Ichi-F -Japanese workingman’s blues
One of my Christmas gifts was Ichi-F: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant As it says on the cover, it is a worker’s memoir. The...
Author: Alan Baumler
Huainanzi and teaching Early China
I really liked using Huainanzi in my upper-division Early China class this semester. I have a habit of switching books a lot in all my classes, in part because...
Teaching with old photographs
One thing that I have started teaching with this semester is Ed Krebs and Hanchao Lu, eds., China in Family Photographs: A Peoples History of Revolution and Eve...
Pinyin is coming to get you!
Here is a CIA report on Pinyin from, I think, 1961 or so. They lay out the history of pinyin as a method of romanization (or latinization) of Chinese, and from ...
Who are the shi?
Since I am teaching Early China this semester, I am drawing from Yuri Pines, Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Period ...
Did Chinese women go to opium dens?
Since someone asked me if Qing women went to opium dens, I thought I would answer and put up some of my evidence. Short answer – I don’t think so, a...
Canadian pot and the lessons of opium
Apparently Canada has legalized pot. The New Republic is speculating that they may find it hard to get an official distribution system to replace the old illega...
Chinese Anti-Japanese films
There is a new book out, though sadly only in Japanese so far, about Chinese Anti-Japanese films. There are countless Sino-Japanese war movies and TV shows, and...
Syllabus blogging for Fall 2018
So, as is our tradition, a bit about what I will be doing in my classes in the Fall. As is also tradition, I am doing this way too late to incorporate any of yo...
Is the Shanghai Textile Museum the best museum in China?
The Shanghai Textile Museum 上海纺织博物馆 150 Aomen Rd; 澳門路150号(right near the M50 art district) is not one of the most famous museums in China. Lonely Planet dismiss...
Visual Shanghai
I went to the Shanghai History Museum today and got some nice teaching-related images. Some of them are useful, but not that exciting, like a nice rickshaw and ...
Was Hirata Atsutane Japan’s first Science Fiction writer?
Maybe. Well, sort of. It kind of depends on how you define things. Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) was one of the key thinkers and popularizers of Japanese Nativism...
Pan-Asian Hell
People like Hell. Most religions seem to have one, and depicting it is a classic way of instructing the masses about the wages of sin. Reproducing these images ...
Who likes short shorts?
Columbia University Press sent me a copy of Mu Aili and Mike Smith’s Contemporary Chinese Short-Short Stories: A Parallel Text. The book is, as you might have g...
Teaching Tokugawa math
Do you teach Tokugawa Japan? If so you probably spend some time talking about the rise of popular education, the terakoya temple schools etc. I found a good boo...