April 15th — Date of Destiny
Three significant events converge on April 15th this year: First, it is US Tax Filing Deadline Day. How is it that you can live almost identical lives from year...
Category: Academia
Academic Life
History Mini-Sites
I’m sure I’m not the only one who, as I read some interesting history in one of those paper-inscribed book-things, wonder if information about the h...
Academia/Books and Articles/China-Japan/Education/English/Japan/Korea-Japan/Memory/Nationalism/Politics
Historiographical Triangulation
This could be good, or it could be awful. Or it might be a good first draft, but the effort certainly seems worth noting (emphasis added): A middle school histo...
Japanese Universities in World Context
Tomorrow’s Professor just forwarded a list of the top 500 universities in the world. As the introduction says Attempting to rank universities world-wide i...
Japan’s contribution to nihilistic Islamism
The AHA’s flagship journal American Historical Review doesn’t run Japanese articles all that often and, to be honest, interesting ones even more rar...
CFP: ASPAC 2005
I’m a big fan of sub-national academic conferences. The nationals are fine, of course: I’ve gone to quite a few, some even when I wasn’t looki...
Iris Chang’s Death
Iris Chang is dead, apparently by her own hand as a result of depression. Her work on the Nanjing Massacre brought her fame and attention, of all kinds. She was...
Translation Prize and Gatekeeper Issues
A colleague of mine, Prof. Larry Rogers, just won the 2004 Keene Center translation award for his book of translations of modern stories about Tokyo neighborhoo...
Self-Introduction: Luck and Curiousity
My name is Jonathan Dresner, and I consider myself a very lucky man. I had no particular interest in Japan or history in High School, until I spent a year in Na...