Ai Weiwei, the state of China's progress, and other dissidents

Pretty good summary article charting the last couple of years that led up to the arrest, release, and careful monitoring of the comings and goings of China's most high-profile, though self-admittedly most lucky (privileged?), dissident (a term Ai, in fact, disavows).  Beyond summarizing key events and facts, the article is full of informative links to follow, including a thoughtful musing from Ian Johnson at the The New York Review of Books, on the somewhat schizophrenic state of freedom in Chinese society, ranging from house arrests and kidnappings of human rights lawyers, to the all but unrestricted rights of most upwardly mobile Chinese commoners.  For more information on other imprisoned dissidents, you can start here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/26/ai-weiwei-china-situation-quite-bad

A History of Cinema in China and Taiwan

Street Angel 马路天使 directed by Yuan Muzhi 袁牧之, 1937

Mainland Cinema

Chinese cinema got off to a slow start in the first years of the 20^th century, beginning by filming local opera in the Fengtai Photography shop in Beijing in 1905, then quickly moving to Shanghai in 1909.  Shanghai, a natural location due to a heavy presence of (mostly Western) foreigners, was to become the Chinese cinema capital for many decades, even having a huge influence on the cinema of Hong Kong and Taiwan.

1916 saw the Hui Xi production company’s first fully locally-funded effort with Wronged Ghosts in an Opium Den 黑籍冤魂, followed in 1922 by Romance of a Fruit Peddler (劳工之爱情 a.k.a. Laborer’s Love ), a light comedy and the earliest Chinese film to survive until today.

 Romance of a Fruit Pedlar, a.k.a. Laborer’s Love 劳工之爱情, 1922

Early Chinese films were mostly entertainment-based, and consequently given a poor write-up by historians as such, though in more recent years scholars have taken a second look to find much sophistication in that era’s offerings.  Nonetheless, in the 1930’s Japanese aggression prompted more political, progressive films, sparking what came to be known as China’s first Golden Age of film, the resistance cinema of the 1930’s, specifically 1932-7.  Those years included Spring Silkworms 春蚕 (a 1933 adaptation of a Mao Dun 茅盾 short story), one of the earliest of the “leftist” cinema; Sun Yu’s 孙瑜 Big Road  (大路 a.k.a. The Highway) in 1935; and in 1937, Street Angel 马路天使 directed by Yuan Muzhi 袁牧之.

1937 brought the outbreak of full war with Japan, bringing local, free cinema almost to a complete stop; however, Japan fully promoted the cinema industry under occupation, and it thrived as such, albeit in a heavily censored form, pushing Chinese filmmakers to disguise their anti-Japanese slogans by sometimes thinly veiled methods.  Then, from 1946-1949 a “second Golden Age” of Chinese cinema emerged, mostly focusing on hardships of the civil war period.  This included 1947/1948’s A Spring River Flows East 江春水向东流, sometimes referred to as “China’s Gone with the Wind”.  Also released in 1948 was Spring in a Small Town 小城之春, directed by Fei Mu 费穆, later named by the 2004 Hong Kong Film Awards as the greatest Chinese language film ever made.  It’s fate was to be criticized and banned by the Communist government, only to enjoy a revival in the post-Cultural Revolution era.

Spring in a Small Town 小城之春, directed by Fei Mu 费穆, 1948

In October 1946, the Northeast Film Studio 东北电影制片厂, located in Hegang (north of Ha’erbin), took over production from the confiscated Japanese Manchuria Cinema Association 満洲映画協会, and released its first feature, Bridge 桥, in May of 1949.  The studio would later reshape and relocate to become the famous Changchun Film Group Corporation 长春电影集团公司. Later works focused largely on women as heroine fighters, workers, martyrs and sufferers, a trend of perhaps misplaced feminist sentiment that would last right on into the 1980’s, the next period of Chinese cinema to really leave a mark for itself.

The period from 1949-1966 was almost completely dominated by Socialist-Realist “worker-peasant” films (工农兵电影).  In 1951 all pre-1949 Shanghai films were banned, as were foreign and Hong Kong films.  1956 was an important year, in that it saw the inauguration of the Beijing Film Academy 北京电影学院, the origin of so many of the country’s soon-to-be screen legends.

The government takeover of film began with the reaction against Sun Yu’s 孙瑜 1950 film The Life of Wu Xun 武训传, which was viciously criticized by Mao, signaling the takeover of private cinema by the government’s department of Propaganda and later the Ministry of Culture. Within the promotion of “revolutionary realism”, various sub-genres emerged, including village films, national minority films, spy/espionage films, revolutionary/war films, films with industrial subjects and adaptations of May 4^th literature.

During the 100 Flowers Movement (1956-1957), state-control of cinema was somewhat relaxed, and new techniques and themes emerged, including criticism of Communist bureaucracy and heavy-handiness, only to be cracked down on again in the Anti-Rightist movement.  The Great Leap Forward brought a push for more production (at fewer costs—resulting in crude, hurried productions), and later the 10-year anniversary of the PRC yielded a state-sponsored improvement in production techniques.

director Xie Jin 谢晋

1960-1966 is referred to as the Classical revolutionary period, the films of which are often called simply “red films”.  The important director Xie Jin 谢晋 captures the context of the era.  As Esther Yau writes,

“Xie Jin, who emerged as a new talent in the late 1950s, demonstrated exemplary skills in adapting traditional and Hollywood type narrative and characterization strategies to revolutionary contexts. His military film Red Detachment of Women ([红色娘子军], 1960) incorporated thriller-type elements and exploited the ‘exotic’ details of southern China; while Stage Sisters ([舞台姐妹], 1964) was a finely crafted, melodramatic character study of two female opera singers.”

Three Monks 三个和尚, 1980

Animated films using a variety of folk arts, such as paper cuts, shadow plays, puppetry and traditional paintings, also were very popular for entertaining and educating children. The most famous of these, the classic Havoc in Heaven 大闹天宫 (in two parts, 1961 and 1964), was made by Wan Laiming 万籁鸣 of the Wan Brothers 万氏兄弟 and won Best Film award at the London International Film Festival. Additionally, two animated ink and wash films (水墨动画片), Where is Mama? 小蝌蚪找妈妈 (1960) and The Flute of the Cowherd 牧笛 (for the second half, click here), co-directed by the classic Chinese animator Te Wei 特伟 in 1963, captured the art and poetry of Chinese brush painting.

During the Cultural Revolution, cinema production was stopped except for ten revolutionary opera 革命样板戏 films (including Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy 智取威虎山, heavily controlled by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing), and older films were pulled from circulation, while many writings on cinema were destroyed.

Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy 智取威虎山, 1970

After 1973, film production slowly resumed, and in 1981 China began the Golden Rooster Awards 金鸡奖 for film.  The period between 1977-1984 was marked by “scar films” 伤痕电影, part of a wider artistic movement dealing with the Cultural Revolution’s effects on society, at the same time more or less ending the eulogization of peasant workers at the expense of intellectual characters, most notably, perhaps, in Xie Jin’s  Hibiscus Town 芙蓉镇 in 1986.

1984 marked the start of a new chapter, in which Wu Tianming’s 吴天明 Life 人生 began a new era of modern films that focus on the individual, along with Lu Xiaoya’s 陆小雅 Girl in Red 红衣少女 about an inquisitive high school teenager. The switch to a market economy that was slowly integrated into the movie industry resulted in both more freedom for movie makers, and less ability to continue the exploratory techniques of the early 80’s, as an audience-based direction for funding necessitated the increase in popularism to the detriment of artistic experimentation.

directors　张艺谋　and　陈凯歌

Zhang Junzhao 张军钊, working with cinematographer Zhang Yimou  张艺谋, in 1984 made One and Eight 一个和八个, which moved cinema beyond the then popular “human realism” toward new themes, via a multitude of new techniques.  Zhang Yimou also worked with director Chen Kaige 陈凯歌 on Yellow Earth 黄土地 in the same year. Underappreciated until it received immense praise at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, it is now among the most well known Chinese films in the world.  Finally, Tian Zhuangzhuang  田壮壮"shunned Han enthnocentrism" by focusing on Mongolian culture in 1985’s On the Hunting Ground (猎场扎撒) and 1986’s Horse Thief (盗马贼).

All graduates of the Beijing Film Academy from the same year, these directors and cinematographers became known as the Fifth Generation of Filmmakers, often described as “exploratory (tansuo 探索)” in technique and austere in approach, also acknowledging their general failings in the box office, despite critical acclaim.  Ester Yau writes,

“the Fifth Generation movement enforced a rupture between itself and the types of realism so far established. In relentlessly dismantling the language and ideology of an established political culture, the Fifth Generation films renounced the dramatic patterns of both revolutionary and humanist realism; instead, their narrative and formal strategies were critique-oriented. (p. 700)”

However, it wasn’t until Zhang Yimou made the switch to director, combining the more arthouse technique of the Fifth Generation with tales of passion and romance that were more accessible to audiences, that modern Chinese film became more popular at home.

Yellow Earth 黄土地，directed by Chen Kaige 陈凯歌, 1984

The label “Fourth Generation” retroactively refers to the older directors, et al. working in the 1980’s who had received their training before 1966, whose careers had been disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, and whose outlook was more humanist than their austere younger counterparts.  Often focused on women figures struggling in the transition between traditional and modern China (e.g. Huang Jianzhong’s 黄健中 A Good Woman 良家妇女in 1985, and Wu Lan’s 乌兰 1986 film, Girl from Hunan 湘女萧萧), in many of these films, “sexual love has a redemptive value, as it is expressive of individuality and desire to change.  (Yau, p.701)”

Gong Li in Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum 红高粱, 1988

These directors were able to produce their films largely because of the work of Xi’an’s film studio under the guidance of director Wu Tianming 吴天明, who stated his goal as “to make profit with one hand and take awards with the other”, thus balancing exploratory and popular film, culminating in Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum 红高粱 taking home awards from Berlin in 1988.  Then, toward the end of the 80’s, films began to center on life in the cities and Chinese citizen’s ambivalence in a new commodity-driven market economy, especially those films made in Guangdong’s Pearl River Studio.

At this time approximately 20 female directors became active in the male-dominated industry, including Lu Xiaoya 陆小雅, Zhang Nuanxin 张暖忻 , Huang Shuqin 黄蜀芹, Wang Junzheng 王君正 and Li Shaohong 李少红, focusing on the tension between tradition and modernism, including the sexual liberation of women in Chinese society.  One such film was Huang Shuqin’s second, 1993’s Huahun (画魂 a.k.a. A Soul Haunted by Painting a.k.a. La Peinteur, starring Gong Li　巩俐) , which was heavily censored for its scenes of sex and nudity.

In the 90’s, especially in the government’s conservative backlash after the Tiananmen Massacre, there was more pressure to commercialize, especially as the market for film audiences came under pressure from American and Hong Kong videos, among other things.  Also at this time, the CCP began producing and funding epic historic films in attempts to strengthen its image and shape historical narrative, a trend still seen today.

the director Huang Shuqin 黄蜀芹

Meanwhile, a discreet and lo-key documentary movement grew out of the Academy of Broadcasting, including 吴文光Wu Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing (流浪北京 1988) about struggling artists in the nation’s capital.  Others focused on the lingering impact of the Tiananmen Square protests.

Without access to the studio funding that the Fifth Generation directors enjoyed (many of whom in the late 90’s were becoming international stars in European film festivals), the so-called Sixth Generation of filmmakers have had to independently finance their own features, luckily without the pressure of studio quotas.  In comparison, their films about disillusionment and isolation make the works of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou seem commercial in comparison.  (As illustration, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life 三峡好人 was released in 2006, two years after Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers 十面埋伏, and one year after Chen Kaige’s The Promise 无极.)

The World 世界, directed by Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯, 2004

This generation is best known by directors Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯, Wang Xiaoshuai 王小帅 and Zhang Yuan 张元 , whose 1993 Beijing Bastards 北京杂种 was one of China’s first independent films, starring musicians Cui Jian, Dou Wei and He Yong.  Li Yang 李杨 is particularly well known for his brutal treatment of modern Chinese social problems, such as the female sex trade (2007’s  Blind Mountain 盲山) and the dangerous and corrupt mining industry (2003’s Blind Shaft 盲井).  Zhang Yuan was one of the first mainland directors to openly explore the themes of homosexuality in East Palace, West Palace 东宫西宫 (1996), and Lou Ye 娄烨 is known for his neo-noir treatments of sexuality, obsession and gender, e.g. Suzhou River 苏州河 (2000), which is still banned in China.  Other notable directors include He Jianjun 何建军 and Lu Chuan 陆川, the latter of whom is loosely grouped into the Sixth Generation less for common themes than for chronological purposes.

More recent developments in Mainland film include the extremely low-budget and independent dGeneration (d for digital), and the New Documentary Movement, which goes back to Wu Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing mentioned above.  Meanwhile, in the last decade filmmakers Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚 and Jiang Wen 姜文 have made popular films that have done extremely well in the local box office.  Feng’s Aftershock 唐山大地震 (2009) and Jiang’s Let the Bullet’s Fly 让子弹飞 (2010) grossed 97.4 million dollars and 111 million, respectively.

Blind Mountain 盲山, directed by Li Yang 李阳，2007

 -----------------------------------------------------------

Taiwanese “New Cinema”

Early on, largely making kung fu and action epics (which many times rivaled those of Hong Kong), Taiwanese cinema later came to be defined by directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢, Tsai Ming-liang 蔡明亮 and Edward Yang 楊德昌.  

the director Edward Yang 楊德昌

Early Taiwanese cinema was dominated by the themes and styles of its Japanese occupiers, notably including the narrated silent-film genre, benshi (弁士), renamed benzi in Mandarin.  After the Chinese civil war, and the arrival of the Kuomintang, most films between 1949 and the mid 1960’s were made in Taiwanese.  The KMT’s policy of promoting Mandarin, and for a time outlawing Taiwanese, led to a quick decline, with the last entirely Taiwanese-language film made in 1981.  Then in 1963, the government introduced the “Health Realism” movement, which strove to implement societal morals through cinema.

In the late 1970’s, seeking to distinguish itself from mainland China, Taiwan launched a “back-to-roots” cultural exploration that gave rise to the “New Cinema” movement of the 1980’s.  The emergence of hsiang-t’u (郷土: nativist) art, following the expulsion from the U.N., the denial of participation in the Olympics, and the severance of diplomatic ties with many nations, sparked an introspection breaking with the tradition of mainland exile literature, Western-influenced elite styles, or popular commercialism that had thus far dominated the island.

City of Sadness 悲情城市, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢, 1989

The movement in film began with 1983’s The Sandwich Man 兒子的大玩偶 (a.k.a. His Son’s Big Doll), adapted from Huang Ch’un-ming’s 黃春明 novellas, and In Our Time 光陰的故事, a 1982 film directed by Edward Yang, Te Chen-tao, I Chen-ko and Yi Chang.  The films, among other things, explore the socio-economic life of country people, as well as poor urban-dwellers, in Taiwan’s changing society.

Most of the directors of the era were educated in film schools in the U.S.; however Guangdong-born Hou Hsiao-hsien, who fled the mainland with his family after 1949 and grew up with the modernization of the once agriculturally-based island, is one of the few to have not lived abroad.

After three commercial films, in 1983 he made His Son’s Big Doll, in which he began to develop a characteristic style of “a laconic and oblique story-teller, downplaying the dramatic by offering leisurely observations of small, everyday occurrences. He favours meditative long takes with a minimum of camera movements, most often in medium or long shot. A favourite technique is to allow the camera simply to stare at an empty room that a character is about to enter or has just left, frequently making masterful use, through the soundtrack, of off-screen space…. His cinematic style has been compared to classical Chinese poetry, to traditional landscape painting, and to Buddhist narrative scrolls. (Yip, p. 712)”  Hou’s 1989 epic City of Sadness 悲情城市 launched him to international acclaim at foreign film festivals, cementing his reputation as the voice of Taiwanese cinema.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman 飲食男女, directed by Ang Lee 李安，

1994

Films of the 90’s and beyond became gradually more accessible to audiences, while retaining much of the themes and styles of the earlier New Wave movement.  Tsai Ming-Liang’s 1994 Vive L’Amour 愛情萬歲 explores the life of Taipei’s urban youth, for example.  However, Ang Lee 安李 is the best known of what is informally called the “Second New Wave”, making films with strong family themes that were praised by both critics and the average movie-goer, beginning with his early films Pushing Hands 推手 (1991), The Wedding Banquet 喜宴 (1993) and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman 飲食男女 (1994).  His 2000 wuxia film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 臥虎藏龍 popularized for the first time Asian cinema outside Hong Kong among common Western audiences, while at the same time setting off debates in academia on its place among traditional Asian cinema (with its international cast and affected themes that seemed fabricated for Western audiences).

In the late 90’s, Taiwanese cinema took a sharp decline, with box office numbers for domestic films dwindling almost to nothing.  It was not until Wei Tu-sheng’s 魏德聖 2008 polylingual romantic/comedy/music-drama Cape No. 7 海角七號 that any native film enjoyed wide success with audiences, setting off a revival of optimism for the island’s production.  (It is the second-highest grossing film in Taiwanese history, just behind the U.S.’s Titanic.)

The actress Shu Qi 舒淇 in 蔡明亮Tsai Ming-liang's 2001 Millenium Mambo 千禧曼波

                                               

                                                                References

Berry, Chris.  “China Before 1949”, in The Oxford History of World Cinema.  edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Li, Cheuk-To. “Popular Cinema in Hong Kong”, in The Oxford History of World Cinema.  edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Yau, Esther. “China After the Revolution”, in The Oxford History of World Cinema.  edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Yip, June.  “Taiwanese New Cinema”, in The Oxford History of World Cinema.  edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Oxford University Press, 1996.

various wikipedia articles accessed between October 28^th and November 13, 2011.

viewing wish list:

Bumming in Beijing

The Missing Gun (Lu Chuan)

anything by Wang Bing

苏州评弹 Suzhou Pingtan

Lately I've been in the mood to listen to traditional music as the weather gets colder in this tiny country town.  I'm interested in folk music from all over the world, but my favorite styles are the string and vocal music of northern Europe and the British Isles, and that, of course, of East Asia, viz. China and Japan.  Lately, I've been listening to a lot of folk music from the Wu-speaking area of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, specifically Suzhou pingtan (苏州评弹). The clangy plucking of the strings and the impassioned twang of the vocals reminds me of everything I've always loved about bluegrass music, but set to a slower, deliberate pacing of traditional East Asian music.   Too lazy to write my own report, the following is a slightly doctored cutting and pasting of the first half dozen or so hits from a Google search on the subject.



Pingtang is a type of Chinese musical storytelling known as shuochang (说唱, literally "spoken singing").  Shuochang is most often performed by a solo male or female singer, although it may also be performed by two singers. The singers may provide their own accompaniment with hand-held percussion such as clappers (called ban; 板) or a small drum, or there may also be a small ensemble of one or two musicians.  The stories usually relate a historical romance, court case, martial arts story or heroic epic. The Tanci (弹词， the sung portion of the words of the story), which is also called Xiaoshu, is mainly performed by two people, relating the stories of daily life and love. The instruments used include the Sanxian 三线 and lute (琵琶 pipa).  (For a pretty awesome, but distinctly different style with an erhu 二胡, see this video.) This art originally appeared in the Qing Dynasty and was favored by successive monarchs and locals. Its distinctive performing skill consists of storytelling, loud laughter, music-playing and singing.




Pingtan is also called 'Suzhou Pingtan', because it first originated in the city of Suzhou in Jiangsu province and is performed in the Suzhou dialect, which is closely related to the variety of Chinese spoken in Shanghai--termed a "dialect" of Chinese, but considered distinct languages by linguists.  According to Zhou Zhenhua, vice chief of the 'Shanghai Pingtan Troupe', "Suzhou Pingtan...originated from the folk ballad, folk songs and fables which appeared over 5,000 years ago. Pinghua [评话, storytelling without music] was developed from a speaking art called Bianwen in the Tang dynasty more than 1,300 years ago and Huaben in the Song dynasty. And Suzhou Pingtan emerged later in the Ming and early Qing dynasties when performers started to use the Suzhou dialect while performing. It has a history stretching back around 400 years."



Zhou goes on to explain, "Pingtan usually performs long stories, which are divided into many parts. One part is performed over the course of a day and the whole story telling may last for weeks. There are also some stories of medium length and shorter ones. Traditional tales often follow a historical theme with heroic and epic stories."  There are some 120 traditional stories left to us by the ancient performers and 'Pingtan' artists are continuously writing new ones that are closer to contemporary life.

Suzhou Pingtan reached its peak during the middle of the Qing dynasty. After the 1970s, this art gradually declined but has been rejuvenated in recent years. As most of the audiences enjoying Pingtan are mainly elderly and middle aged people, organizations which promote Pingtan are striving to attract more young people to this brilliant traditional art.

Over the course of its history, Pingtan has absorbed various popular folk tunes. For instance, shu tone came from other quyi forms and is the basis of other styles. Due to different performance styles, shu tone is divided into the Chen Yuquan, Ma Rufei and Yu Xiushan schools. Over its long development, new styles were formed that inherited the legacy of the three schools. Liu Tianyun and Yang Zhenxiong inherited the Chen school, while Xia Hesheng and Zhu Huizhen inherited the Yu School. 




 
The Ma school exerted the greatest impact on posterity, with successors who formed schools of their own such as Xue Xiaoqing diao (调，tone), Shen Jianan diao and Qin diao (developed by Zhu Xueqin on the basis of Xue diao). Zhou Yuquan developed into a school on the basis of Ma diao, while Jiang Yuequan developed into a school on the basis of Zhou diao. Due to this development, Suzhou pingtan has a great diversity of styles in singing and storytelling. 

Pingtan is traditionally performed in teahouses or special storytelling houses in Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta region, where patrons sip tea and relax under the atmosphere. One of the most famous pintang players is 吴静 (Wu Jing).

On a personal note, the greatest trip I've taken in my life so far was to the area of southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang where this music originated.  So it already holds a special place in my heart.  While my trip to Suzhou itself was rather ruined by problems registering at the hotel, the nearby towns of Tongli and Xitang will always be remembered with a sharp pang of nostalgia for strolling around those old, stony avenues beside the waterways, listening to the speech of the local Wu languages, and eating zongzi in the cold.  Every now and then there would be a pingtan performance inside one of the area's many garden attractions.  Ah, memories.  



Take a listen to the crazy spoken breakdown in the last minute of this performance:



A few more for your listening pleasure are below.  You can also find hour-long videos on Youtube via Tudou if you are in for a real performance.

即身仏 Buddhist Mummies

For Halloween in Japan, I read Japanese Ghost Stories:  Spirits, Hauntings and Paranormal Phenomena by Catrien Ross.  The majority of the book was about psychic ability and things like automatic writing, telekinesis, and the like, things that don't really interest me much.  But the last three or four chapters were devoted to haunted or otherwise anomalous places around Japan, including Zenpoji temple in Tsuruoka City, Yamagata prefecture, where there is reportedly a fish with a human face.  A quick Google search turned up nothing on this fish in Zenpoji, though human-faced fish are a mainstay of Cheongju (청주/淸州), Chungcheongbuk-do, South Korea.


However, by far the most striking memory of this read was the Buddhist mummies of Gassan, otherwise known as "flesh body bodhisattvas", or Sokushinbutsu (即身仏) in Japanese.  A group of ascetic practitioners of Shingon Buddhism, these worships undertake a decade-long annihilation of their bodies in order to achieve freedom from samsara in their current lifetime.  If successful, their bodies would be perfectly preserved for all time, but if they failed, and in the end decomposed, then....well, the effort was appreciated, but they had to start all over again in another lifetime.

The erasure of their physical being is one of the more gruesome rituals I've ever known human beings to willingly submit to.  (I suppose the most gruesome submission of oneself to certain death I know of is the Russian drug krokodil, if you call that willing.)  Having precedents in China and Tibet, the Sokushinbutsu's ritual is described by Aaron Lowe in the journal Agora:


"The process of self-mummification is broken down into three 1,000-day periods. Each period is
characterized by physical and mental changes caused by phase-specific austerities and excruciating pain.
The process is not some mystic secret, but rather a calculated scientific means for ridding the body of
material that cannot cross over into nirvana. In the first phase the priest is restricted to a diet of only nuts
and grains surrounding the temple complex.11 During this time the practitioner endures extreme hardships,
such as meditating under icy cold mountain streams for hours on end. “Japan is a mountainous country.”12
Therefore, most of the Shingon temple complexes are in the proximity of large sacred mountains.

"During the second phase of the process, the fat matter that causes the body to decompose is greatly
reduced. Upon entering the second one thousand-day period, the priest’s body fat is near zero. In this
stage, the diet is restricted even further to only miniscule amounts of pine bark and roots from pine trees.
After this stage, the priest is like a “skin-covered skeleton.”13 The dehydration helps in preservation of the
body. Towards the end of the second stage, “A special tea is made from the sap of the urushi tree.” This
sap is used as a lacquer for furniture. The tea is a poisonous concoction that causes vomiting and
sickness that further decrease the moisture in the body, but more importantly, its build up in the system
prevents insects from speeding up the decomposition process. This, in turn, helps the self-mummification
process by protecting the to-be mummified priest from natural elements.

"Upon entering the final stage, the priest is given a bell and then sealed in his tomb where a tube is
inserted into a small opening in the top. Every day, he rings the bell. Eventually, when the ringing stops,
the tube is removed. 14 At the end of the last 1000-day period, nearly ten years after starting, the tomb is
opened and the results are seen. Out of the thousands who have tried to complete this decade long
process, most are decomposed, and thus, have failed in their efforts. Only a select few actually achieve
this fascinating but grisly transformation. The priests who triumphed in their endeavor are said to be one
with the cosmic Buddha. While the people who tried and failed are praised for their fervor, they are not
thought to be Buddha. Therefore, they enter back into the wheel of Samsara."

There is a 30-second video from inside one museum on Youtube.  (Apparently, there is also a documentary about the Yamagata temples, with a short preview here.)  Another great site for reading about/viewing photos is on Environmental Graffiti.  More than anything else, the mummies remind me of the Templar, horse-mounted zombies of Amando de Ossorio's Tombs of the Blind Dead, perhaps a crass observation given the sacred nature of the Gassan monks.

Catching up and changing course

taken down the street from my current home in Uchinoura

So, in the grand spirit of blogging, as far as I know it, I have taken an extended hiatus from this site.  This has largely been due to life circumstances, which saw me depart from just reading about East Asia to actually living there.  On the other hand, I had sort of burnt out on the format in which I was keeping this blog.  What it was supposed to replicate in my life was the experience of being in an Asian Studies program, exploring various topics in the realm of East Asia, and writing short essays on what I found.  Were I actually IN an Asian Studies program, and this site served to supplement or help organize in-class projects, then this might be a viable project.  However, I let myself take my writing far too seriously than time allotted, and writing became more of a burden than a pleasure.

Sadly, such is still the case, but recently I've had the want to be posting things on the web, if for no other reason than my own satisfaction.  (Well, what other reason has there ever been, I guess?)  I'm in no position to do in-depth web crawls to write well-read summaries of my reading; in fact I'm in less of a position than I was when I started this blog, then having a mostly open schedule while now working full time.  But, perhaps more importantly, I find no reason to make such posts.  I had originally wanted to rehabilitate this blog to keep a cultural journal of readings, but perhaps focus more on current events.  However, on the one hand, I'm not well-read enough in the foundational literature to make any sort of insightful reflections on either what is going on in Asia currently, or on the place of a given film or novel in the tradition of East Asian literature.

But that's okay.  You know why?  Because there are about a thousand blogs that already do this better than I do at present.  I'll soon explain why the blog will now be more focused on China, but suffice it to say, I would not make much of a splash in the ocean of blogs on China.  If it is Chinese current affairs you are interested in, then you would do well to hit up China Digital Times or for a more academic/literary blog on China (probably more like what I had in mind for my own), you can check out China Beat.  For information on labor issues, there's China Labour Bulletin, and for legal issues there's China Law and Policy or Stan Abram's blog at China Hearsay, all fine blogs to keep you more than busy at staying up to date with current events.  Finally, there's Australia National University's China Heritage Quarterly that covers a variety of topics in academic format.  So if it is Chinese current events you are after, there is no need for one more.

But then, who is the "you" I'm speaking to, anyway?  Actually, it makes more sense to treat this blog as a personal link folder for myself to keep track of what I have been reading and following, primarily online.  For the most part, especially this year while so much of my time is eaten away by work and studying Chinese, it will make the most sense to just make a serious of short posts, with or without commentary, to articles, essayists, artists and other online sites simply for easy reference in the future.  There's been quite a lot lately in the news that I would like to be able to go back and refer to, if only for purposes of conversation.  Additionally, at least once a week, if not almost every day, I run across a topic or artist whom I would like to refer back to at some airy future date.  Why not post it here so that the one or two friends I have that are also interested in the subject matter can enjoy the same?

Of course, when I have the time or the motivation, perhaps I can write something more close to an article on this or that.  Since this blog began as a series of film reviews, right now I think I will take it back to those less ambitious beginnings and initiate a nine month project, designed in part to keep me sane over the coming thirty-something weeks while I am living out my stay in southern Japan.  So before I begin posting on Chinese-language film, let me explain that.

Almost a year and a half ago, I left the stultifying town of Athens, Georgia to work as an English teacher at Beijing Language and Culture University.  This was just after I finished my MA in Linguistics, and the sense of detachment and self-doubt that left me with was what prompted me to start this blog in the first place.  I spent most of my time in Beijing trying to come to grips with what I would do with my future, trying to get my emotions to catch up with my intellect in terms of shifting interests (it seemed, despite day-to-day predilections, I was stuck in a rut of pursuing the same old things), and adapting to life in an overpopulated, heavily polluted city with poor infrastructure and dubious food standards.  Early on in that year, I started looking to Japan as an escape route, not only from the grime of Beijing, but from the indecision of what I was most interested in doing with myself.  With that in mind, I applied for the JET Program in November of 2010, and jumped through the endless hoops it took to get accepted.

Despite specifying three top preferences for my stay in Japan, I was placed somewhere I had never heard of, far away from anywhere in Japan with which I was familiar:  the extreme south of Kyushu, in Kagoshima prefecture on the Osumi peninsula.  It is essentially a tropical zone.  Being a fan of cold weather, I wasn't thrilled, but thought, hey, this is Japan, the country that has thus far dominated this blog.  I will love it, and I will soak up the Japanese language and culture like a sponge.  Presciently, in my final weeks in Beijing, I began to sense that maybe I had not properly thought this thing through.

So, after a ten day trip back to the U.S., I left for Japan, with a spectacular but short-lived stay in Tokyo on my way to Uchinoura, Kimotsuki, the tiny town in Kagoshima where I am currently living for nine more months.  The place is like some kind of pristine mountainous paradise beside the sea, full of lush fir forests on steep mountain slopes, large expanses of ocean, and absolutely nothing to do with your time.  At the same time, it is infested with spiders and centipedes and God know what other fauna that emit loud metallic chirps and screeches during the night.

The major turning point in my life came somewhere toward the end of the first month, however.  After a strong initial showing at picking up Japanese during a completely pointless month of "office days" (it was deemed important that I clock in at 8:30 in the morning, sit in an office all day, and clock out at 4:15 Monday through Friday, despite the fact there wasn't a single thing for me to do), I quickly realized that I was not the latent polyglot I always assumed I would be, and that an enormous amount of time is needed not just to crunch vocabulary items, but to keep yourself well enough immersed in a language to not let old words slip out the back door as new ones enter the front.  I found myself in the position of once again, for the hundredth time it would seem, letting my newly gained Mandarin skills slide back down that steep slope of language learning in order to learn the language of my my monolingual environment, or else blow off Japanese entirely, facing a year of ostracization, lack of communication, and guilt at both missing a prize opportunity at immersion and offending the people around me.

I chose the latter.  Because most importantly, in my daily burnings of nostalgia for my year in Beijing, I realized just how important China, and thus mastering Chinese, is to me, while my interest in Japan, though on the surface ostensibly vast when you consider cinema, music, literature and aesthetics (not to mention sushi), really doesn't hold a candle to my interests in Chinese history, culture, and geography, not to mention tracking China's tumultuous transition into a modern nation of global, consumer culture, which appears to be largely leaving the society traumatized and soul-searching.  My interests in Japan are light, relaxing and fun, but I've found that burdening myself with the task of learning another language, much to my dismay, while still not fully fluent in Chinese, was zapping the fun from those Japanese musings. 

Yuanming Yuan, Beijing

What's more, I was finally able to see how central and integrated a role China has played in my life for the last decade.  Suddenly I was tracing a direct thread from reviewing my first hundred characters or so on a bus ride to New York, only the second time I had ever traveled outside the southern U.S., to my marriage, then my sickly trip to China for the first time, through my good friends I made in graduate school and my first experience living outside the U.S.  It seems that through most of the important times in my life, studying Chinese has been there in some form or another, even if I largely neglected it or de-emphasized it.  Not to mention, not only were issues related to China, especially the tense history of interaction between Han Chinese and minorities like the Tibetans and Uyghurs, the first to really stoke my intellectual fervor in conversation about the world, but while living in Beijing I met people from all over the globe who shared the same interests and passions as I have for the country.

Beijing was filthy.  You could not walk on the streets without dodging spit (or worse), or getting honked down by asshole drivers, or harassed by hawkers or panhandlers.  Traffic was terrible and its emissions, along with the hyperactive smokestacks of factories around the cities, covered the air in a hazy funk, some days so thick I chose to stay indoors all day.  (Though, to be fair, there were long stretches of blue skies that surprised every one from time to time.)  Living in Beijing was exhausting, and a trip anywhere, with the requisite hour stuck sandwiched in crowds on the bus or subway, left you angry at the world.

hutong near Beihai, Beijing

The town I now live in is clean and the air is cleansing to breathe.  While in Beijing my skin would often itch from the dryness in the atmosphere, here it is moist 24/7.  There are beaches and mountains and fresh seafood every day.  Everyone is so nice you never even have to worry about locking your doors, and everywhere you go you can find solitude and paths to escape to a shrine or alter hidden in the forest.  Crime is nothing to speak of, and the government is relatively honest and accountable to the people.  While I sense a strong nationalist pride among the people, it is never so flagrant or blind as the nauseating patriotism I constantly encountered in China.

And yet I count down the days until I can leave this sterile environment and return somewhere that I have the ability to immerse myself in Chinese studies, picking back up that thread that has run through what will surely be the most formative, dynamic and chaotic decade of my life.  For entirely illogical reasons, I feel like my heart bleeds for China, and no amount of reading or conversation can quell it, at least for the foreseeable future.

Uchinoura rooftops after a tropical storm

While I try to make some effort to learn a little Japanese now and then, and I am still interested in the occasional monograph on some aspect of the country or culture, my reading list is quickly growing with titles on the May 4th Movement, the (semi-)sexual liberation of the late 1980's and 90's, the role of women and workers in the modern era, the desperation of China's many famines, especially the state-orchestrated famine of the Great Leap Forward, and as always the plight of the minorities of the west and the Mongolian steppes that live as second-class citizens under Han rule in their ancestral land.  This is of course not an exhaustive list, but I only expect it to grow as time passes.  Hopefully in two year's time I will be in a PhD program with a reasonably well-defined route through academia, hewn close to the Chinese language in all its facets, but with a healthy slice of cultural/literary studies to indulge the readings that have now taken up so much of my mental space.

In the meantime, to get through these monotonous days in paradise as best I can, I hope to post about 35 movies from mainland China and Taiwan, following a short history of the two nations' cinema.  It gives me a way to tick off the weeks while not feeling so isolated from the culture I've come to adopt as my own, so to speak, even if it's taken me a full decade to fully realize the implications of that.

Better late than never, I hope.

tree above a small altar to Kanno, Uchinoura

Shrine entrance in Kouyama, Kimotsuki