Russo-Japanese War Re-visited
I fortuitously caught the last twenty minutes or so of a panel discussion titled “The Meaning of the Russo-Japanese War Today” on NHK Kyoiku Televis...
Author: tak
The Price of Historical Accuracy
Recently I received an email from a novelist out on the West Coast who is working on a historical novel set in 1946 Japan. She wanted to know how much things co...
Kotaji on Korea (& Japan)
I wanted to quickly mention two fascinating posts by Kotaji in the last two weeks that may be of interest to readers here. First, he refers to an article in OhM...
The Wushe Incident on Film
Kerim at his blog Keywords alerts us to a film, currently under production, that reconstructs the Wushe Incident (霧社事件), the famous aboriginal Taiwanese rebelli...
Jazz in Japan
Michael Molasky, who teaches at University of Minnesota and has published on Okinawa literature (this and this), has recently released a book in Japanese on the...
A Cyberpunk-ish Tale of a Young Missing Historian
A Japan historian in a novel! The New York Times has a book review of The Method Actors by Carl Shuker. The review says: Shuker’s basic plot concerns the ...
Jared Diamond on “The Japanese Race”
At Savage Minds, an anthropology group blog that I contribute to, a heated debate has erupted over Jared Diamond‘s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Hu...
Recent Links
These all deserve separate posts, but here are some links I found in the last few days that I wanted to write about but didn’t have time for (perhaps othe...
A Poll on U.S.-Japan Relations
Goyaboy, or “the binary identity fo Gerald Figal,” alerts us to the incredulity of the recent AP-Kyodo News poll meant to take the pulse of the U.S....
Article Nine on Film
Kei Yamamoto, writing for the citizen newspaper JANJAN, has reviewed the film Japan’s Peace Constitution (邦題 『映画 日本憲法』). The film is directed by John Junk...
Sex, Lies, and Okinawa
For anyone interested in Okinawa and the history of journalism in Japan, David Jacobson over at Japan Media Review has recently reported on a new lawsuit by a j...
Akihito as the Sovereign of Japan?
Asahi Shinbun reports that the LDP has accepted plans to push for changing the name “Self-Defense Force”(「自衛隊」) to “Self-Defense Military̶...
Post-Anpo Apostasy
During my search for a short article on Anpo (the anti U.S.-Japan Security Treaty movement in 1960), Konrad mentioned that he would be interested in hearing abo...
Oe and Millenarian Movements
I have spent the last few days working on a syllabus for a course titled “Anthropology of Social Movements,” and I figure I could use some help from...