Category: 江戸
Talks about the Tokugawa period.
Teaching Tokugawa math
Do you teach Tokugawa Japan? If so you probably spend some time talking about the rise of popular education, the terakoya temple schools etc. I found a good boo...
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...
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...
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...
The Three Stages of Ninja
The ninja question came up last week in my Samurai class — we were talking about possible writing projects — so I had to do my ninja spiel, which ha...
Turnbull Book on Ako
Stephen Turnbull, one of the most prolific and controversial writers on Japanese military history, has written a book on the 47 Samurai incident. The Samurai Ar...
Ninjas at Night, Dragons at Dawn: Magic Tree House does Japanese History
Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House series is intended to educate and entertain by taking its protagonists to different times and places, real and mythic...
Young Samurai: Way of the Dragon and the Battle of Osaka
The third installment of Chris Bradford’s Young Samurai series shifts modes mid-book, when the action moves from the original Harry Potter-esque bildungsr...
The Lead Poisoning Thesis
Some research is startling, and some research confirms what we already guessed or assumed, but there’s some research which falls between these categories:...
Young Samurai: The Way of the Sword: Ancient Culture, Modern Politics
Reading The Way of the Sword while listening to the “Restoring Honor” event, I began to wonder if our current shift to discourses of honor and warri...
Judge Ooka’s Sidekick, part two: The Ghost In the Tokaido Inn and In Darkness, Death
After reading the last two installments in the Hooblers’ samurai detective series, I got hold of the first two. There are still two I have not read, obvio...
Judge Ooka’s Sidekick: A Samurai Never Fears Death and The Sword that Cut the Burning Grass by Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler
Wandering through the children’s section of our local public library with my son, I encountered a new-to-me children’s mystery series based in Tokug...
Aizawa Yasushi on America
In the Prefatory Remarks to Aizawa Yasushi‘s 1825 New Theses (新論) we find an interesting little gloss on the relationship of the “Divine Realm”...
Dinner first, then dessert
I was going to post about it here, but Another Damned Medievalist raised the question of how to deal with primary sources in a class where students lack importa...