Science, Social Science, and Pseudoscience of Diet/Culture Thesis
Eminent food historian Rachel Laudan alerted me recently to the existence of new scholarship, cultural psychology, giving support to the idea that different bas...
Author: Jonathan Dresner
ASPAC 2014 Abstract: Japanese Historical Process in Anglophone Cinema
It’s that time of year again, when procrastinators do their taxes, spring cleaning, and summer abstract writing in one weekend! My proposed paper for ASPA...
Yes, I watched it.
As Jamie Noguchi said, I see these movies so you don’t have to: my review of 47 Ronin is up at HNN. As expected, it’s a blazing failure, with few de...
Leave WWII out of it, OK?
There are good reasons to bring Japan into the gun control debate in the United States: the relative success of firearms regulation in Japan, the recent rise of...
Japanese Counter-Insurgency: Strategy or Tactic?
Robert Farley’s article on Japan’s WWII Counter-Insurgency planning and implementation begs the question of whether COIN, as it’s called now, ...
Japanese Counter-Insurgency: Strategy or Tactic?
Robert Farley’s article on Japan’s WWII Counter-Insurgency planning and implementation begs the question of whether COIN, as it’s called now, ...
A memory stirs..
Reading Emily Whewell’s review of this new book on the Chinese and Japanese treaty port systems and extraterritoriality brought back a long-ago scholarly ...
A memory stirs…
Reading Emily Whewell’s review of this new book on the Chinese and Japanese treaty port systems and extraterritoriality brought back a long-ago scholarly ...
Reconsidering Marco Polo
“Marco Polo’s reports of China, now judged mostly hearsay….” Perry Anderson, LRB I got an email from a student who found my blog post in which...
Daiyou Islands: New Sources, New Clarity?
NYT reporter Nick Kristof brought in a guest blogger, Han-Yi Shaw of Taiwan, to examine some new mid-Meiji documentation about Japan’s relationship with t...
Senkaku Islands: New Sources, New Clarity?
NYT reporter Nick Kristof brought in a guest blogger, Han-Yi Shaw of Taiwan, to examine some new mid-Meiji documentation about Japan’s relationship with t...
Things I don’t know about Korea, part 3
One of the things that I noticed about the materials I used last time I taught Korean history1 is that the texts I chose for my course did not mention, much les...
What do Samurai Have To Do With It?
I saw Margi Preus’s Heart of a Samurai (Amulet, 2010) and the title alone made me cringe: just what the world needs, another kid book touting the putative...
Atomic Bomb Symposium at Federation of American Scientists
There’s almost no new historical content here, aside from some biographical ruminations. Stanley Kutler’s, reprinted at HNN, is the most historicall...