aspects of censorship and self-censorship, as well as arranged biographically and contemporary historically, they represent an important everyday and social history document on music life in exile.
