The North Flank Guard: A Military Exercise Escalated into Artillery Exchange
This is the second of a three part series. Read the first posting here. On November 28, a South Korean artilleryman mistakenly fired a single 155mm shell north ...
Author: K. M. Lawson
The North Flank Guard
In politics, a direct attack is not always the most effective. One way to proceed is to target someone or something that is seen to represent a more extreme, a ...
License to Hunt Japanese
John Dower’s book War Without Mercy does a great job at talking about, and showing images of the many ways that race played a role in the propaganda and d...
Shipping Designators for Japanese Cities
There are two creative processes that I find particular mysterious. Coming up with the names for musical bands…and shipping designators. Here for example,...
The Red Flag Song
On May 1, 1946 Oscar Olander, a former commissioner of the Michigan State police, entered Tokyo early on the morning of “Food May Day” as part of hi...
Bruce Willis and Harvard Yenching
I dropped by Harvard-Yenching library this afternoon to pick up some books requested from the depository and look up a few more from my todo list. I noted down ...
Candy and School Lunches
In the New York Times yesterday there was an interesting article entitled, “Is Candy Evil or Just Misunderstood?” In particular it discussed the rel...
Sweaty Traitors – Character Simplifications That Just Weren't Meant to Be
I had an old instructor of Chinese language many years ago who took every opportunity to pick fun at the evil Reds on the mainland. I think he fled China in 194...
An Interpreter’s Tale
I have been collecting notes for a study of the treason of interpreters. This may not make it into my dissertation, but I find the topic fascinating. In the his...
The Most Effective Kind of Education
While there are many historical problems worthy of exploring in the study of history, I personably believe that one of the most important is an attempt to under...
A Chinese Warlord’s Predictions for the Korean War
Yan Xishan, former warlord of Shanxi province and briefly premier of the Chinese republic wrote a book, Peace or World War, that was published in its English tr...
Evidence and Torture
As can be seen in this New York Times article and BBC report from May 31 reports some interesting news on the legal front when it comes to torture: The top judi...
A Question of Credibility: The ASCK
Of late I have become depressed by what I see as a lack of credibility in some of the efforts to counter the flood of media reports and bombastic condemnations ...
Update: Japanese to the Rescue
In April I made a short posting about an interesting work of fiction from 1907, called Death Trap by R. W. Cole1 that depicts a future German invasion of Britai...
The Will of a Traitor
In The Will of a Traitor, posted next door at 井底之蛙, I write about the controversial will of China’s most famous collaborator, and an interesting English t...