Formatting

First Things First

Your format should look pretty similar to this:

The Introduction and Thesis Statement

The purpose of the introduction is, of course, to introduce your work. It is also a place to analyze the question at hand and demonstrate how you will approach an answer to the question. It is NOT the place to put the background history of everything you want to talk about. Many students focus too much on historical background–it is acceptable to add some historical insights, of course, but almost all of your historical citations should be in the body of your essay.

Oh yeah–there’s no law of writing that says you have to start writing your paper with the introduction. I actually write the intro last, as it’s really hard to introduce something that you haven’t written yet. You should have a good idea about your thesis before proceeding to the body paragraphs, of course.

Types of Introductions

There are a few methods to writing your introduction, and you should choose one that you feel fits your writing style best. In papers of 5-6 pages in length, I almost always use a short and punchy introduction. As an example of a very short introduction, here’s one I wrote for a 5 page assignment (similar to this assignment!) in 2007:

On the other hand, here is a more traditional introduction, with a little bit of a vague thesis at the end. I wrote this in 2005.

Writing a Thesis Statement

For this essay, you should include a clean, coherent thesis statemen. However, DO NOT feel like you have to write a unique, groundbreaking thesis statement. This is just a mid-term essay, and you are just learning to be a historian. Here are some examples I provided for the 2010 midterm essay:

• “The economic influence of modernization greatly improved the standing of the Japanese middle class as evidenced in Naomi, as seen in the rise of zaibatsu, and the desire to spread prosperity through the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

• “While modernization and industrialization in Japan solidified economic and military prosperity at home, this development came at the cost of mistreatment of the colonized Koreans and exploitation of lower-class labor.”

Your job as a writer, then, is to convince the reader that your thesis is valid.

The purpose of your introduction is to introduce your argument, and you never get a second chance at a first impression, right? So, make a strong first impression with a good thesis.

The Body

On Writing

Write as many body paragraphs as you need. Don’t be limited to 3 body paragraphs because your high school teacher told you that’s how essays are written–they only told you that because they don’t have time to read 150 essays (it’s true!). Use transitions to connect paragraphs and show that you can relate your own ideas to the author’s arguments. Take a look at this paragraph that analyzes the works of three authors:

Organization

Each body paragraph should have a single, clearly defined topic. You can talk about several authors or several events as long as they relate to the topic of the paragraph. If you need more than one paragraph to explain your point, use a transition sentence into another paragraph.

Topics?

We’ve covered a lot of topics in class. Please keep in mind the distinction between the Japanese people and the Japanese empire. Here is just a sample of what we’ve talked about that you can include in your essay: samurai; tenant farmers; the Imperial Diet; the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa Emperors; the Russo-Japanese and Sino-Japanese Wars; the People’s Rights Movement; labor unions; middle-class life; gender distinctions; women’s rights; riots; socialism and communism; reactionaries; unequal treaties; the colonies and possessions in Korea, Manchuria, Okinawa, Taiwan, etc.; treatment of “foreigners” and colonized subjects (Americans, Ainu, Okinawans, Koreans, Chinese, Europeans). That’s just what we talked about leading to the time immediately following World War I. You don’t need to use all of these examples, of course, but your essay should include at least some of these topics and can include discussion of the movies we watched. Ultimately, you should focus on topics that you believe will best support your argument. Think of it like food–use just enough topics and you’ll be happy; use too few, and you’ll be hungry; use too many, and you’ll feel bloated.

Footnotes?

Those little sentences at the end of the above image are called “footnotes,” and they’re pretty much standard in history. When you use a quote from a source or are talking about an author’s specific viewpoint, you should use a footnote to announce that this information comes from another source. Doing this clearly defines your arguments from the arguments of other people. You can access footnotes in Microsoft Word by going to the “insert” tab and clicking footnote. Formatting styles can be viewed at this website and at this website. You should have a Works Cited page at the end.

The Conclusion

In the conclusion, you should revisit you thesis to conclude your argument. If you want to summarize all of your body paragraphs, that’s fine, but it’s not required. Remember how I should I have focused my thesis a little more in the above example about Galileo? Let’s see how I concluded it:

J’Essaie

The English word ‘essay’ is derived from the French word ‘essayer,’ which means “to try.” When you write an essay, you are trying to convince somebody of your point, rather than reporting back information that you read. You can see that the end of the 2011 midterm question asks you to “present your discussion”–this is where the part about trying (and your thesis)–gets really important. The points that you raise throughout the first part of your essay will be crucial in supporting your argument in the second part. There is no right or wrong answer, but some answers are definitely more informed than others. If your paper is unorganized and simply reports back information without any injection of analysis on your behalf, you’re quite near an uninformed answer. So go ahead and really try to prove your point.

Plagiarism

First, don’t do it–it will cause you to fail the paper, and in severe circumstances, your college/program might decide that you should no longer be enrolled.

Plagiarism is taking somebody else’s words or work and passing them off as your own. This is why citations are absolutely crucial to help us understand when you are taking words and ideas from other authors, and when you are speaking on your own behalf. Furthermore, if you take an author’s words verbatim (word for word) in your paper and do not give them proper credit, you are plagiarizing. A single omission can be overlooked (although the grade is penalized), but it is university policy that any significant instance of plagiarism be reported and entered on the student’s personal record.

What Do I Cite?

There are four very clear instances when you should always cite.

When you use a direct quote: After a baseball game, Ichiro said, “I’m very happy about my endorsement with Kirin Ichiban beer.” (citation here)

When you summarize a direct quote: After the baseball game Ichiro told the reporters that he was happy to endorse Kirin Ichiban beer. (citation here)

When you use an author’s specific argument: Blair Williams argues that Ichiro should be inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame for reasons X, Y, and Z. (citation here)

When you use specific information: In 2004 Ichiro led the league in batting average (.372) and set a single-season record in hits (262). (citation here)

You do not need to cite in these instances:

Statements of generally agreed facts: Ichiro is a baseball player and has an endorsement with Kirin Ichiban.

Generalized arguments: Some people believe that Ichiro didn’t need money from an endorsement. (There should be more specific information after a statement like this)

When using your opinion/stating your position: After this analysis, it is clear that Ichiro is a media superstar.

Last Thoughts

There is no single answer in a historical essay. In a test, you might need to include some specific details to get full credit for the answer. In an essay, however, you need to pick and choose your evidence to deploy it in an effective argument. You cannot, of course, cherry pick your arguments–there are certainly undeniable facts in history. You can, however, argue that the Nanjing Massacre was more representative of the conduct of the Japanese Imperial Army than the propaganda anime movies. Your job, then, is to think critically about what we have read in class, and then make an argument about history. This is undoubtedly the most important and most fun part about being a historian. Truly, I hope you enjoy writing this essay.

In November 1982, South Korean boxer Duk Koo Kim was killed as a result of injuries sustained in his bout with Ray Mancini. Kim had been a star boxer in his homeland and wanted to fight against the American heavyweights, but in only his second international fight found himself toe-to-toe with Lightweight champion Ray Mancini. The bout lasted 15 rounds with each fighter refusing to admit defeat despite heavy damages. After Kim’s last knockdown, he managed to make it to the ropes before falling into a coma from which he would never recover. Generally speaking, the moral that most sports fans have received from this incident is that an Asian champion that had never seen the real strength of the West was killed in almost his first time encountering it.

Re-enter Hideki Irabu, the “Japanese Nolan Ryan,” who came to America under great fanfare, failed, and entered a destructive life before dying ignominiously a decade after the world forgot him. His story has been covered quite well by The New York Times and ESPN writers, the former pointing out that Irabu had not lost his passion for the game even in 2009 and had been hoping for a comeback at the age of 39. For most of his post-Japan career, however, he suffered a fate worse than simply being a bad pitcher–that of being a comic tragedy–as ESPN writer Rob Parker closes his article, Irabu was remembered as the epithet ‘fat toad,’ and perhaps worst of all, immortalized as the butt of a Seinfeld joke.

What happens, though, if we try to study Irabu and see what he might have meant for the larger game of baseball or Japanese-American relations outside of his anecdotal career? Irabu was indisputably a good story for the media, a man that could never live up to the hype of being the next Nolan Ryan, making it easy for the New York media to slam the Irabu for any fault. In some games he was spot-on, and in others he was a tremendous burden to the team, and this seems to be how his teammates remember him.  Fans, meanwhile, remember him for not living up to the value of his contract, which was a 4-year contract for about $3 million a year. In 1997 he was the 8th highest paid player on the Yankees, falling to 9th highest paid in 1998 (archived salaries available at www.baseballchronology.com). He wasn’t breaking the Yankees bank, certainly, and arguably wasn’t even the biggest waste of money–that might well have been Chuck Knoblauch, who acts as an interesting comparison to Irabu.

Chuck Knoblauch played several strong years with the Minnesota Twins before arriving with the New York Yankees in 1998, starting at $6 million a year. Entering his 8th year of professional baseball in 1998, Knoblauch had 4-All Star appearances, a Rookie of the Year award, and had been hitting well above league average for most of his career. In his first year in New York, everything started to fall apart. While hitting league average in 1998, his defensive prowess quickly disappeared, ranking 38th in the American League in defensive ability, a ranking lower than a slew of part-time and fill-in players making pocket change. In the following years, Knoblauch would come close to setting records for terrible defense–in 1999, he put up the second worst performance at second base in the American League behind Ray Durham. After his uneventful time in New York, Knoblauch would go on to be charged with domestic abuse and steroid use. Generally speaking, despite similarities in ‘failing,’ Knoblauch has been remembered as simply a bad investment, but not in the in the same infamous fashion as Irabu.

I bring up these numbers because a similar analysis of Irabu’s numbers shows that he actually wasn’t that bad, but just overpaid. Looking at his advanced statistics, he was not a great pitcher, but actually closer to league average. Contrary to many reports, his statistical best year seemed to be 1999, when he made improvements to his game in all categories and was ranked in terms of playing value in the mid-50s of all pitchers in the league. The advanced statistics show that he had terrible luck throughout his career, with hitters consistently lucking into hits. When ballpark and defense are adjusted for (remembering that Chuck Knoblauch’s terrible defensive glove stood about 45 feet behind him during every start in 1999), Irabu’s overall numbers were only slightly worse than the average pitcher.

Maybe most telling is that Baseballreference.com shows the players that most closely match Irabu in career statistics are not considered complete busts. Andy Sonnastine–the pitcher most similar to Irabu–continues to play in the MLB for the Tampa Bay Rays while making less than a million a year. Meanwhile, Jason Hammel–the pitcher 4th most similar to Irabu–maintains a workman-like status for the Colorado Rockies and is paid $3 million in the 2011 season. While each pitcher certainly fights to keep their job, their relatively cheaper cost, low profile markets, and lack of a storied pedigree dissociates them from the likes of Irabu.

As a player, Irabu was not a complete failure, but actually just not that good–at least in the Major Leagues. At home, he played well before and after his time in America, but little of this time that made him the ‘Japanese Nolan Ryan’ seems to count in the larger baseball media. A major question, then, is this: among all the failed players for the Yankees, why does Irabu stand out as such a tragic comic character? Why didn’t he just fade away into obscurity like Knoblauch? Why does a Google search of ‘Irabu’ bring up ‘fat toad’ and Seinfeld jokes?

Re-enter Duk Koo Kim, who fought to the top and wanted to challenge the West, only to die trying. It’s too much to push a concrete connection between this East-West dialect, and I hesitate to even use such language in fear of solidifying some sort of sporting hierarchy between the geographical regions. But what other reasons or analogies can be made to understand why Irabu is a ‘fat toad’ and Knoblauch is just gone? We must consider the analogy to Duk Koo Kim–that the East just can’t compete with the West.

The Western media seems to constantly remind Asia that while they’re invited to play, they’ll never truly win. The greater question for media, writers, bloggers, and academics, then, is to ask how Asian sports players can be dissociated from the ignominy of ‘failure’ and put into the category where so many Western sports players find themselves: that they tried their best and just didn’t make the team.

Just before and after the Women’s World Cup game between the United States and Japan, a number of news outlets made a major point to connect Japan’s recent nuclear disaster and the drive of the the national team to win the World Cup. Chico Harlan of the Washington Post went as far to write: “For Japan, this was a break from its own victimhood,” implying that a nation of 130 million had exactly one thing on its mind: tragedy. What it needed to revive itself from tragedy was victory, and that came in the World Cup.

There are some sporting events that transcend the actions on the playing field, and this was not one of them. There are salient and watershed moments in sports that connect things like race or politics, but aside from emotional boosts the Japanese victory in the Women’s World Cup does very little to improve the situation in Fukushima.

What does improve the situation in Fukushima is not a soccer game played in Germany, but people who work daily to clean up, rebuild, and support the damaged region.

Further Reading:

• Washington Post Article
• Los Angeles Times Article
• Christian Science Monitor Article

The East and West Divide

The “Orient” refers to the geographical ‘East’ of Europe, and its counterpart is the ‘Occident,’ which referred mostly to Europe. These terms were used often up to the 1970s, and still occasionally appear today. The scholar Edward Said raised awareness in the late 1970s that the term ‘Orient’ initially referred to the Arabic nations (the Near East), and then came to similarly associate with Asia (the Far East).

One might argue that the word ‘East’ has simply replaced ‘Orient’ and ‘West’ has replaced ‘Occident.’ In general, ‘East’ and ‘West’ refer mostly to geographical orientations, while ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ carry cultural assumptions. Try this: what comes to mind when you think the word ‘orient’? For me: The Orient Express, Chinese food, and Oriental airlines. Now do the same with ‘East’. I quickly think up: Eastern philosophy, Eastern mysticism, and Eastern medicine. There’s cultural connotations to the words ‘East’ and ‘West,’ of course, but they are much more generalized, and we might say much more positive than ‘Oriental’.

What to Write

When writing of geographical divides, it is generally acceptable to utilize ‘East’ and ‘West, as long as the writer makes it understood that the divide is primarily for compare and contrast. The writer must remember that the (far) ‘East’ refers not only to Japan, but to China, Korea, and often Indonesia, Oceania, and India. As such, it should only be used when the writer intends to speak generally about that region.

In general, the best practice is to use the cultural or national pronouns, like Japan, Japanese, Shintoists, nationalists, and so on. Even among these groups, there are still multiple viewpoints, so the writer must be careful to be as specific as possible when talking about cultural groups.

Further Reading:

• Edward Said: Wikipedia description of Orientalism

Contrary to the Evidence?

The challenge of making this statement is that evidence of groupthink and conformity appear in Japanese society everyday: meetings and committees are formed to solve the smallest tasks, and dissenting or differing opinions are silenced to promote things like ‘harmony.’ The problem, of course, is defining precisely what groupthink is, and identifying what actions imply conformist actions. Furthermore, Western writers regularly assume that their innately democratic instincts somehow remove their own concepts of altering or hiding ideas to maintain status quo. In other words: what precisely is Japanese about groupthink and conformity, and why is it somehow absent from or downplayed by other cultures? Ultimately, the writers about Japan are writing about, generally speaking, universal human practices that are not limited to and should not be identified by national boundaries. Surely actions of groupthink and conformity vary by culture, and this is the crux of what writers about Japan mean: that the instances of Japanese groupthink and conformity are culturally salient. That is, they matter, but only to a certain degree. It is inappropriate, however, to conflate the recognition of this concept to identify the Japanese as being somehow culturally alien to Westerners.

Japanese people are not somehow unique in their practice of groupthink and conformity and are not controlled by it, but Japanese culture is nonetheless influenced by it. It is a subtle delineation but also a very important one for writers to consider.

Removing Nationality

In Baseball Without Borders, an academic book about the globalization of baseball edited by George Gmelch, Dan Gordon writes about changes in high school baseball. Many of Gordon’s observations compare Japanese baseball to American baseball, in that Japanese baseball is becoming more and more like a variant of American baseball.  I agree with many of Gordon’s points at a basic level, but one quote in particular always stops me, when he’s citing his Japanese friend’s knowledge of baseball:

Gordon:

“The high school coach is considered absolute in [Japanese high school] baseball,” said Yoshihiku. “If a mug is white and the coach says it’s black, it’s black.”  (Baseball Without Borders, 14)

This strikes me as an example of conformity because it appeals to an anti-rational tendency of a (Japanese) subordinate to assume whatever position his or her superior demands. However, there’s nothing uniquely Japanese about this. I played American baseball through high school, and from experience I can affirm that refuting a coach results in almost nothing positive. When I ignored signs to steal a base, I was made to run laps. When I refused to walk a batter, I was taken off the playing field. Frustrated with my playing time, I skipped an important game, and the coaches refused to acknowledge me for the next week.  Of course, the relationship between an insubordinate inferior and his or her superior goes for a number of other social environments, whether it be the workplace or academia.

While I don’t mean to pick this point to death, it’s vital to understand this difference: what aspects of Japanese society arise from their own realized actions of groupthink and conformity, and what aspects of Japanese groupthink and conformity are inappropriately imposed upon them by writers? Understanding this is crucial to represent the Japanese as equal human beings to Westerners, and not somehow controlled by mindless groupthink. There are, of course, cases to be made for mindless conformity, but it must be explained why such conformity is somehow uniquely Japanese. Otherwise, it’s just conformity.

How can writers improve upon this? When you write about topics that lend themselves toward explanations of groupthink, conformity, and teamwork, remove references to nationality and see how it reads. Is it a Japanese baseball coach that commands unquestioning authority, or is it any baseball coach that commands unquestioning authority? If the nationality matters, then it’s important to use particulars to explain what makes an event particularly unique to Japanese conformity.

Further Reading:

• Our Man in Abiko: How to Write About Japan

• Gakuranman: The 7 Stages of Gaijinhood Revisited

• Hiroaki Sato: Usual Conformist Cliches About the Japanese