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Rediscovering Natsume Sōseki: Celebrating the Centenary of Sōseki's Arrival in England 1900–1902: With the First English Translation of. Travels in Manchuria and Korea. Translated, introduction By Inger Slgrun Brodey and Sammy I. Tsunematsu. Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2000. vi, 155 pp. $24.95. | The Journal of Asian Studies | Cambridge Core

Rediscovering Natsume Sōseki: Celebrating the Centenary of Sōseki's Arrival in England 1900–1902: With the First English Translation of. Travels in Manchuria and Korea. Translated, introduction By Inger Slgrun Brodey and Sammy I. Tsunematsu. Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2000. vi, 155 pp. $24.95. | The Journal of Asian Studies | Cambridge Core

Rediscovering Natsume Sōseki: Celebrating the Centenary of Sōseki's Arrival in England 1900–1902: With the First English Translation of. Travels in Manchuria and Korea. Translated, introduction By Inger Slgrun Brodey and Sammy I. Tsunematsu. Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2000. vi, 155 pp. $24.95.

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2010

Joshua A. Fogel

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Type: Book Reviews—Japan
Information: The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 61 , Issue 4 , November 2002 , pp. 1372 - 1373
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/3096480[Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2002

Top review from the United States

Nathan Adrian Hagen

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing

Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2002

The book consists of a long introduction written by Inger Brodey, discussing Soseki's works and life, and devoting some attention to the work translated in the body of the book: Soseki's "Travels in Manchuria and Korea". This book has never before been translated into English, unfortunately for good reason. Brodey mentions in the introduction that Japanese critics have generally not been very friendly to the work, deriding it as being a work mainly about Soseki's daily petty concerns and personal health as he travels through Manchuria. (The narration ends before Soseki reached Korea. No-one would be surprised, I think, if Soseki had been disappointed with his own work and decided to end it early since it was achieving nothing of real value.) These were my sentiments exactly; its narrative is tedious and lacking in any development.

I myself am a great admirer of Soseki's works and literary achievements, but this book will add nothing to his reputation and will be ignored.

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Sōseki Natsume: The Loneliness of a Japanese Writer in London

Sōseki Natsume: The Loneliness of a Japanese Writer in London

Sōseki Natsume:
The Loneliness of a Japanese Writer in London

AUTHOR: ANNA ELLIS-REES

PUBLISHED: 3 FEBRUARY 2019

London Bridge. George W. F. Ellis 1925. London Metropolitan Archives.

Many a fine phrase has been spun about old and new London, capturing its bustling spirit, its metropolitan beauty and its romantic heart. But not all those who have lived and breathed the life of the city have such wonderful words to share with us. For some it is not solely a centre of great history, art and culture: it is also a deeply lonely place. And for one man in particular his years in London were ‘the most unpleasant’ of his life.

The man who uttered these words — the protagonist of the story — was the prolific Japanese writer Sōseki Natsume (夏目漱石), who lived from 1867 to 1916. Sōseki resided at ‘The Chase’ in Clapham from 1901 to 1902 — he had already lodged in Gower Street, West Hampstead and Camberwell — and it is not hard to imagine that life in Victorian London for a Japanese man was far from straightforward.

Image of Sōseki on a 1000 yen note. Wikimedia.
To England

Sōseki may be unfamiliar to some of our readers, but speak his name anywhere in Japan, or around scholars of Japanese literature, and you might as well have said ‘Joyce’ or ‘Fitzgerald’ or ‘Orwell’. Considered by many to be the greatest modern Japanese writer, Sōseki published a collection of novels that are loved the world over, ranging from Kokoro, the ode to the relationship between pupil and teacher, to I Am a Cat, an amusing tale told entirely from a feline’s point of view. He is now the key item on the literature syllabus in Japanese schools — and the first stop for those new to Japanese fiction — and his was the face featured on the 1000 yen note from 1984 until 2004.

And yet his literary career only took off after his visit to Britain. Undoubtedly his time in London was a great source of inspiration, and it was here that he experienced the moments of loneliness, the identity crisis and the internal suffering that are so present in his works.

Prior to his departure from Japan, Sōseki was a teacher of English literature. He moved around, from Tokyo to Shikoku and then finally to Kumamoto in the southern Japanese island of Kyūshū. When he was informed by the Ministry of Education that he was to study the English language in Britain for two years, he was relieved. In the first place he disliked teaching. Then again, he felt trapped in an unhappy marriage in which both he and his wife, Nakane Kyōko, suffered deeply from mental health problems. Sadly for Sōseki his sojourn in this country would not heal these wounds.

Crowded street in Tokyo. Underwood & Underwood c.1905. Library of Congress.
Cooped up in a small room

Not everything went according to plan. Sōseki’s original intention was to study not in London but in Cambridge, a desire he could not fulfil with the mean finances he received from the Japanese Ministry of Education. He also considered going to Edinburgh but decided against this: in spite of the fact that he was attracted to the history and character of the city, he was adamant that he did not want to pick up a Scottish accent! It was probably with reluctance that he finally settled in London, and, as the days passed, this feeling soon turned into disappointment.

Academically, Sōseki was able to achieve everything he had come to do. Finding lectures at University College London unsatisfactory, he hired a private tutor to help him master English. His teacher was none other than the great editor of Shakespeare, William James Craig. One might assume that with a world-class mentor and countless books to read Sōseki was in his own kind of paradise.

Instead he quickly became very unhappy. Cooped up in his small room with little money to spend, and spending most of that on his book collection rather than on food and better accommodation, he discovered that the sorrow he had planned to leave behind in Japan only deepened.

Gower Street in Bloomsbury, where Sōseki had lodgings. National Buildings Record.
Tom Thumb

However, Sōseki’s despair was undoubtedly rooted in something much deeper than his immediate surroundings. He suffered agonising loneliness in his struggle to make acquaintances, finding himself with no true English companions. He even saw himself as physically inferior to those he called the ‘tall and good-looking people’:

An unusually small person approaches. Eureka! I think. But when we brush past one another I see he is about two inches taller than me. A strangely complexioned Tom Thumb approaches, but now I realise this is my own image reflected in a mirror. There is nothing for it but to laugh bitterly, and, naturally, when I do so, the image laughs, bitterly, too.

His response to his encounters with the people of London show him as confused and disappointed rather than outraged or victimised. In his letters he describes a particular evening when he was out in Western garb. Two passers-by noticed him and said ‘A handsome Jap’. In his own words Sōseki was unsure ‘whether I should be flattered or offended.’
How thick the moss

However, what seemed to cause the most hurt was how distant the English were from his way of seeing the world:

When I was in England, I was once laughed at because I invited someone for snow-viewing. At another time I described how deeply the feelings of Japanese are affected by the moon, and my listeners were only puzzled … I was invited to Scotland to stay at a palatial house. One day, when the master and I took a walk in the garden, I noted that the paths between the rows of trees were all covered thickly with moss. I offered a compliment, saying that these paths had magnificently acquired a look of age. Whereupon my host replied that he intended soon to get a gardener to scrape all this moss away.

Victorian snow scene set on Hampstead Heath. Robert Finlay McIntyre 19th / early 20th century. Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum.
The entrance to the underworld

London for Sōseki became warped. No longer the great homeland of the authors who had inspired him and of the experts who were changing the face of his country, it was a place of desperate personal misery. In his story of a fictional visit to the Tower of London these feelings translate into the depiction of a city corrupted by a sinister and ominous nature:

Just by its name alone, the Traitor’s Gate is already terrifying. From time immemorial thousands of criminals, buried from sight while living in the tower, were all conveyed from boats to this gate. Once they had left the boat behind and passed through, the sun of the outside world did not shine on them again. The Thames was to them the river Styx, and this gate was the entrance to the Underworld.

Matthew Calbraith Perry. Beckers & Piard c.1855. Wikimedia.
A world power emerging

Today we might associate these feelings with what we call culture shock. But the term is barely adequate in light of the profound societal and international changes of the time. Only in the last quarter of a century had the official ‘opening’ of Japan by foreign powers, and the subsequent transition from feudalism to modernisation and Westernisation, taken place.

The Japanese Empire was in full swing, and there followed several successful territorial claims and military conquests both at home and abroad, most notably in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894 to 1895. And yet it was not until the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905 that Western powers were properly aware of the capabilities of this small island nation.

Therefore one might say that in 1901 and 1902, with Japan not yet taken entirely seriously as an international power beyond Asia, a Japanese man in a European country would hardly have been seen as an equal. And one such man — Sōseki Natsume — saw himself alienated from a world and from a people he had once held in high regard.
Transforming national identity

Sōseki left London in 1902, swearing never to return again. In the space of two years he had gained valuable insights that would influence most of the work he would do as one of Japan’s greatest writers. Themes of isolation and his country’s struggle to reconcile traditional culture with Western influences are heavily present in his novels.

Yet he had also endured a nervous breakdown. The home of the literature he had once cherished — no longer — had left him mentally fragile and emotionally unstable. But he was sure of one thing: that it was time for Japan to stop looking at the West through rose-tinted glasses. For too long had the Meiji veneration of Western expertise prevailed. Japan was a nation in its own right with its own skills, its own knowledge and its own qualities.

This belief seems fitting for a time when Japan was in the process of becoming a true military and colonial threat to the West. One wonders what Sōseki would have made of the position in the world Japan has occupied since his death in 1916.

Japanese woodblock print of Matthew Calbraith Perry. c.1854. Library of Congress.
A dog amongst a pack of wolves

Although this little tale took place over a century ago, it would not go amiss to return for a moment to the twenty-first century, and to dwell on its relevance to the present day. Anyone who has resided overseas will be familiar with feelings of isolation. Repatriation makes these feelings easy to forget.

Sōseki once said that in London he felt ‘like a poor dog that had strayed among a pack of wolves’. Maybe he spoke for all people who have suffered as he did. And while we may entertain the thought that we have moved on from the days when the big city left foreigners like Sōseki alienated, sadly this is still the reality for many of his modern counterparts. We can only hope that the day will come when no one visiting our capital has to share his experience of loneliness and isolation.

Sōseki Natsume. c.1908.
Acknowledgement

London Overlooked would like to thank Anna Ellis-Rees for contributing this article.

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The Edwardian period was indeed a “Gilded Age,” both in England and America. Yet social relationships were strictly defined, and interactions among and between the classes were governed by a series of complex and rigid rules—what we would call “manners”.

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Chinese Indenture in the Interwar Netherlands East Indies and the ‘Coolie Ordinance’: Slavery & Abolition: Vol 45 , No 3 - Get Access

Slavery & Abolition

A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies

Volume 45, 2024 - Issue 3

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Forum: The Abolition of Chinese Indentured Labour Editors: Julia T. Martínez and Claire Lowrie

Chinese Indenture in the Interwar Netherlands East Indies and the ‘Coolie Ordinance’

Gregor Benton

Pages 501-520 | Published online: 17 Aug 2024

====

https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2024.2344391

=====

ABSTRACT

Formal indenture became widespread in the Chinese labour diaspora on Dutch-ruled Sumatra later than in the British Empire and ended later than anywhere else, apart from in some small and isolated settings.

It also took a different form and was differently named as ‘the penal sanction’. Despite attempts by reformists in the East Indies and the Hague to phase it out, the penal sanction survived into the inter-war years because of resistance from vested conservative interests in both places. It was finally wound up as a result of a combination of international pressures from several sides and socioeconomic changes in the colony itself.

KEYWORDS: Penal sanctionindentureChineseNetherlands East IndiesKongsi

김진숙 (노동조합인) - 위키백과, 우리 모두의 백과사전

김진숙 (노동조합인)

위키백과, 우리 모두의 백과사전.

김진숙
신상정보
출생	1960년 7월 7일(64세) 경기도 강화군
성별	여성
국적	대한민국
활동 정보
소속	전국민주노동조합총연맹
경력	조선 용접
상훈	제7회 박종철인권상(2011년)
웹사이트	김진숙 - X

김진숙(1960년 7월 7일 ~ )은 대한민국의 노동운동가이다. 현재 전국민주노동조합총연맹 부산본부 지도위원이다.

활동

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18살부터 보세공장 시다, 신문배달, 우유배달, 시내버스 안내양 등의 일을 했다. 1981년 10월 1일 대한조선공사 (현 한진중공업)에 대한민국 최초 여성 용접사로 입사해 일했다.^[1]

1986년 2월 18일 노조 대의원에 당선됐고, 당선 직후인 2월 20일 노조 집행부의 어용성을 폭로하는 유인물을 제작·배포했다는 이유로 3차례에 걸쳐 부산직할시 경찰국 대공분실에 연행돼 고문을 당했고 같은 해 7월 14일 징계해고됐다. 2009년 11월 2일 '민주화운동관련자명예회복 및 보상 심의 위원회'는 '한진중공업에서의 노조민주화 활동을 민주화 운동으로 인정함과 동시에 부당해고임'을 분명히 하면서 복직을 권고하였으나 사측은 이를 수용하지 않았다.^[2]

2010년 12월 15일, 경영 악화를 이유로 한진중공업 측이 생산직 근로자 400명을 희망퇴직시키기로 결정한 것에 반발하여, 2011년 1월 6일부터는 한진중공업 내의 85호 크레인에서 고공농성에 들어갔다.^[3]^[4] [2011년 11월 10일, 노사 합의에 따라 309일간의 고공 농성을 마치고 크레인에서 내려왔다.

2020년 연내 매각을 목표로 하는 한진중공업에서 인력 감축이 추진되자, 이 움직임에 맞서 노동자들과 연대하는 의미로 6월부터 복직투쟁을 벌이고 있다.^[5]

저서

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"소금꽃나무" 후마니타스 2007년 ISBN 9788990106384

수상

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2011년 제7회 박종철인권상
2020년 제34회 NCCK인권상

같이 보기

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한진중공업 파업 사태

각주

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↑ 최용락 (2020년 7월 28일). “'소금꽃' 김진숙 "해고 35년, 현장으로 돌아가고 싶다"”. 《프레시안》.
↑ 어쓰 (인권운동사랑방 상임활동가) (2020년 7월 27일). “김진숙 지도위원의 복직을 바라며”. 《프레시안》.
↑ “한진重 정리해고 철회 요구, 민주노총 위원 크레인서 고공농성”. 뉴시스. 2010년 1월 6일. 2011년 8월 27일에 확인함.^{[깨진 링크(과거 내용 찾기)]}
↑ “South Korea woman spends 200th day in crane-top protest”. BBC News. 2011년 7월 26일. 2011년 8월 27일에 확인함.
↑ 최용락 (2020년 6월 19일). “'소금꽃' 김진숙 "공장을 내 발로 걸어나오고 싶다"”. 《프레시안》.