TY - CHAP
T1 - Senzaimaru’s Maiden Voyage to Shanghai in 1862
T2 - Brush Conversation between Japanese Travelers and People They Encountered in Qing China
AU - Li, Chor Shing David
AU - Aoyama, Reijiro
N1 - David C. S. Li (李楚成) is Professor and Head of the Department of Chinese
and Bilingual Studies (中文及雙語學系), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
(香港理工大學). He received his BA in English (Hong Kong), MA in Applied Linguistics (France), and PhD in Linguistics (Germany). He has published widely in multilingualism in Greater China, World Englishes, Hong Kong English, China English, bilingual education and language policy, bilingual interaction and code-switching (translanguaging), Cantonese as an additional language, and South Asian Hongkongers’ needs for written Chinese. He speaks Cantonese, English, and Mandarin fluently, is conversant in German and French, and is learning Japanese and Korean. More recent interests focus on the historical spread of written Chinese (Sinitic) and its use as a scripta franca until the early twentieth century in Sinographic East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam). Email: david.cs.li@polyu.edu.hk.
Reijiro Aoyama’s (青山玲二郎) research is concerned with transnational and global processes mediated by migration and the movement of information, symbols, capital and cultural commodities. His research interests include anthropology of work and mobility, narratives of migration, and material and non-material culture of cross-border interactions. He has conducted several long-term ethnographies of the Japanese presence in East Asia, and has published on Japanese diaspora, craftsmanship, and emotional work in service industries, Sino-Japanese animation, and historical cross-border interactions mediated by Sinitic writing. Before taking up his post at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, he taught at Fudan University, Tsinghua University, and City University of Hong Kong. Email: reijirou2000@gmail.com.
PY - 2022/4/29
Y1 - 2022/4/29
N2 - The year 1862 marked the maiden voyage by 51 Japanese passengers to Shanghai after Chinese-Japanese official contact was suspended for over 220 years. After that two-month visit, some of the samurais wrote up their insightful observations and detailed recollections in the form of travelogues or diary accounts. A total of 17 texts were produced. Among the rich details gauged through their lens was a rich variety of anecdotes involving brushtalking—using brush, ink and paper—when they were engaged in communication with Chinese street vendors and shopkeepers, but also acquaintances and friends they made. Verbatim records of the exact words improvised during brushed encounters afford us a glimpse into patterned writing-mediated communication between Chinese and Japanese people interactively face-to-face, despite the absence of a shared spoken language. This seems unparalleled in other ancient cultures, thanks to phonetic inter-subjectivity of written Chinese, a morphographic, non-alphabetic script. Meaning is conveyed morphographically without neither side having to know or ask: ‘How do you say this in your language?’ The Senzaimaru travelers’ collective experiences suggest that brushtalk was a viable modality of transcultural, cross-border communication between Chinese and Japanese literati of Classical Chinese (wenyan 文言) or Literary Sinitic in early modern East Asia.
AB - The year 1862 marked the maiden voyage by 51 Japanese passengers to Shanghai after Chinese-Japanese official contact was suspended for over 220 years. After that two-month visit, some of the samurais wrote up their insightful observations and detailed recollections in the form of travelogues or diary accounts. A total of 17 texts were produced. Among the rich details gauged through their lens was a rich variety of anecdotes involving brushtalking—using brush, ink and paper—when they were engaged in communication with Chinese street vendors and shopkeepers, but also acquaintances and friends they made. Verbatim records of the exact words improvised during brushed encounters afford us a glimpse into patterned writing-mediated communication between Chinese and Japanese people interactively face-to-face, despite the absence of a shared spoken language. This seems unparalleled in other ancient cultures, thanks to phonetic inter-subjectivity of written Chinese, a morphographic, non-alphabetic script. Meaning is conveyed morphographically without neither side having to know or ask: ‘How do you say this in your language?’ The Senzaimaru travelers’ collective experiences suggest that brushtalk was a viable modality of transcultural, cross-border communication between Chinese and Japanese literati of Classical Chinese (wenyan 文言) or Literary Sinitic in early modern East Asia.
UR - https://www.routledge.com/Brush-Conversation-in-the-Sinographic-Cosmopolis-Interactional-Cross-border/Li-Aoyama-Wong/p/book/9780367499402
M3 - Chapter in an edited book (as author)
SN - 978-0- 367- 49940- 2
T3 - Routledge Studies in the Early History of Asia
SP - 111
EP - 126
BT - Brush Conversation in the Sinographic Cosmopolis
A2 - Li, David C. S.
A2 - Aoyama, Reijiro
A2 - Wong, Tak-Sum
PB - Rouledge
CY - London & New York
ER -