 Hello and welcome to Global Connections. I'm Patrick Bratton here with you again today and I've got a special guest with me, one of my colleagues, Dr. John David Ann, a professor of history at Hawaii Pacific University. So welcome to Think Tech. Thanks very much, Patrick. Happy to be here. Now you've been on various Think Tech shows before in the past, right? I have, yes. A number of Think Tech shows. In fact, recently I was on a Think Tech show with Jay talking about the Brexit. Oh, interesting. Now, use of Professor History. I mean, you've been here at HPU for a number of years, but I'm to understand that you're an upper-north midwesterner, right? That's true. Born and raised in Minnesota, went to the University of Minnesota Morris for my undergraduate and the University of Minnesota Minneapolis for my graduate degrees. So, you know, just Minnesota through and through, but, you know, I got a job offer to come to Hawaii and sure enough, I moved my family here in 1997. It's been here almost 20 years. Oh. So, in my come, Aina, I hope so. We can all aspire, right? Okay, that's correct. I mean, you never really know for sure, but I think I am at this point. So, yeah. I mean, you have a long distinguished career as a historian of Asia and U.S.-Asia relations. I mean, Minnesota has always had this reputation for Asian studies as well, yes. Yeah, that's interesting. You know, the University of Minnesota has, and you know, we're in the middle of the country landlocked, well, I guess Lake Superior, but really landlocked. But I think that's part of the reason why Minnesotans have reached out so far in the globe because we're so like, okay, it's the middle of a Minnesota winter, you're freezing cold, you can't go anywhere, not even outside your home. And so, I think it's produced this kind of thirst for adventure and internationalism among Minnesotans. So, when I was an undergraduate, I did an exchange program at University of Minnesota, and I went to the University of Essex in Colchester, England. I also spent some time as a resident manager at a house on the University of Minnesota campus, which had students from all over the world, and that was great fun. And then I started studying U.S.-East Asian relations through the YMCA, and the YMCA is an organization that went all over the world in its missionary work, set up branches in Japan, in China, then in Southeast Asia, in the Philippines, all over East Asia and Southeast Asia. So my interest in the YMCA really kind of led me to East Asia. And from there, I've written books on U.S.-East Asian relations and traveled there quite often. Why the YMCA? I mean, was it a little too much disco? No, actually, the thing about the YMCA is the archives are at the University of Minnesota. Oh, okay, interesting. So, I actually had a graduate course in the archives on the YMCA. So, every time that graduate course met, then I would take some time afterwards and I would walk through the archives and see all these boxes. And when it came time to choose my dissertation topic, I thought, okay, China, 150-page boxes, way too much, okay? Japan, 15-page boxes, that's doable. Mexico, 15-page boxes, that's also doable. So I called up the academic advisor for Mexico. He said, I'm not interested in that at all. So I thought, okay, I'm not going to do Mexico. Sure. So then it was Japan. And the Japan advisor was very supportive. So that's kind of how I got to the YMCA. Also, I mentioned also, too, sort of the zeitgeist of the time period. I mean, you know, with the sort of, many people talking about the rise of Japan back then and a lot of both the sort of love-hate relationship that we had with Japan, you know, both having a strong security relationship but all those years of sort of Japan bashing and things like that. Yes. I mean, this was the late 1980s. And you're exactly right. You know, the Japanese were on the rise. They bought Rockefeller Center. Seemed that they were taking over the world. And of course, I was, you know, not oblivious to that, engaged in that. So you're right that that was also very influential. Interesting. I mean, how have you, I mean, one of the things that's interesting is that, you know, as Mark Twain says, you know, the past doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Right. And so a lot of the language that we've heard the past 10 or 15 years about the rise of China, China buying everything and all this sorts of things. I mean, I detect echoes of that earlier sort of period people concerned about Japan back, you know, 20, 25 years ago. I mean, do you see sort of similarities, too, as well? Or do you see important differences? Well, there are definitely similarities between that time and this. Of course, the China's economic muscle is similar to what Japan had in the late 1980s where the Japanese were coming to Hawaii and buying things with cash, doubling home prices here in Hawaii in 1988. And so there's some of that same thing going on in Manhattan and other, you know, Los Angeles, other parts of the U.S. with Chinese money. So that's definitely happening. The economic threat or the economic competition between the United States and China is real and in some ways it resembles that economic competition between Japan and the United States. But I think the big difference is that China represents more than an economic threat. It represents a military threat. Whereas Japan never did. Japan, of course, was a security ally of the United States. Japan had a very small army. No offensive capability in the 1980s. And the United States had essentially built the Japanese army by giving Japan surplus weapons and kind of second-generation technology in its security agreements. Those kinds of things could be transferred to Japan. So that's, I think, the big difference is in terms of regional hegemony in East Asia, the Japanese never represented a military threat. But the Chinese represent a very real military threat to the United States in the region of East Asia and the Pacific. I mean, it kind of gets to some of the aspects you're embarking on a lot of interesting research projects this summer and into this fall. And you've got, I want to talk about some of the two tracks that you're doing. And I think that what we've just mentioned really feeds into that. I mean, one thing that might sound a little esoteric when we start, but one of the things you're interested in is sort of these conceptions of modernity. And if we think about the rise of Japan, the rise of China, or much of the rest of Asia, in many instances it's these countries grappling with mixing Western and Asian concepts of modernity and development and so on. I mean, it seems in a sense an easy thing to think about. But on the other hand, if we think about modernity, it can be quite complex. I mean, how would you frame this so that our watchers can sort of come to terms with it? Right, right. So the way that I've framed it in the book is to talk about, first of all, I'm looking at influences. What were the influence on Japanese and Chinese intellectuals and then American intellectuals? And then I'm really looking at modernity through the lens of rationalism, scientific rationalism, the idea of progress. And then seeing how the intellectuals themselves shaped or shaped their definitions of modernity, and that includes, in East Asia, a very strong emphasis on the nation as being kind of the locus of modern thinking and the locus of modern life. Not so much in the U.S., although I think it's still important in the U.S. so nationalism is also part of that. And then modernity is typically defined as also having the kind of the unfettered individual in the agency of the individual. And one of the things that surprised me in my research is that you find any number of Japanese and Chinese intellectuals who believe in the cultivation of the individual in almost a very American kind of way, which I didn't expect to find. But what's going on there is that Confucianism has within it a very strong strain of the cultivation of the individual. Chushi Confucianism, which is really the traditional Confucianism and which is really the one that's taught in the schools in China and Japan, has this very strong emphasis on the cultivation of the individual. And the intellectuals that I studied in the early time period in the late 19th century also have that idea that you need to free and cultivate the individual in order to have a successful nation and in turn to modernize or make that nation modern. Interesting, because often when you take courses on history of Asia or Asian culture and so on, I mean, a shorthand that's often used in the West for understanding sort of Asian culture, Asian history is to de-emphasize the individual. Exactly. We've got this sort of collective identity and hierarchies and so on and so forth. So are you saying that perhaps that's not necessarily always the case, or perhaps that's... Yeah, I think that's been over-emphasized in American curriculums and certainly in American stereotypes about East Asians. That's absolutely the case, that we've kind of lost a real analysis of Japan and China in this idea of groupism. Now, you can, of course, even today you can find some vestiges of the old kind of loyalty and duty values of the pre-modern period in Japan and China, but those... I mean, they're still a part of the culture, but they're not central, I would say. We've got a picture I think we just had of your book on the YMCA, right? Right, well, this was actually one book after the YMCA. That book was a study of cultural diplomacy between the U.S. and Japan in the period before World War II. And I think one of the things about that book that's important is it shows that the relationship between the United States and Japan deteriorated not just at the official level, the State Department to Foreign Ministry, but it also deteriorated at the unofficial level. A kind of people's diplomacy was very engaged between the United States and Japan. And yet, in the 1930s when the Japanese invaded Manchuria and then they invaded China, the rest of China in 1937, that unofficial relationship begins to deteriorate long before the official one does. And it's like a premonition or a foreshadowing of those major tensions that are to come. One of the arguments I make in the book is that by the late 1930s, then you have no... because the people's diplomacy has really fallen apart. You have no way for unofficial or informal channels of communication between the United States and Japan. Okay. So then, you know, when the actual official relationship, you know, falls apart, then you have no way to go behind... there's no backdoors for the United States and Japan at that point. And I think it contributes to the March to War in 1939 to 1941. Just to clarify for our watchers, I mean, what's the difference between sort of diplomacy as we normally conceptualize it and what you've termed sort of cultural diplomacy? Right, right. So cultural diplomacy is actually the work of peoples and ideas and what we would term culture. Art, architecture, you know, the transmission of... or the sending books back and forth, building libraries. So it's culture as we have kind of traditionally defined it only when we think about it in terms of diplomacy. It's using those art forms or other forms of culture as a way to actually do diplomacy. And it can be official in that the State Department actually sent musicians on tours in the 1950s and 60s. Been going to the USSR, right? Exactly. Or Louis Armstrong going to Egypt. You know, there are lots of examples here. That was cultural diplomacy done by the State Department, but you also have lots of private examples of cultural diplomacy. For instance, American missionaries to Japan, coming back from Japan and setting up the institution called the Institute of Pacific Relations in 1925, established, founded right here in Honolulu. And it became a very important forum for doing cultural diplomacy between the United States and Japan. And trying to find common interests and doing research projects in East Asia and some research projects in Japan. So ultimately it fell apart. The IPR became kind of an arm of the American government in World War II. But for a time there, they engaged in some very creative one-to-one cultural diplomacy. And they didn't even want the State Department involved. Interesting. We'll stop for a second here and we'll come back after a couple of announcements. Aloha, I'm Chantel Seville, host of The Savvy Chick Show on Think Tech, Hawaii. This show is for you. It's all about inspiring and empowering girls of the future to do what they love, get out there and be healthy, fit and confident. If you're up for that, 11 a.m. every Wednesday, I'll see you there. Aloha, my name is Carl Campania and I am the host of Think Tech, Hawaii's Education Movers, Shakers and Reformers. I invite you to come watch our show on ThinkTechHawaii.com. You can also see our shows on YouTube as well. You can Google search those. I appreciate the time. I hope that you do join us as we learn about education, about the educational system here in Hawaii, what the challenges are, what the benefits are, and how much our kids are learning. Thank you. Hope you join us. Welcome back to Global Connections. I'm Patrick Racken. I'm talking with John David M. We're talking about sort of culture diplomacy and conceptions and maternity in Asia. Before the break, John was sort of describing to us the differences between traditional sort of track one diplomacy versus other types of sort of non-official diplomacy, cultural diplomacy. One of the things I was curious about to kind of jump back to an earlier point about modernity and Asian conceptions and modernity, what role does say education, educational exchanges play? Because, you know, at face value when we think about the influences of modernity in Asia, the easy way that people look at it is to look at people from Asia who go to the U.S. or go to Europe do studies and come back. So, for example, you know, the father of the Indian constitution, Dr. Ambedkar, he studied in the U.S. and was in some ways influenced in comparison to some of his other Indian independence leaders that were more influenced by sort of their time in the U.K. I mean, how do we see that in Asia, people like Sun Yat-sen or some of these other figures as well? So, very good question and an important part of the book, actually, well, so Sun Yat-sen and Chen Ka-shek and Liang Qichao who I actually have a picture of him if you want to pull up some of those pictures. They and that's actually a picture of the Japanese parliament yeah, the parliament building. That's where I was doing my research, not at the diet but right across the street. That's a beautiful area. It's a very pretty area. But, you know, one of the things about Liang is that he didn't study in the U.S. Liang studied in Japan as well as Chen Ka-shek and Sun Yat-sen and many others. Most intellectuals from East Asia actually didn't come to the United States in the first couple of generations. They went to Japan especially Chinese who would have had the opportunity maybe to go to the United States. Many of the many of those most influential leaders and intellectuals actually ended up in Japan and part of the reason why is they were very interested in the Japanese success because the Japanese in the late 19th century had thrown off forms of informal imperialism from the West, the unequal treaties essentially. They had modernized their economy and they had begun to look like at least a modern nation in East Asia. It was astonishing for westerners but it was also astonishing now that's actually Fukuzawa who actually helped in the modernization of Japan and really is the first great, maybe the greatest Japanese intellectual of the 19th and the 20th century. But Fukuzawa argued that the individual had to be made free in Japan in order for the Japanese nation to become free and independent. He wanted to overthrow the old Tokugawa system of loyalties the kind of loyalty to your lord he believed that was a terrible system. So Fukuzawa was very influential. Fukuzawa actually did go to the United States not to study that as a part of diplomatic missions. So there's some influence there's some western influence on Fukuzawa but Fukuzawa is seen by Americans and Japanese and even academic historians today as a westernizer, pure and simple. And what I've done in the book is really reconceptualized Fukuzawa's role and argued that no, no he's not just a westernizer he's actually taking from his own traditions he's taking from the west and he's really conceiving of Japan as this place that the Japanese people need to become independent individuals. Really it's totally surprising to me. So Liang and Liang's is the next picture on that slide show. This is Liang Chichao right there as a young man and Liang actually he's a part of a reform movement in the late 1890s. The reform movement falls apart Empress steps in and threatens to kill him and Kong Yu Wei they flee and where do they go they go to Japan. Liang spends the next several years in Japan and actually really is very deeply influenced by Japanese modernization by Japanese intellectuals when Liang reads about the west he goes to the west but much later when he reads about the west he actually gets his information from through Japanese translations of western texts so Liang's influence from Japan is very heavy Liang is also interested in what we call a neoconfusionist approach of Wang Yang Ming thought this is getting a little complex but essentially Wang was a provincial governor he was also an intellectual but he needed people who were willing to help out willing to be good citizens loyal to the governor willing to work hard for the good of the people and this is how Liang conceives of what China has to do to become more modern its population must become more loyal, more devoted to the cause of China more willing to work hard for China kind of the Machiavellian type of men of courage the Chinese need men of courage to fight for China and Liang identifies this in Wang Yang Ming thought so Liang has less often been presented as a pure westernizer but he's still presented within that framework of the westernization of China and this is a mistake so part of the book is correcting that revising that and showing Liang Liang is a very complex individual with a lot of different influences one of the things I'm you mentioned this influence in how everyone study in Japan I read a few years ago that relatively recent biography of Chiang Kai-shek and learning about how influential that time was for him going to Japan that really marked his outlook and one could almost even say is way alive but this is kind of interesting paradox or irony of all of these people from various parts of Asia coming to Japan to learn to think about nationalism independence from colonialism only to have Japan inflict colonialism on them 10 or so years later and I'm struck by this kind of irony of when like say colonial powers in Europe they would take in the elites from their colonies and train them to school and they'd come back with these ideas of Rousseau and individualism hey wait a second right we were taught individualism democracy why are we colonial subjects it's kind of the similar sort of paradox with all of these people who went to Japan to learn about modernity and being independent Asians at the same time later Japan tried to colonize them yes yeah I mean it is a similar kind of thing is Chiang Kai-shek using his Japanese kind of influenced ideas against Japan in the 1930s or to free himself from Japanese power not so much so it's not quite a direct parallel to like Gandhi who uses Western ideas against the west but I think there are some similarities there definitely yeah so actually what was just on the screen was my visit to the UNESCO archives oh interesting and this is okay I wasn't attending parties all week but this was a little it looks quite festive John too festive maybe but this was just a party at the end of the week but the UNESCO archives were really fascinating and fascinating because of course there's this tense relationship between the United States government and UNESCO and I looked into the roots of that this is the other project this is the cultural diplomacy project so that was great fun but also kind of us blew me away I mean what's something that give us a nugget so there's another slide in there not the United Nations that's actually before this I'll talk a little bit about the United Nations though so and that's my trip to Japan so I've got two projects here going and we're kind of flipping between the two but this is me and two sumo junior sumo they get bigger than that actually yeah over time do you have that there's that traditional sumo wrestler dish that you can eat no I've never eaten it it's quite good if I went by the stables okay yeah so I asked these two guys the archives was closed just to be clear so I went in search for the sumo basho which is the tournament and I found these two guys and they were walking and I thought I'm not going to ask them for their picture this Japanese older man runs up to me and says no no I'll ask them for you and I'm like really they couldn't crush me but that was perfectly fine they were very friendly so during that trip I was at the National Archives of Japan and got some good information on some intellectuals closer to World War II and during World War II but going back to my other project the cultural diplomacy project I was both this spring I was in Geneva at the United Nations and that was the one picture and then I was also at the UNESCO archives at the UNESCO building in Paris and they were both very fruitful and you see the picture there the UNESCO material was very interesting because in the late 70s in the early days there were real tensions between the United States government and UNESCO and the US government cuts off funding but there are always those who support the ideals of UNESCO which is education, science and culture really to spread it internationally to do education to promote these things globally and so that was actually the cover of a pamphlet a promotional pamphlet to try to argue that UNESCO was a good thing for the US and for the world so the research was fascinating the food was fantastic and I had a very good time there are worse places to do research than Paris and Geneva that's actually the UN archives there in Geneva and this was remodeled in 2012 with money from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation actually contributed money to build the archives in the first place so I thought it was very interesting they're still involved they're still committed to the ideals of the UN we've just got a a minute or two left on the show I want to maybe, so what are you planning to do maybe in the future where is John David Ann moving in terms of research? well the two projects are really a lot it's probably too much right now so I'm hoping in the fall that I can get the one project the modernist project I have five chapters on that one chapter book I'm hoping to finish those two chapters in the fall with the sabbatical that I got and then I hope to get at least one chapter done on the cultural diplomacy project the US cultural diplomacy project and try to work on that through the spring and the summer I'm going off to Washington DC and then New York City for more research on that project in a little bit here and hopefully just stay home maybe next summer just stay home like crazy to try to finish that project so the cultural diplomacy project I envision as a project which has a wider audience so I hope to turn that into a trade book okay interesting but you know a book for a wider audience we'll see if that works out or not but I think it's a very important project because when you look I mean it's when you look at American internationalism right now it's really dominated by the American military presence and the American focus on militarization because of the terrorism threat and that's kind of it's distorted historically distorted the way that the United States has approached internationalism so I'm hoping with this second book to demonstrate that historically the United States has done a lot of cultural diplomacy has not relied on the military exclusively and that in some cases has been very successful in its cultural diplomacy kind of provide a model or a template for going back to a more balanced approach to our diplomatic efforts excellent well we look forward to having you on again maybe as you get done with the project and talk about that well thank you very much John for coming and speaking to us at Global Connections no problem I'm happy to do it excellent and I was Patrick Bratton here with Global Connections and I'll see you guys again next week