College Magazine

Asian Studies at Gettysburg

by Jim Hale

Chalk in hand, Prof. Eleanor Hogan sketches a tree and a cat, then turns to her class with a question. "Why is the cat in the tree and not on it?"

Students quickly get the point: prepositions are fundamentally arbitrary and have to be learned. As children, most students learned them in English. In Hogan's classroom, they will put their preconceptions aside and learn them in Japanese. For example, naka means either inside or among, unless you're talking about a building or large room, in which case you omit the word altogether. Then there are postpositions, which come after nouns and identify them as subjects, direct objects, or indirect objects. To make things even more interesting, Japanese employs three different writing systems -- or four if you count romaji, which spells Japanese words with the Roman alphabet. Speaking of counting, Japanese speakers also use different sets of numbers depending on the physical shape of the objects in question. And grammar's not the only challenge. Japanese words are woven into an intricate network of culture and courtesy. For example, origato is a polite expression of gratitude. However, the word becomes deeply discourteous if used in conjunction with any sort of request. "There are no thank-yous in advance in Japanese," said Asian Studies Prof. Midori Y. Morris.

No wonder most language classes meet five days a week in the College's newest department, Asian Studies, which was created three years ago. Students can take up to four years of Japanese and complete an interdisciplinary major or minor in Japanese Studies. Also available is a minor in East Asian Studies, in which students choose to focus on either Japan or China. The department also offers two years of Chinese language courses. Plans call for a third and fourth year in the near future and eventually a major and minor.

From Missouri to Beijing
One student couldn't wait to major in Chinese, so the department worked with Kinsey Wright '07 to create an individual program. "Kinsey is definitely smitten and bitten" by the language and the culture, said political science Prof. Fritz Gaenslen, who co-chairs Asian Studies with Hogan.

Wright's major led her to a stage in Beijing, where she found herself singing a sly parody of "The East is Red," the anthem of China's cataclysmic Cultural Revolution. Two thousand people were in the audience at the official opening of an art gallery, including police and government officials who understood Wright's Chinese all too well -- and angrily switched off the sound system. Wright's friends, courageous dissident artists whose work she had come to respect during her study-abroad experience last summer, escaped punishment because they'd had the wit to ask a foreigner to mock the Maoist hymn rather than risking it themselves. Wright, whose hometown is Monroe City, Mo., was less surprised to find herself in China than in Gettysburg. Since high school -- when she read Pearl Buck's classic novel of China, The Good Earth -- she had known she would major in Chinese. But where? Several colleges beckoned, but Gettysburg offered an unusual opportunity. "I could have been a number in some big Asian Studies program," she said, "or be one of the first students in Chinese at Gettysburg and help create the program."

Gettysburg has proved to be an excellent fit for Wright, thanks to study-abroad opportunities and close relationships with her professors. Last summer, she devoted a month to a Gettysburg-sponsored stay at the Beijing Educational Institute, where she studied Chinese in close collaboration with Gettysburg Asian Studies Prof. Ruihua Shen, followed by four months at Gettysburg's affiliate in Beijing, Capital Normal University. After immersing herself in Chinese language and culture through those experiences -- and taking all of Gettysburg's Chinese courses plus advanced individual coursework the department created for her -- Wright can converse in Mandarin and enjoy movies without subtitles. She knows some 2,000 Chinese characters. "Writing them is like making art," Wright said. "Each one is a little drawing." "As soon as she knows three thousand characters, she will be able to do anything," said Shen.

"When your professors are your friends, it's a pleasure to go class," said Wright, who plans to return to China this summer. She also hopes to help out with the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, and eventually to get involved with human rights work in China, perhaps making education available to women in rural areas or working with people with AIDS.

If China sneezes...
Learning Chinese requires hard work and dedication. "This isn't something you study ten minutes before class," Wright said, but she feels the effort is worth it, not only in terms of appreciating a beautiful and ancient culture, but also in planning pragmatically for the future. "My sister went to China in college," Wright said, "and she told me, ¿China is it. You should learn the language. If you do you'll never have trouble finding a job.' And she was right. It's the most spoken language in the world. Somebody will always want to do business with China. If China sneezes, the rest of the world catches cold."

Wright's geopolitical perspective fits in perfectly with her minor in political science, but also points to the interdisciplinary nature of Gettysburg's Asian Studies department, which includes classes offered by the political science, history, management, religion, visual arts, music, philosophy, and anthropology departments. China's growing economic influence has sparked something of a "China buzz," Gaenslen said. "It's probably the fastest growing language in high schools in the United States." However, he and Hogan agreed that many students who come to Chinese with an eye on its practical value end up being seduced by the culture.

Conversely, many students approach Japanese from the opposite direction. Rather than beginning with a practical interest in the language -- as Hogan and many others did during Japan's economic surge of the 1980s -- today's students are often first attracted to Japanese popular culture. "Anime (sophisticated animated cartoons) and videogames play an important part," said Japanese Prof. Leo Yip. "Students see a lot of Japanese and Chinese characters (writing) in them and in manga (graphic novels)." Anime was the focus of film studies Prof. Jim Udden's fall 2005 first-year seminar, Animated Japan: A Look at an Asian Culture through a Global Art Form. Approximately half of the seminar's 14 members were studying Japanese. "Just about all of them said anime was one of the key reasons," Udden said, adding that there was a similar correlation in his Japanese Cinema course.

Japanese beginnings
The Asian Studies department is rooted in the vision of College Trustee Sotaro Ishii and economics Prof. Katsuyuki "Kats" Niiro. The two became acquainted when Ishii studied at Gettysburg in 1976-77, and they have worked together since then to bring Japanese and Asian studies to campus.
Though courses on Asia have been in the curriculum for decades, Japanese instruction began in 1992, thanks to the persistent advocacy of Niiro. The first full-time Japanese instructor was hired in 1993. A second position was added three years later through the philanthropy of Ishii, who has served as a trustee of the College since 1999. That same year, one of the Japanese positions was converted to tenure-track, and Hogan was chosen to fill the position after an international search. As of April, another search was under way for a tenure-track post in Chinese.

Recent years have been a period of remarkable growth for Asian Studies at Gettysburg, fueled by the continuing generosity of the Ishii family and by grants totaling $1.5 million from the Henry R. Luce and Freeman foundations. Some major accomplishments include expansion of the Japanese tenure-track faculty from two to three, the establishment of a Japan-themed residential house for students, and the hosting of Asian Studies academic conferences on campus. In addition, the Freeman grant supported the cataloguing, appraising, and digitizing of Musselman Library's extensive resources in Asian art. More than 4,000 items have been donated by faculty, alumni, and friends over many years. (See story on page 00.)
 "No other area of the educational program has witnessed such remarkable development as Asian Studies, and Japanese in particular, nor has any other area witnessed such convergence of external support," Provost Dan DeNicola wrote in 2005. "Gettysburg has in the past five years become prominent among liberal arts colleges in the area of Japanese Studies."

One indication of Gettysburg's growing stature is the success of Drew Sconce '03, who received a full fellowship covering all costs for the master's program in Japanese language and literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. "Competition in graduate Japanese programs around the country is on the rise, and one of the main reasons I was accepted to the program at UMass was the amount of unique coursework that Gettysburg offers," Sconce said.

Study abroad is key
Whether students focus on Japanese or Chinese, study abroad is a vital part of the Asian Studies experience at Gettysburg.

In China, students live, study, and volunteer at Gettysburg's affiliate, Capital Normal University in Beijing. Students also have opportunities like the Freeman-funded experience at the Beijing Educational Institute that Wright shared with Herman Collier and David Shadick, both '07, James Dolan '06, and recent graduates Benjamin Heung and Andrea Stevens, both '05. The group attended classes, partnered with local students who escorted them around the city and school, saw the Forbidden City, and traveled to the Great Wall and the seaside city of Shanhaiguan. In Japan, Gettysburg is affiliated with Kansai Gaidai University in Hirakata City, between the business and industrial center of Osaka and the ancient capital of Kyoto. The program includes instruction in Japanese language, courses on Japanese topics in English, and other opportunities such as living with a Japanese host family, field trips to cultural and historical sites, study of traditional arts, and visits to Japanese businesses. Students can also attend other universities in Japan.

The international experience also extends to the campus, and not merely in the emails sent and blogs (online web logs) posted by students who are overseas. Each year, a recent graduate of Kansai Gaidai comes to Gettysburg to serve as a teaching assistant in Japanese, helping to infuse the department with the freshest trends of a living language and its popular culture. The assistant leads a weekly lunch during which students converse and play games in Japanese. The 2005-06 academic year was Akari Hiraga's third and final year as teaching assistant. "She will be dearly missed," Hogan said. In addition, students can also join the Japan Club or the China Club or take part in numerous events related to Asian Studies that are available on campus, including films, concerts, guest speakers, exhibits, and much more. The department also takes advantage of the many cultural offerings of nearby Washington, D.C.

'Remarkable developments'
Such co-curricular opportunities complement the department's rich interdisciplinary curriculum and state-of-the-art language instruction resources.

The College's Language Resource Center (LRC), located along with Asian Studies in recently renovated Breidenbaugh Hall, is "very crucial," Hogan said. The LRC offers a library of the latest learning software and much more. Students can drop in for one-on-one help or gather with classmates for a group project. Students can play - or help create - instructional computer games, or get a digital voiceprint that compares their pronunciation with that of a native speaker. "We don't care what method you use to learn the material, as long as you learn it," Hogan said. "If you want to play games, fine. If you want to sit down and handwrite flash cards, that's fine too. Everybody learns in different ways." Such flexible, inventive, and wide-ranging dedication to students underscores DeNicola's assessment of the Asian Studies department's developing history: "a story of remarkable developments at Gettysburg - a changed and enriched curricular landscape and co-curricular programs - that have resulted from institutional vision and commitment, excellent faculty work, and the generous support of the Ishii family and the Henry Luce and Freeman foundations."