Disaster Reaction and Response: 2014 TUSA Scholars Present

The Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley presents a series of papers on Disaster Reaction response

Yungnane Yang
Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley
Professor, Department of Political Science & Institute of Political Economy, National Cheng Kung University

How did U.S. Government respond to the 3/11 Fukushima’s Nuclear Disaster?

U.S. foreign policy has been very influential all over the world. How the U.S. government reacted to the 3/11 Fukushima’s Nuclear Disaster has had significant impact on Japan and other countries. The purpose of this presentation is to explore the U.S. foreign policy and its impact regarding to the nuclear disaster.

Mei-tzu Tsai, Department of Chinese Literature, National Cheng Kung University

An observation of others’ suffering— A Study of the Disaster Writings, Thoughts and Cultural Identity of Japan-educated Chinese Writers Before and After the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake

The death toll from the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 has been estimated at nearly 130,000. After the earthquake, it was rumored that Koreans were poisoning wells. Radical Japanese activists thus sought to identify what they termed “not-their-own-people”, those with strange accents and pronunciation, in an attempt to find and kill Koreans. Some of the Chinese residents in the area were then mistakenly identified as Koreans and killed. The Great Kanto Earthquake as a context of discourse on the cultural relationship between China, Korea and Japan to some extent represents an imagination of a common body of East Asia, which contains many unstable elements and potential conflicts arising from differences in national identity, national character and national power.

The Great Kanto Earthquake highlighted the fact that Japan would always be threatened by its location in an earthquake-prone zone. The rise in militarism was hoped to insure that Japan would always have the option of taking over the land and resources of China. In the face of the suffering of his Japanese neighbors, ???Guo Moruo wrote to express his feelings and thoughts on natural disasters within the context of a heterogeneous culture. He began his literary career as a romanticist writer, and later redirected his literary interest to a variety of fields and creations, ranging from historical plays to studies of ancient society, translation of works on Marxism and writings of communist militarism. This project intends to explore ideas about the Great Kanto earthquake expressed by Gou and other Japanese-educated Chinese writers in order to better understand the relationship between Chinese and Japanese intellectuals in this complicated era.

Besides, While the Chinese writer Guo was described as “the son of Asia” by the Japanese writer Satou Haruo, Japan was seen as the greatest empire in East Asia from the Japanese perspective. The change in Guo’s ideas about Japan can be understood in the context of the emergence of an East Asia Discourse in the early 20th century. Japanese scholar Ito notes that both Chinese and Japanese intellectuals attempted to pursue “surpassing national values” in order to develop international communism, such asIn the mid-1920s, the pro-Japanese Chinese writer??? Zhou Zuoren learned from Saneatsu Mushanok?ji “the Ideal of New Village”—a commune in which all people farm and read together, and help each other. That is ideal Communism society. Although their efforts repeatedly failed. The divisions and networks among many organizations, societies and groups in Europe, America and Asia can be traced back to the works produced by Chinese and Japanese writers during the period of 1920-1940.