Seidensticker’s Passing
I’m not one of those Japan scholars who came to the field as a Japanophile1 , and my preferred literary reading tends to speculative fiction, humorous ver...
Category: Academia
Academic Life
Useful, Inconvenient History
President Bush cited John Dower regarding the potential for post-war democratization. Bush was using Dower’s Embracing Defeat to ridicule those who believ...
Asia as a Marginal Category
Here we go again. The American Historical Association has proposed new rules for adding and eliminating membership categories, those “areas of scholarly i...
The Rice Bowl and the Bomb
Japan Focus and the NYTimes seem to be in sync at the moment, with a spate of pieces on resurgent nationalism and Japanese war memory.1 Say what you like about ...
Japanese War Memories at ASPAC
I’m not going to go though quite the same song-and-dance I did with Japanese Diaspora or South Asian studies because these issues are much more familiar t...
Japanese Diaspora at ASPAC
As I mentioned here and here, I had some great discussions about the question of diaspora at ASPAC. The dividing line between Asian studies and Asian American s...
Academia/Christianity/Conferences/English/Gender/Historiography/Korea/Korea-China/Late Chosŏn/Religion
Korean (Gender) Studies at ASPAC
In spite of the lovely Korean Studies Center which headquartered the conference, ASPAC 2007 didn’t have a lot of Korean content. In fact, with the excepti...
Vagaries of Honolulu
One of the things I always look forward to when I go to Honlulu is visiting the Okonomiyaki restaurant in the International Marketplace — there just aren&...
Upcoming: ASPAC Blogging
Later this week I’m going to be going over to Honolulu for ASPAC 2007, the Pacific Region Asian Studies conference. The program is here: I’ll be pre...
Reflecting on a semester
We’ve been talking about our syllabi for a while here at the Frogs, but we haven’t done a lot of post-semester commentary. I had two Asia courses th...
In honor of finals
I was going through some old papers last month and came across a collection of student exam bloopers and exclamations (you’ll see) from what was — I...
Academia/China-Japan/Current/Recent Events/English/Historiography/Japan/Korea-Japan/Occupation/photography/US-Japan/War/昭和
What’s New?
The University of Hawai’i at Manoa Center for Japanese Studies has a new collection of Occupation-era photographs. I’m struck by two things in parti...
Samurai Baseball: Off Base or Safe at Home?
[A version of this piece was published on Japan Focus (April 4, 2007)] Baseball fans, lovers of a good fight, and those who are curious about how we go about un...
Korea Journal Blog
The Korea Journal, which has for some time provided online access to its articles in PDF format has now added a weblog. The Korea Journal Blog has just started ...