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About the Asian contributors to Oriental Adventures, or Who even were these guys?
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<blockquote data-quote="Panda-s1" data-source="post: 8031097" data-attributes="member: 59554"><p>well alright. I appreciate the picture.</p><p></p><p>a few things I notice: 1) <em>very</em> heavily skewed toward Japanese things, though given the history of this book I guess I shouldn't be surprised. 2) aside from primary sources most of the books by Asian authors are about specific aspects and culture, like folklore. a lot of the books about broader culture and history are by western authors. I hope you understand that up until relatively recently a lot of western academics had.... interesting views on Asian subjects, and if that's the viewpoint the writers were going by it could very well skew this book a certain way.</p><p></p><p>like on a personal note, as a Korean American what kind of book title is "The Koreans and Their Culture"? like, what about our culture? why you gotta mention it separately? less personally I look up the book and it's from...1951. yeah I'm not exactly expecting any sort of fair or unproblematic views if I'm honest, and there's no indication of whether or not he goes into the history of Korea, or whether or not he's talking about what Korea was like in the past or what it was like at the time he wrote the book. a book on modern Korean culture feels useless if you're trying offer a medieval fantasy version of it. I get that OA doesn't go heavily into Korea, but it's still the only source they offer other than a book about folklore.</p><p></p><p>and yeah, I realize that might very well be the only source they had, but that's part of the problem here. today I don't even need to leave my home if I want to find resources on Korean culture, but that wasn't the case back then and yet they still made an entry about it. also if they cover Mongolia and Vietnam, where's the sources about those places? maybe I'm missing it? I know they don't go into those places heavily, but listing no source feels like a tiny red flag. </p><p></p><p>I hope you understand why this book might be seen as dated and potentially harmful, especially now that I know the haphazard nature of its creation. if this book was just "Japanese Adventures!" I doubt we'd be talking about it the same way we are now, but that's not the case. the book skews heavily Japanese but they still called it "Oriental Adventures", and they're serving real world cultures as exotic and mysterious settings under the thin veneer of fictionalized countries, especially at a time when academic resources may have been less than stellar.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Panda-s1, post: 8031097, member: 59554"] well alright. I appreciate the picture. a few things I notice: 1) [I]very[/I] heavily skewed toward Japanese things, though given the history of this book I guess I shouldn't be surprised. 2) aside from primary sources most of the books by Asian authors are about specific aspects and culture, like folklore. a lot of the books about broader culture and history are by western authors. I hope you understand that up until relatively recently a lot of western academics had.... interesting views on Asian subjects, and if that's the viewpoint the writers were going by it could very well skew this book a certain way. like on a personal note, as a Korean American what kind of book title is "The Koreans and Their Culture"? like, what about our culture? why you gotta mention it separately? less personally I look up the book and it's from...1951. yeah I'm not exactly expecting any sort of fair or unproblematic views if I'm honest, and there's no indication of whether or not he goes into the history of Korea, or whether or not he's talking about what Korea was like in the past or what it was like at the time he wrote the book. a book on modern Korean culture feels useless if you're trying offer a medieval fantasy version of it. I get that OA doesn't go heavily into Korea, but it's still the only source they offer other than a book about folklore. and yeah, I realize that might very well be the only source they had, but that's part of the problem here. today I don't even need to leave my home if I want to find resources on Korean culture, but that wasn't the case back then and yet they still made an entry about it. also if they cover Mongolia and Vietnam, where's the sources about those places? maybe I'm missing it? I know they don't go into those places heavily, but listing no source feels like a tiny red flag. I hope you understand why this book might be seen as dated and potentially harmful, especially now that I know the haphazard nature of its creation. if this book was just "Japanese Adventures!" I doubt we'd be talking about it the same way we are now, but that's not the case. the book skews heavily Japanese but they still called it "Oriental Adventures", and they're serving real world cultures as exotic and mysterious settings under the thin veneer of fictionalized countries, especially at a time when academic resources may have been less than stellar. [/QUOTE]
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