I Wanna be Bob Dylan
A fun book to draw from when teaching modern Japan is Soeda Azembo and Michael Lewis, A Life Adrift: Soeda Azembo, Popular Song and Modern Mass Culture in Japan...
Author: Alan Baumler
Testing to the teach
Below is the mid-term for my Modern Japan class. You can see the syllabus here. I wanted to think about this a bit, because I am trying to do several things wit...
Yellow Peril!
For those of you who don’t follow American politics, the immigrant scourge is back. This time it is Haitian immigrants eating your pets which has gone fro...
Syllabus Blogging Fall 2024
As is the tradition here, I am posting my syllabi so people can make suggestions, although I m doing so too late to take much advantage of your helpful advice....
Tang cooking
Via Sinologists list, a Chinese news item on a Tang tomb in Taiyuan There is a nice scene of food prep, so if, for teaching purposes, you need a picture of a wo...
Teaching from the test -Chat GPT edition
One thing that I did in my final exam for Rice Paddies this Spring was to ask them to compare how how Wikipedia and Chat GPT did at explaining terms that in the...
Air Policing on Taiwan
“Air policing” was a term the British seem to have come up with after the Great War. Although using the new technology to keep the natives down star...
The perfect wife
Three things to use in class Epitaph for Mme Ren, titled Lady of Virtue (shuren) The Honorable Bao Deming, the Assistant Regional Military Commander for my prov...
How much is that goose in the window?
Another book I got for the holidays is Tim Brook. The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China. Princeton, 2023. Oddly enough, I read t...
Obscene mystery solved! (Sort of)
At long last an issue is solved! Did an engraver creating banknotes for a Japanese puppet bank in the 1940s slip in a picture of Confucius making an obscene ges...
Teaching Late Imperial China
So, if the class makes1 I will be doing Late Imperial China in Spring. I was going to do a few weeks of basic stuff, do some Sanyan Stories, set up their resear...
Qing Taxation
Since I got a bit of flak for asking for Taisu Zhang’s The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics and Institutions for Christmas I t...
Grilled Playboy
If you are looking for something fun and useful to teach in a Tokugawa class, I recommend Santo Kyoden Playboy Grilled Edo Style from Kern, Adam L. Manga from ...
Syllabus blogging -Tokugawa
In keeping with tradition, here is the Tokugawa group project for this semester. I probably could have made more categories, but this should be enough. The rest...