Category: 昭和
Talks about the Showa period
Revision and Revisionism
Deep in the middle of a roundtable about constitutional revision and neo-nationalism in Japan, comes a bit of discussion of historical revision and popular beli...
Frank Capra’s Know Your Enemy: Japan
The (in)famous 1945 Frank Capra propaganda piece Know Your Enemy: Japan can now be ordered very inexpensively as an extra on the $9.99 DVD of John Ford’s ...
Iriye: Two Postwars: 1905 and 1945
Professor Akira Iriye gave a talk at the Reischauer Institute yesterday which, like most Japan Forum events, was open to the public. Iriye has been attending va...
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...
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...
Nearing the End Picture Collection
As we approach the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII and Japan’s defeat, a number of Japanese newspapers are beginning to turn out articles and other ma...
Nostalgia and Representations of Asia in Japan
Last year I wrote an article entitled Losing the Soul of Japan which was posted on the excellent weblog Chanpon. In the article I made some comments on the topi...
Last Prince
The last surviving heir of the Korean Yi dynasty has died. [hat tip to Jerry West] Born in 1931 in Japan to the former Crown Prince of Korea, Yi Ku also died in...
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...
The May 15 Incident (1932): Inukai & Chaplin
Hi I’m Tak Watanabe, and I’m new here. (Thanks Konrad for the invite!) I’ll post a self-introduction soon, but in the mean time I wanted to po...
Updates: Textbook and Constitutional revision
The Tri-national textbook I wrote about here has been published. The South Koreans, at least, are taking it pretty seriously [via Ralph Luker], with national di...