DEAN Advisor Profile: Professor Leo Ching

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Professor Ching at DEAN's "Seventy-Year-Old Shadows of Hiroshima" panel discussion
For the first DEAN Advisor Profile, Managing Editor Sakura Takahashi speaks with Professor Leo Ching of Duke University's Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department.

Could you tell us about your academic interests and what you do at Duke?
 
During the semester, I mainly teach and provide services to the department and the university. I also try to do research with whatever remaining time I have. My main field of research is Japanese Cultural Studies, which is an interdisciplinary inquiry of literature, history, sociology or anthropology… it’s a combination that looks at culture as a totality. My own training was from literature, then I branched out doing other things such as popular culture and media studies. My immediate field of research is the Japanese Empire. I look at the historical, philosophical, and cultural ramifications of Japanese imperialism and colonialism, focusing on the relations between Japan and Taiwan, and other areas of the empire.

I’m also interested in questions related to globalization and culture. I’ve done some research and written articles about Japanese popular culture and regionalism – how Japanese popular culture situated itself not just within Japan, but regionally and globally. In my teaching, I examine the “underside” or “dark side” of Japanese modernity, try to understand events and voices marginalized or repressed by the modern nation-state.
 
What projects are you working on now?
 
Currently, I am interested in the gamification of pedagogy. A couple of colleagues and I are developing a gaming mechanism on conflict resolution that we hope to transform practices in the traditional classroom. Through gaming, students can teach each other rather than the “teacher teach, student learn” model that has been with us for a long time. I’m talking about using cards, board games and other mechanisms in which students play certain roles and interact while conducting research to justify their actions.

I am also completing a book manuscript on anti-Japanese sentiments in postwar East Asia. I examine how anti-Japanese sentiments are representative of the messy and incomplete process of decolonization in mainland China, South Korea and Taiwan.
 
My next question is how you became interested in these topics. I assume that your experiences being in different countries had an impact?
 
I was born in Taiwan and grew up there until I was 10, in a very interesting environment. The maternal side of my family – which is what you would call Taiwanese – was nostalgic for the Japanese period. They all spoke Japanese, and addressed each other by their Japanese names. But my father originally came from mainland China with the Nationalist government, and his friends and comrades from the military were staunchly anti-Japanese. So I grew up in a strange, very schizophrenic environment. My grandmother loves Japanese medicine, Japanese apples, and all that. And then my aunt’s husband, a mainlander,  always belittled the Japanese, and disapproved the fact that my father went to Japan to work, and our eventual emigration.

When I first went to Japan, I didn’t understand any of this history of Japanese colonialism and imperialism because I went to an international school, which is really quite sheltered. And I passed [as Japanese]. It was only when I came to the United States that I began to look at Japan from the outside, and gain a more critical perspective. This was in the mid-to-late 1980’s, when there was a lot of fear of the rise of Japan. As an undergraduate I participated in two movements in LA, one was the Japanese-American internment redress and reparation. It got me thinking because in Japan I never learned about Japanese-Americans being interned during the war. I also joined a protest against this hair salon in Santa Monica that called themselves “JAPS,” which they claimed were the initials of the owners’ names. But obviously it has a different resonance to Asian-Americans, to the Japanese community. Those two events politicized me, to think more critically about Japan’s role in Asia and also the United States, and about war and racism in general.
 
Have you noticed any changes in attitudes towards Japan?
 
So my latest book project is about anti-Japanese sentiments in East Asia. I look at China, South Korea, and Taiwan as case studies to think about the different ways Japan is remembered. China, as you might have guessed, is staunchly anti-Japan but there is growing interest, especially among the young people, in trying to be more reconciliatory. Exposure and interests in Japanese popular culture is a big reason for their different attitude, especially compared to their parents’ generation. However, there is a mounting chauvinism on both sides, especially amongst the government officials. Korea is similar, Taiwan is a little different because of the authoritarian rule of the Nationalist government that relocated to the island after it lost the civil war with the Communists. During the Cold War, a lot of these memories were repressed in China, South Korea, and Taiwan, but afterwards with the democratization of South Korea and Taiwan, and the rise of China, a lot of what the Japanese did – both its legacy and its history, such as the “comfort women” issue – have resurfaced and  being reinterpreted.
 
This is a complicated issue, but would you say you’re generally optimistic [about East Asian relations]?
 
The short answer is I don’t know. First of all, we have to recognize that there has never been two superpowers in East Asia. The Chinese Empire gave away to the Japanese Empire, and since the Cold War Japan has been dominant in the region under US military support. So with the rise of China we are witnessing a completely different regional configuration that has no precedent in the region.

The tension is actually about US presence – you think about South Korea, North Korea, the Taiwan-China strait, Okinawa – it is still US militarism dividing Asia into different sides, much like the Cold War structure that is supposedly over in other parts of the world. Many are advocating that in order for East Asia to have a true dialogue and reconciliation, the United States has to get out first.

The hope is that people will have more common sense and with the internet, other kinds of communication technology, and economic integration, that there will be periodic upheavals, but not an all-out war. But from the recent Japanese parliament decision to revise the security bills and so on, anything can happen.
 
Do you think that it is important to address a US audience with regard to East Asian issues?
 
Definitely, like we said in the Hiroshima panel discussion, I think that Americans do not fully understand why the atomic bomb was dropped. Oftentimes the explanation is that we dropped the bomb to end the war. We know now it’s not so simple. And many of them do not understand the internment camps, and the discrimination against Japanese-Americans or Asians in general. You know the author of Jurassic Park, Michael Creighton? He’s written a novel called “The Rising Sun” that basically demonizes the Japanese in the 80’s and portrayed Japan as an impending threat to American economy and security although the British, for instance, was the largest investor in American real estates at the time. Racism has always been part of war between the US and Japan as John Dowers describes in his brilliant “War Without Mercy.” However, the fact that the Americans never caricatured the Germans the way they depicted the Japanese as subhuman shows a kind of racism or racist hierarchy that existed, and perhaps still with us today. We also must not ignore Japanese racism against Asians within and outside of Japan. For me that’s really important, to let all students, not just American or Japanese, understand the complexity of conflicts, and show how, without interrogating racism, we are all complicit in the buildup of the American and Japanese empires.
 
I’d also like to ask you about your involvement in DEAN. How did you initially get involved?
 
Some of my students were involved in DEAN from the very beginning. When I was the chair of the  Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department (AMES) department, DEAN wanted to have a closer working relationship with the department where the faculty would encourage students to submit their term papers or essays to DEAN. We were in constant conversation about how the department can help develop DEAN, how we can channel some of our best students towards DEAN – and some of them actually did submit their papers and got published. I had a mostly supportive role; this is a student organization so faculty’s role is supplementary rather than to try and direct the vision for the students.
 
What do you think a student organization like DEAN can bring to the table with regard to international affairs and East Asian relations?
 
It’s gratifying for me to see that not just undergraduates, but people from the community come to the events you hold, such as the recent event on the 70th anniversary of the atomic bomb. It’s also good for us academics because it forces us to speak in a language that’s conversant to undergraduates and people who are not academics. DEAN is a kind of conduit for that – I envision it as a much broader platform than just a student publication.

With today’s social media-driven culture that prioritizes sound bites and instant gratification, which has its own merits, a student-run organization that publishes peer-reviewed essays and hold public events on campus is a tremendous achievement. I believe DEAN provides a forum for intellectual and public engagement with issues pertaining to East Asia that is rare not only within Duke, but at other institutions as well. Please keep up the good work!

Sakura Takahashi is a junior at Duke University.