Waseda 2000

A report on The First International Conference on Chinese History
14-17 September 2000 / Waseda University, Tôkyô, Japan

[This impressionistic summary was shared with the WSW E-mail list on 2 October 2000, as an informal report of an important event, which in turn was part of a perhaps even more important initiative. It is reprinted here substantially in its original form. For Bruce's talk on that occasion, see the Competing Systems pages in the Lectures section]

General

This is not the moment to try to summarize in detail any of the papers at the First International Conference on Chinese History held at Waseda University on 14-17 Sept 2000. The present casual notes may be amusing for those who haven't encountered the milieu.

My thanks herewith, by copy of this note, to Kondô Kazunari of Waseda, who handled many of the conference arrangements, and not only gave it shape as a plenary session introducer and summarizer, but continually adjusted small details arising from the inexperience of the foreign visitors.

Connecting

The train from Narita airport to the general vicinity of the Conference hotel hummed on through increasing neon as countryside faded into towns and evening darkened. There were people nodding off to sleep on all sides of me. It was the effort culture, and I felt right at home in it.

Yen Hwei

Tôkyô is not a city, but (as many before have pointed out) a highly ramified village. Newcomers are likely to be surprised by the way the halls of Waseda University not only adjoin, but are brick to stone continuous with, the neighborhood shops (typical frontage: 15 feet) which crowd the side street, and the avenue corner, and most of all the little lanes jutting off at a sharp angle as one walks from the hotel to the conference center (part of the library complex). For such lanes, as memories of earlier decades, I have a certain kimochi. I think that we must imagine Yen Hwei as living, not in the Lu countryside, but right in the crowded Lu capital, not far - say, 500 yards - from the audience halls of the mighty, but completely out of sight of them, and environed by noodle aromas and pachinko chings. His concentration under those circumstances of impingement becomes all the more notable.

Plenary Session

I have earlier defined an academic as someone who talks for 50 minutes when their button is pushed. From recent information, that figure may need to be revised upward, especially when the academic is standing rather than sitting, emphasized by spotlights, and partnered by a giant bouquet. The current estimated figure is 75.

Dvng Yi-nan of Beida matched me in courage by joining me in the front row of the auditorium balcony (the nondignitary area). She surpassed me in observation by remarking to me that, of four westerners on the program, I was the only male.

Reception Afterward

Such a collective ignoring of speakers you never saw. The only ones even pretending to listen were the four Westerners, who had evidently read the paragraph on politeness in the guidebook. But the opportunity for free conversation with one's fellow conferees was undeniably useful, and finally, forsaking courtesy for utility, I had (inter alia) an interesting chat with Lin Chaomin of Ywnnan U, who has undertaken to send me his paper on the Shu/Sindh Route in early times. And the speakers droned on.

First Day Sessions

The interpreters between Japanese and Chinese (at least the two I met) were Chinese grad students studying at Japanese universities. And a fine job they made of it, except when they got stuck on highly technical vocabulary. The only thing that jarred on me was the handling of names, and for this I really want a new convention. I hold that the correct translation of Hirase-sensei is Hirase-syenshvng. "Ping-shr Syenshvng" just doesn't do it for me.

Hirase Takao [sic] himself is a young man: slim, intense, and evidently active. He has his own institute at Todai (the Shiryô Hihan Kenkyû Kai, roughly Source Criticism Project), which since 1998 has published proceedings containing his work and that of some of his students. His chronological tables for SA and WS periods are in two numbers of that publication (Shiryô Hihan Kenkyû). He is an associate of the Tôyô Bunko and a member of the Tôdai Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies. Whether through a previous contact with Joachim Gentz or otherwise, he had heard of our little group, and presented me with a list of questions (thoughtfully, in English), which I will dealing with gradually in the days to come.

The Textual Crux

It was obvious through the two days of Papers Sessions, in the Yin, Jou, Chin, and Han column of the schedule, that the Dzwo Jwan is the pivotal text for all interpretation touching on our period; for better or worse, it occupies the same sort of crux position that the Sung Rhyme Tables do for our phonology. Among the points for which its proper construal is crucial (as we have earlier noted in our own discussions) is the question of continuity from Shang to Warring States (the subject of Ping-shr sensei's conference paper). Further, and interestingly, it is now not seen as sufficient for DJ partisans to validate their text; they also recognize a need to disvalidate the Chun/Chyou. Is word of Taeko's lucubrations leaking out? There is also our nagging about the Gwo Yw, and Ping-shr sensei dropped the hint that he regards Gwo Yw as a two-layered text. On that I hope to learn more in later days, when I am able to do some reading in the Project library, now augmented, through the author's kindness, with copies of his publications.

The trend among both the Japanese and the Chinese contingents, not surprisingly, was solidly credulous toward the DJ, and toward the whole complex of ideas for whose pre-WS date the DJ is the only evidence. It thus seemed noteworthy that Watanabe Shinichirô (Kyôto Furitsu) openly treated tyen-sya as a WS concept, notwithstanding the fact that it is sprinkled through the DJ (and thus, to the credulous, through the Spring and Autumn centuries), to say nothing of the Shu. That paper, and for that matter one on centralization and population growth by Ge Jianxiong (Director, the Fudan Institute of Historical Geography), is or was recently available on the Conference website, to which a link will be found on the Project's' China Links page.

Jianxiong had remarked to me earlier that the only passage he knows in either WS or Han texts which directly mentions population pressure [as a source of public unrest] is the one in HFZ 49. He was of opinion that this could not be of Han date, since the wars of unification must have severely depressed the population. But this will only cover only the first generation or so of Han. I would think that by c0150, which is where by intercalation we date that chapter (see Prospects 17-30), any major population dip had had plenty of room to be made good, and prosperity might again have been pressing on the supply side. There was no time to go into this, since as usual my starting point textually is different from most other people's; maybe later.

Second Day Sessions

The sessions on the second day, devoted to economic history, on the whole drew larger crowds, socioeconomics being an established Japanese specialty. Satake Yasuhiko, who has for some years been working on the Mencian wellfield, gave me reprints of some of his more recent articles. His handout for the conference session had some very nice aerial photos of land use patterns, most of them as it happens inclining toward the strip rather than the square. This material too deserves a leisurely look. I had earlier confessed to the author that I am something of a skeptic on the Mencian wellfield. For me, the wellfield idea occurs late in the evolution of Mencian economics (see the forthcoming Singapore Mencius Conference paper), and is thus, in the Mencius, a proposal rather than a recollection. That some lines in the Shr seem to support the Mencian proposal in general terms merely suggests, to me, that some of the Shr are late too, and make their own direct contribution to the contemporary Warring States theory wars.

Tsûyaku

The interpreters were becoming weary toward the end of their second day of hard use, and one of them got a general laugh, not least from herself, by inadvertently slipping into the source language rather than (as it is called) the target language.

Slow readers of Japanese prose have noticed, often with despair, how a sentence seemingly nearing its end can gain new life by pivoting on an adversative subordinating paricle, and then taking off in a different direction. It was thus linguistically interesting to me that both speaker and translator, at one session, implicitly agreed to regard " . . . desu ga" as a full stop, at which the speaker pauses and the interpreter begins. I don't know what Chomsky would make of this.

Exhibit

The library had a special calligraphy display in its exhibit room, among other trophies being a scroll-mounted letter by Sun Wvn, which I was told I must not miss. I didn't miss it, nor did I miss the one by Kang Youwei, but I must admit that I was more impressed in a strictly calligraphic sense by a framed piece on the wall, apparently part of the room decor rather than of the exhibit, a large and robust 4-character motto (bai-nyen shu rvn) written some decades ago by Sha [sand] Mvnghai. Can any of our artists fill me in about this person?

Closing Plenary Session

Ge Jianxiong appeared as a summary speaker, and did a splendid job of it; I would have to go back to the Russian delegate at the ICANAS 36 closing plenary session for a worthy comparison. Questions were entertained from the audience after the section summaries. Most of them seemed to be in the nature of comments, sometimes protracted. I offered a tiny comment of my own, inspired by the Sung/Ywaen summary. It was to the effect that the pattern of Sung government as there reported reminded me very much of the Chi/Lu governments during the 07th through 04c centuries, in that both seemed to be proactive in some areas (war, agriculture) and only reactive in others (economics), and that this continuity of governmental style seems to survive what can only be a discontinuity of governmental system. It might then be useful to note the logic of departures from this pattern, in states sufficiently evidenced to be studiable. No?

Tour

The post-final day deserved the term mushi-atsui; I was reminded that a suitably calligraphed fan ought to have been in my travel kit. We were shown the Seikadô, a Meiji Victorian residence that could be transported, complete with its circular gravel drive in front, to some Belmont MA hilltop without turning a hair (the gigantic tomb of the former owner, situated beyond a grove, was another matter entirely). Samples from the mansion's collection of rare texts were spread out for us. One item which stirred my phonological reflexes was a Gwang Ywn (titled Tang Ywn) of Sung date. That afternoon it was the turn of the Tôyô Bunko, an entirely western bit of architecture, where we got a short history of the institution (whose core collection, the Morrison library, had also been western), and a tour of the actual stacks, complete with climate control and other engines of watchfulness. The stacks are so many warrens, the subcollections being preserved intact rather than integrated in subject order (which is what would happen if I had charge of the place over a weekend), but they are rich warrens indeed. There are surely worse places to be marooned in. All one would need is a pencil, and a certain length of years. And maybe a ball of twine, so as to find one's way back at sunset of each day.

Return

On the train back to Narita, I had the experience of seeing the previous towns in reverse and in daylight, when they have another guise altogether. I passed by names (such as Takasago) known to my antiquarian self as nô plays rather than as station platforms. Can anyone tell me, what is the tree with reddish purple flowers that transcends courtyard walls and frames doorways, thereabouts, at this time of year?

 

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