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...
Category: Anecdotes
From Hirohito to Chiang Kai-shek
Earlier this month, I met a descendent of the Taiwanese aboriginal group, Sysiyat tribe (賽夏族), and his wife. The Sysiyat is a relatively small tribe living in W...
China, the Hobgoblin of Small Minds
I had a student ask me in class, recently, about whether China, among other countries, was planning to take advantage of our coming collapse to move into a posi...
Young Samurai II: A Bad Start
I picked up the second installment of the Young Samurai at the library today. I was thinking about starting it, and looked at the back inside dust cover, where ...
Japan as apocalyptic fulfillment
I have to get to my AAS blogging, I know, but I have to share something I ran across reading — of all things — David Walsh’s HNN reports from ...
Dogs again
As a follow-up to Konrad’s post below I came across something on dogs in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, where he is lamenting the passing of the old city, ...
Japanese Soldiers Use an Accountant’s Trick
I haven’t been making any substantial posts to Frog in a Well of late even though I have been buried in fascinating historical materials as I write my dis...
A Farmer Learns his Chinese Characters
I haven’t been making any substantial posts to Frog in a Well of late even though I have been buried in fascinating historical materials as I write my dis...