[clay dube]

Jessica's source is right. The Koreans developed printing using moveable type ahead of everyone else. The Korean Cultural Center on Wilshire has a nice display on this.

So now a question -- why did the Koreans and other East Asians not make extensive use of moveable type? Instead, most printing was of the carved block variety until relatively recently. Why was it such an amazing breakthrough for Europe when Gutenburg figures it out? [Think about the languages themselves....]

smiling,
clay

[clay dube]

Hi Mehgan and Everyone,

You have a good ear! Throughout East Asia (and I think in SE Asia as well), the norm is to respond to any compliment with "Who, me?" or the equivalent. One says, what is your honorable name (in Chinese, Nin gui xing?)? And in earlier times one responded with, my humble name is.... In contemporary China, people still ask for your honorable name, but most respond without the humble part. Still, when someone says "you do XX well," one responds with "where? how?" in an incredulous tone. The multicourse meal is introduced with "I'm sorry for this poor food, we didn't have time...." One's spouse and children get similar intros. As Mehgan noted, "this is my stupid kid"....

A couple of points:

1. In 21st century American English we sometimes engage in this as well. "Here's a small token of our appreciation..." (and the envelope may have a nice check in it!) "Nice outfit!" - "This? Everything else was dirty!" [Please note that one won't find this present in advertising or politics!]

2. Some Chinese norms of exchange have changed over the 7 decades since Pearl Buck wrote of Wang Long. And the impact of the me-centered one child family generation has only begun to be felt. More changes are coming. Still, the expectation is that the civilized person, the cultured person takes modesty to be an important virtue. And, of course, among friends this sort of polite ritual was and is largely ignored. Teasing and taunting are common among schoolmates and friends.

Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism all value humility. Confucianism probably predates the others and due to its stress on internalizing the values conveyed through ritual (including simple rituals such as greetings) affirmed the group-centeredness and hierarchical consciousness already present in (what we now call) China. And Confucius, while a bit boastful at times, always said something such as "Walking with two other people, I am certain to be able to learn something important from at least one of them." (Every person had the capacity to teach the Sage! Or, perhaps it is still a bit of a boast -- "I'm such a sharp student I can learn from anyone!")

And it isn't just that humility is valued. There's also a cautionary note about the bad things that may come to those who put themselves first. What do you think Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans mean when they repeat a variation of "The tallest tree attracts the wind" or "A nail that sticks out gets hammered down"?

smiling,
clay

PS Thanks for sending the photo (or the web address) to your friends. I'm rather fond of the group shot on the last photo page myself. I love all the smiles -- you weren't all laughing at my shortcomings as a photographer were you?

Please do spread the word about any of the resources on our site that you find useful.

[clay dube]

Hi Folks --

The projects are filling my inbox. I'm taking many with me to review on the plane this week (symposium on Asia in the curriculum meeting in KY) and should be able to start providing feedback when I return next week. In the interim, perhaps those of you who feel comfortable doing so could share your handiwork with your colleagues right here?

A couple have posted pages on school websites, on pages hosted by their ISPs, and so on. Others have sent me essays or lesson plans as Word docs. Please post the urls and attach your files here and benefit from the comments of your colleagues.

smiling,
clay

[clay dube]

The transcript from our forum on the North Korean Nuclear Challenge along with propaganda posters and a crisis chronology are available at:

http://international.ucla.edu/asia/article.asp?parentid=3407

I think the posters are quite interesting and could be paired with bellicose statements from the US.

smiling,
clay

[clay dube]

here's dk3

[clay dube]

Hi Paulette and Everyone,

What I should have written is that I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't put a link to the presentation on any webpage. If you were to do so, Google or some other search engine would "spyder" through it and then the whole site would be available to the Googling world, including lawyers who would soon be sending me thick packets via registered mail.

Feel free to view it yourself, to show it to your students, or to write the address on the board for them to copy down and view in the lab or at home. You may also wish to save it to your own hard drive so that you can use it whenever you choose. (For Windows users, the WHHT program is wonderful for copying a site to your own disk for use in classrooms not wired to the net or for you to create a cd-rom that you give students to use for research. It is a great way to limit what your students have access to while on a classroom computer. Download WHHT or other such software for free from http://www.download.com.)

There are two versions of the presentation online. The better version is the one geared towards Internet Explorer users (you can thank Microsoft for this "feature" of Powerpoint designed sites). Get to it at: http://international.ucla.edu/asia/nk/dk/dividedkorea.htm
For Netscape or Mozilla users, head to http://international.ucla.edu/asia/nk/opendk/dividedkorea1.htm.

Please let me know what you think. A couple things that I've left out are the 1960 coup, the 1979 assassination and coup, the 1980 Kwangju incident, and the conviction of presidents Chun and Roh.... It might help contextualize the emotions on the peninsula to include images of the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

smiling,
clay

[clay dube]

And the second of the three files.

[clay dube]

Here is the first of the three powerpoint files.

[clay dube]

Here is the third part of the presentation. Unfortunately, the forum cannot currently accept .swf and .html attachments. Send me an email and I'll forward you copies of the Joint Security Area flash animation. You can also download them from the last page of the web presentation. Scroll down to slide 75 (the frame on the left side of the screen) to get there.

[clay dube]

Here is the second part of the presentation. [Edit by="Clay Dube on Sep 2, 4:47:00 PM"][/Edit]

[clay dube]

I've attached the first file, dk1.ppt. If you have Powerpoint, you can open and view it, if not, please view the web version of the presentation. Click here to see the web version of the presentation.

[clay dube]

Hi Folks,

This is an updated version of the presentation I offered on the first day of the workshop. Because of its overall size (6 mb) I have had to divide it into five parts. Those of you who have Powerpoint can easily stitch the 3 parts of the presentation together (open dk1.ppt, then dk2.ppt and dk3.ppt, go to the last slide of dk1 and then copy and paste all the slides from dk2 and dk3 into dk1). The flash animated advertisement for Joint Security Area will run as long as you copy the .htm and .swf files into the same folder as where you put the divided korea presentation.

If all this sounds too complicated, just click on Divided Korea and you'll see a web version of the presentation.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The web version is for the use of you (and perhaps your students) only. Please do not put a link to it on the web. There are no public links to it.

The files are:
dk1.ppt
dk2.ppt
dk3.ppt
jsa.html
intro.swf

Only the first three files are needed for the presentation. Be patient as they download. Each is quite large.

Please let me know if you find the presentation useful.

smiling,
clay

[clay dube]

Hi Folks,

Jessica's right about the usefulness of http://www.st.rim.or.jp/~cycle/MyKEIZE.HTML for teaching about Japanese myths.

One thing to keep in mind about recommending sites that you find via about.com is that you can provide the actual URL which is shorter and cleaner than the one you get via about.com. How can one do this? Simply look at the upper left of the window and click on the "turn off this top frame" link.

Compare:
http://ancienthistory.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.st.rim.or.jp%2F%7Ecycle%2FMyKEIZE.HTML

with

http://www.st.rim.or.jp/~cycle/MyKEIZE.HTML

And there's another benefit as well -- you won't subject your colleagues and friends to about.com pop-up windows.

smiling,
clay

[clay dube]

Thanks, Jason, for encouraging readers to take a look at the transcript of the forum we put together back in March. We managed to bring together a distinguished panel of speakers representing many points of view on the challenge.

Prof. Moon advised the previous administration (Kim Dae-jung's) and is an influential advisor to the current SK gov't. He used to teach in the US but now teaches at Yonsei University (Seoul).

Prof. Cha is a well known commentator and the co-author of a book on NK nuclear development efforts and US policy options. He's a Korea specialist at Georgetown.

Prof. Shirk is a former deputy sec. of state and heads the Univ. of California global conflict research program. She's a China specialist teaching at UCSD.

Prof. Morse is a former Defense and Energy dept. staffer and a widely-read commentator on NE Asia (incidentally, he's currently doing a lot of work on the Japanese digital entertainment industry, please see http://www.international.ucla.edu/asia/article.asp?parentid=2931 for more on that). He holds the Terasaki Chair in US-Japan relations at UCLA.

Prof. Duncan is a historian of Korea and heads our Center for Korean Studies. The US gov't sent him as a soldier to Korea. He eventually earned his BA at Korea University. He writes a biweekly column on current affairs for a Korean newspaper.

UCLA Chancellor Carnesale is the former head of the Kennedy School of Gov't at Harvard. He is an expert on nuclear weapons and on arms control.

Prof. C.H. Lee heads Claremont McKenna's int'l and gov't studies program and has written extensively on Korean politics.

Prof. N.H. Lee is a historian specializing in student movements in Korea. She teaches at UCLA.

Dr. Levin is a Korea specialist at RAND Corporation and has written extensively on popular opinion in South Korea.

Dr. Gilinsky is a physicist and a former staffer for several nuclear-related agencies including the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Rather than a few minutes of sound bites, this three hour forum permitted speakers to map out their ideas and to respond to each others observations. The website includes links to some of the published works of these speakers.

Please visit: http://international.ucla.edu/asia/article.asp?parentid=3407.

smiling,
clay

[clay dube]

Lou originally saved this as an html file -- which can't be attached. I've converted it to a .doc file which most word processors can open. Please click on the icon below to open and read her annotations.

smiling,
clay

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