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.
A silver beaker presented to A F B Carpenter, by the agent and crew of the Steam Launch Tung Li, for rescuing them from destruction in the typhoon at Hong Kong November 1900. The storm was known as the Geng-Zi typhoon disaster, due to 1900 being known as the “Geng-Zi” year. The storm dissipated late on November 10 over southern China. A rare November typhoon, the storm produced severe waves that damaged and sank 270 boats in Hong Kong’s harbor, including a British gunboat and a dredge.
A photo of perhaps the most influential men in the Peking Legation Quarter in 1929 – here gathered on the steps of the Legation of the Netherlands…
Left to right – Sir Miles Lampson (UK), the Count de Martel (France, and also co author of the fantastically gossipy Silhouettes of Peking), Willems Jacobus Oudendijk (Holland), John Van Antwerp MacMurray (who was about to resign over a dispute regarding the KMT with the State Department in Washington) and Daniele Vare (Italy and the author of course of The Maker of Heavenly Trousers and other great Peking-set novels)…
