Hey, I published something! It is a course reader entitled “Japan, China and Pan-Asianism” I did not write much of it, but it does have my name on it. The reason I bring it up is to call attention to Asia-Pacific Journal (formerly Japan Focus.) Over the years they have published a tremendous amount of interesting stuff, in part because they are one of few on-line journals that takes advantage of the form. Most on-line journals are just the same scholarly research articles that you could find in a dead tree journal. Asia Pacific Journal does those, but also lots of other types of things. They have stuff on current events, translations, interviews, historiographical essays etc. The idea behind their series of course readers was that there was a lot of good stuff in their archive that could be used to teach with. Rather than have people dig through the archive and figure out what they wanted to use they have been asking people to pull together sets of readings around a particular theme. I did the relationship between modern China and Japan as seen through the lens of Pan-Asianism.
For this one I was able to collect a bunch of interesting stuff that APJ had published that you would not find anywhere else. If you are interested in Pan-Asianism the holy grail is Saaler and Szpilman’s Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History. Instead of trying to get your students to read both volumes of that why not have them read APJ’s summary of it1 written by….Saaler and Szpilman. There has been a lot of research in Europe on the impact of the Russo-Japanese War on Japan’s global standing. Instead of having your students learn German why not have them read Gerhard Krebs, “World War Zero? New Literature on the Russo-Japanese War 1904/05,”2 It’s always good to have them read some primary sources so why not have them read a series of letters between Rabindranath Tagore and the Japanese intellectual Yone Noguchi on the meaning of Pan-Asianism?3 Yes, you could summarize the recent work on the Japanese invasion of China, but why not have Diana Lary do it for you instead?4 All this and a lot more! All free!
Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, “Pan-Asianism as an Ideal of Asian Identity and Solidarity, 1850–Present,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 9.17.1, April 25, 2011. ↩
The Asia-Pacific Journal 10.21.2, May 21, 2012. ↩
Zeljko Cipris, “Seduced by Nationalism: Yone Noguchi’s ‘Terrible Mistake’: Debating the China-Japan War With Tagore,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, November 17, 2007. ↩
Diana Lary, “China and Japan at War: Suffering and Survival, 1937-1945,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 10.48.2, November 29, 2010. ↩
