[Denis Vovchenko]

Great resource! There is also an audio commentary when you click on the images

[Denis Vovchenko]

Great resource! There is also an audio commentary when you click on the images

[Denis Vovchenko]

I liked the Return of the Yokai episode - it is easy to use in a history class since it traces the ups and downs in the popularity of those Japanese mascots

[Denis Vovchenko]

I also chose to review the same film since it is the most famous and awarded Asian film. While the movie is very straightforward, I thought it did chart a new path of portraying the lower classes as morally inferior to the rich. In classic social dramas like "The Grapes of Wrath" or recent ones like "Avatar" and "Elysium" the rich are depicted as much more wicked than the poor.

[Denis Vovchenko]

Great points! I wonder what the original Korean title literally means and how successful "parasite" is as translation. I wonder what you make of the fact that both the employer and the Kim father dressed up as Native Americans in the end. I thought it was a way for the director to point to S. Korea's peripheral status in the US dominated global Cowboys and Indians game.

[Denis Vovchenko]

Jeffrey Hou’s piece illustrated the East Asian cases of “insurgent planning” as a popular counterweight to neoliberal governance worldwide (202). I think “subversive” planning is more appropriate. I love the concept but as a historian I expected in “INSURGENT URBANISM” something like barricades of the Paris Commune of 1870-71 or of the Moscow Uprising of 1905. Vin’s videos for tonight and Jeffrey Hou’s article on temporal urbanism for some reason don’t have a political dimension. Is there such urban revolutionary landscape mythology in East Asia?

Hou’s example of Tokyo’s business district serving as homeless shelter at nights reminded me of “Occupy Wallstreet” camps in many US cities and more recently of BLM protesters who occupied Seattle. Walking through one of them I thought they looked like a squatter settlement. Has something like “Occupy Wallstreet” been tried in contemporary East Asia with its recent socioeconomic crises going back to 1997? (P. 208 Tokyo (daily) “Protected from the elements, the covered space at the West Exit of the Shinjuku Station has also served as a refuge for the city’s homeless population whose number grew during the 1990s after the burst of the bubble economy.”)

Speaking of protests, did the example of humane and ecofriendly urban change come about as a result of social protest (Cheonggyeocheon River revitalization in Seoul etc)? Vin seems to imply that we should promote that kind of urban future not as groups of activists but as individuals contributing to a global shift of sensibilities, right?

 

 

[Denis Vovchenko]

One of Vin’s images in the first video rang a couple of bells with me – there was a lady riding a bike with a trailer loaded with folded cardboard. In our small town, there is no city-wide recycling so I take our recyclables including folded cardboard to a recycling station once a month or so. I also remembered Charles Dickens’ novels where the urban poor lived in such slums constantly rummaging the streets for usable middle class trash. If I am not mistaken, the junkman who ran such an old-clothes store in “Oliver Twist” was also secretly dealing in stolen stuff and forcing the orphans to bring not just usable rags but also rich men’s wallets and watches. So with that in mind, I am not too surprised that Western and later Asian governments increasingly monitored such areas that Vin romanticized. As Vin said, the challenge is to save heritage areas while cleaning them up. The middle ground is surely hard to find but I would rather visit the Whitechapel district in its present form with Jack the Ripper tours than the same spot in its original colorful organic shape of the late 1800s. That kind of comparison should grab students’ attention since much of Dickens’ is something familiar as part of popular culture (not to speak of Jack the Ripper movies etc). What do you think?

 

[Denis Vovchenko]

The material for today is very much connected to our discussion of Western imperialist influences last week. Jeffrey Hou made an interesting point that while home-grown “informal urbanism” in East Asia is regulated out of existence, Western-style food trucks are allowed to thrive (p. 195).

 

[Denis Vovchenko]

It seems that Vin is a fan of Venturi’s understanding of Japan’s “ambiguity without anguish.” P. 196 “Having not traveled to Japan before and spared of witnessing the panorama of Japanese modernization, he was more than many others able to perceive a complex monoculture with completely unbiased eyes.” I wonder what Vin meant by “complex monoculture”. Lack of ethnic diversity yet open to or obsessed with Westernism like “Lost in Translation”? Many of you traveled to Japan. Do you share that assessment?

 

[Denis Vovchenko]

Another comment on Wallach – Preservation as imperialism in disguise?

The idea that architectural preservation in Asia is of Western provenance made on p. 15 in Wallach should be seen in the broader context of European imperialism. Benedict Anderson in “imagined Communities” mentioned that colonial era museums were not innocent humanitarian efforts to restore old grandeur in Asia as Wallach seems to imply. Such reconstructions like Taj Mahal and Borobodur were supposed to send a message that the locals were unworthy of their glorious ancestors.

P. 16, “Even in China, where the hand of development so often fills the glove of government, the tension between development and preservation is not only real but almost certain to grow stronger. The irony is that preservation itself is a European idea. Perhaps the story be- gins in 1590, when Sixtus V ordered the restoration of the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. The idea arrived in Asia about 1900 with the restoration of the monuments that fell within the colonial empires. It is, of course, one thing to restore a Taj Mahal, an Angkor Wat, and a Borobodur.”

 

[Denis Vovchenko]

I was surprised by this example of such an early reaction against Westernism at the time of the famous article “On Leaving Asia” (1885) by Fukuzawa Yukichi https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/lesson-plan-on-leaving-asia-primary-source-document/- p. 179, “Another such effort of significance was the Diet building (Fig 9.2). From 1886- 87, two German architects, Wilhelm Böckmann and Hermann Ende were invited to Tokyo to draw up two plans for a Diet building. Böckmann’s initial plan was a masonry structure with a dome and flanking wings, which would form the center of a large government ring south of the Imperial Palace. However, there was public resistance in Japan to Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru’s internationalist policies, compelling the architects to also submit a more Japanese design that introduced traditional Japanese architectural features in many parts of the building. These designs were never built, but were used for the Tokyo District Court and Ministry of Justice buildings.”

 

[Denis Vovchenko]

Wallach’s article can be used as a bridge between US and Asian history classes. I was struck by this point in Wallach P. 13 which reminded me of 5 Civilized Tribes in the US who like the Cherokees had tried to absorb all kinds of trappings of European lifestyle but were still excluded from the pale and sent on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. Even there in the “wilderness” they did not shed European culture but consciously made themselves into beacons of Western civilization as opposed to local tribes like Osage. Wallach p. 13, “What began as European buildings for Europeans in Asia has become European buildings for Asians in Asia. Yes, a case can be made that modern architecture is no longer European at all and that it long ago became, as it claimed to be, international, but whether in Dubai or Kuala Lumpur or Shanghai the proudest towers are still designed by foreigners. For people as proud as Asians and as sensitive to colonial wounds, this continuing reliance on outsiders is astonishing, as though the only difference between the architecture of the colonial era and the architecture of today is that today, unlike Scott and the University of Bombay's Rajabai Tower, architects at least fly in to inspect a site before the steel begins.” It seems that Wallach is saying that direct Western control of Asia had been but a brief moment (with the exceptions of places like Vin’s Goa) but indirectly the West is casting a huge shadow at least in 2013. Since then the US began to see East Asia (read, China) not as a dependency but as a rival.

 

[Denis Vovchenko]

Is Taj Mahal or the Red Fort in India a “native” or a “colonial” monument? I wonder why Vin did not include Muslim architecture into his 10 types we looked at during week 1. Along with Buddhism, it is a culture that unites much of South-East Asia to India and West Asia.

From what I understand, the Indian nationalist discourse since the Partition criticized both Islamic Mughal and British domination but Muslim influence is much more demonized probably from the same time. There had been more efforts to erase and forget Afghan-Persian influences than British or Portuguese ones, right? Although Christians in India are not too comfortable in India, Muslims even before PM Modi’s tenure saw more of their culture and architecture “reclaimed” for Hindus, right?

 

[Denis Vovchenko]

My Buddhist misconceptions?

Before the recent anti-Muslim policies in Myanmar, Buddhism was considered peaceful despite warrior-monks in Japan and China. Reality is even more complicated – I did not know that samurai were the main sponsors of Zen Buddhism in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (p. 57 in “View from the Zen Shoin”). As I understand it now, samurai who embraced Zen Buddhism did not become monks typically, most of them seemed to recharge their batteries in new meditative spaces to return to the fray of feudal battles. This medieval attitude is similar to modern Zen-style gardens situated amidst busy plazas and avenues (p. 79) – as in the original Zen appeal, we are supposed to give ourselves a momentary break without profoundly changing our pace or unplugging from corporate rat-race. What do you think?

Somehow before this assignment I imagined Zen as similar to Daoist aesthetics with the primacy of natural over man-made details. However, Vin seemingly agrees with this quote on p. 71, “In the Sakuteiki, the author considers man-made natural landscapes superior to natural ones. The rationale behind this intriguing statement is that man-made Japanese landscapes emulate only the best parts of nature weeding out all redundancies and distractions, and doing away with “meaningless stones and features.” The conclusion on p. 81, on the other hand, suggests more going with the flow than manipulation in the Zen garden concept. I guess the truth is somewhere in the middle between those two universal poles of human creativity.

From my limited background knowledge of Zen aesthetics, I expected something like a deliberately broken window or plaster intentionally crumbling. But all architectural and landscaping details appear immaculate in the great photos in Vin’s chapter. There is a hint at cultivated imperfection in the choice of rustic materials on p. 75 and of dull interior colors and “imperfect” pottery on p. 76. P. 57 mentioned that Zen temples departed from the earlier “symmetrical” designs. I guess I expected more “imperfections” in architectural and landscaping elements.

 

[Denis Vovchenko]

I remember reading about the north-south axis in the week 1 reading by Wheatley about early Chinese urban planning. He discussed it as an example of “sacrobiological” space in hoary antiquity (Zhou or earlier) well before Daoism or Buddhism. Is this axis part of some primordial “religion” transcending Asian time and space? Vin mentioned the same axis as a defining feature of Buddhist temples on p. 57 “Core architectural components such as the entrance gate, lotus pond, main gate, Buddha hall, lecture hall, bathhouse and toilet were strictly aligned along a north-south axis, surrounded in less disciplined arrangement by numerous autonomous sub-temples.”

In the video, Vin compared wall lines in Zen monasteries to Mondrian. This idea popped up when I saw lines and circles on the pebble surface of a dry garden (pp. 62 and 70 in A View from the Zen Shoin). I remembered similar surfaces in Ancient Pueblo sites that supposedly influenced Jackson Pollock.

 

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