The final exam is now available. Not to muck up your Thanksgiving vacations too much, but you should look at it sooner rather than later: there’s a lot of work there.
Month: November 2008
Yakuza sued for creating nuisance
The New York Times is reporting on tensions between the Dojinkai and the civilians living in the neighborhood of their headquarters. Two features of this are worth noting in the context of the Samurai course. First, the Yakuza are widely acknowledged to be one of the last, greatest bastions of feudal samurai concepts of honor and the utility of violence; comparing the modern yakuza to medieval samurai is shockingly fruitful. Second, the social order represented by the neighborhood association is a modern incarnation of the horizontal alliances described by Berry in The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto, the ikki as described by Ikegami, and the goningumi of the great Tokugawa order.
Even the appeal to law, civil authorities, is quite traditional: though the Japanese are considered “non-litigious” it’s really not true of the present or the past. In the present, a lot of disputes are dealt with through arbitration systems that aren’t that different from small-claims courts. In the past, of course, the petition to authority and the lawsuit were common enough to be one of our best historical sources. [crossposted to Frog in A Well: Japan]
Reminder: upcoming readings
We had a small group today, but I can’t push the readings back too much at this point in the semester, so we went ahead and had the Chushingura discussion. As noted on the schedule, the discussion Thursday will focus on Ikegami chapters 14 and 15. If you have any questions about Chushingura or Ikegami 10-12, feel free to bring them up.
Shifting Topics, and some fun
Due in part to the difficulties with the reserve reading (there are more copies available at the History Department main desk now), we’ve pushed some of our discussions back. We will be discussing Chushingura on Tuesday, as well as the Ikegami chapters related to it (10, 11, 12). You can find the handout study guide to Chushingura here.
On a lighter note, Samurai swords can be dangerous, especially if you buy them from TV shopping channels.
Next Essay Assignments up
Here are the topics for the third set of essays
Library Call
Would the person who’s checked out and kept the reserves copy of McCullough’s Genji and Heike please return it immediately? In addition to the library fines, you’re keeping your colleagues from getting their work done!
Update: I have a few photocopies of the assigned chapters, which I’ll leave at the History Department Front Desk for borrowing.
Human Interest: Halloween in Japan?
Japan has been taking on some of the Western holidays as fun traditions — Valentine’s Day and Christmas being the obvious ones — and there’s now some movement on Halloween, as well. (Link Fixed!)