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...
Category: 明治
Talks about the Meiji period.
Delayed Reaction, or, I get mail.
In response to my review of The Last Samurai movie, I got the following email yesterday: The text reads: Message From: your mom Message: I read your review of &...
Reading Note: Oleg Benesch, “Inventing the way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan”
Before I praise Benesch’s book, a complaint: Oxford UP pricing is absurd. Now that’s not unusual for academic hardbacks, monographs that go to libra...
Doing Ironic Irony Ironically: Play-Acting Satires of Orientalist Japonisme?
Update at end Evan Smith of “Big, Red, and Shiny” reports: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has found itself mired in controversy over an in-gallery ...
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...
Seppuku: A Samurai Suicide Miscellany
For a little entertainment this Thanksgiving, I read Andrew Rankin’s Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide (Kodansha, 2011).1 Since I’m teaching bot...
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...
AAS 2010: Annexation Centennial
Final exams crash onto my desk tomorrow, but I’m as organized as I can be in advance, so I thought I’d do a little belated AAS blogging, especially ...
Some Good Old Treaty Port Humor
I found this gem in a June 21, 1900 Washington Post article: It is a cute, and surely manufactured story, but it does get at something I have wondered about: di...
TR’s legacy for FDR: Japanese Aggression?
I really didn’t want to get into the discussion about James Bradley’s op-ed and interview because it’s finals season, and because the argument...
The Bow
Via my old friend Scott Eric Kaufman I learned that President Obama’s visit to Japan was drawing criticism from the American right (I also learned that Pr...
World War Wannabee: Russo-Japanese War?
Brett Holman notes a new contender in the “really First World War” sweepstakes — the Seven Years War and Napoleonic Wars being leading early c...
The Teahouse Fire: Painstaking
I don’t often get unsolicited books with handwritten notes from the authors, unless I worked with them in some way. What was even more surprising is that ...