Another new book in the former native speaker's library

Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu, eds. Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire, University of Hawai'i Press, 2023.

This book showed up out of the middle of nowhere. I saw that there was an interview with the editors on the New Books Network, but before listening to the interview, I ordered the book. (To be honest, I still haven't listened to the interview. But I'll get around to it sooner or later!)

In my somewhat foggy state of mind, I think I was attracted to the word "persuasion" in the title and the term "pan-Asian rhetoric" in the book's summary. Paging through the book, I was surprised to see a chapter on Li Xianglan (李香蘭), who is also known as Yamaguchi Yoshiko (山口 淑子) or Shirley Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi was someone I had forgotten that I had heard of before--the other day I stumbled onto her movie, China Nights (「支那の夜」), also known as Shanghai Nights (「上海之夜」) on YouTube. I ended up watching the whole movie even though it was 98% Japanese with no subtitles. (Needless to say, I didn't get a lot out of the dialogue.) The Wikipedia article about Li Xianglan (zh) reminded me that she had also played an Indigenous girl in a movie made in Taiwan called Sayon's Bell (「サヨンの鐘」). A 2011 post by Darryl Sterk from the anthropological blog Savage Minds introduces a recent "anti-aboriginal romance film" named Finding Sayun (【不一樣的月光：尋找沙韻】) that critiques the representation of Indigenous people in the original film.* 

Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading that chapter to find out more about Yamaguchi and Sayon's Bell, which I've also found a copy of on YouTube: 

I also found this 10-minute preview of Finding Sayun: 

* I think my title punctuation is a mess in this paragraph--apologies!

Aging

I've been hearing a lot lately from friends and relatives about various age-related or partially age-related health problems they're encountering. And then I share my own health problems back! I guess I'm at that stage of life when this is par for the course. Combined with that are the deaths of famous people from my childhood or youth, like Richard Simmons, Bob Newhart, Dr. Ruth, etc. And then President Biden steps away from the presidential campaign after lots of loud questions about his ability to govern at his age. (I'm not going to go into political commentary here.) 

Not sure what point I'm trying to make here, if any. Just that this is on my mind these days.

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

Got back from a short trip to find these two books that I ordered from 博客來 books:

• 移工築起的地下社會：跨國勞動在臺灣 (Underground Lives: Stories Untold for Migrant Workers in Taiwan), by 簡永達 (2023)
  
  
• 冷戰下的「臺灣研究」：北美人類學家訪問紀錄 (Studying Taiwan Before Taiwan Studies: American Anthropologists in Cold War Taiwan), edited by Derek Sheridan, Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, and Tseng Wen-liang (2024)

The latter is in both English and Chinese, so I'll probably be reading that first. But before that, I have a lot of work to catch up on...

【台灣演義】大學史 （History of Universities in Taiwan)

This was produced in 2020, but I didn't see it back then. It's pretty interesting. I learned a bit more about higher education during the Japanese colonial period and the martial law period.

I don't agree with some of the information in the video, though. They said that Soochow University was the first private university in Taiwan, but according to Wikipedia, it wasn't actually fully certified as a university until 1971. Classes started at Tunghai University in 1955, though for some reason, Tunghai isn't mentioned in this video.