Can you speak Chinese?
Friend-of-the-blog Gina Tam1 has a new book out.Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 Cambridge University Press, 2020 It is a really remarkable s...
Category: Cultural
Cultural history.
A brief note on Google Culture
Google Culture is apparently producing some original content: “A brief history of Kimono” https://shinpaideshou.wordpress.com/2018/01/19/fun-link-fr...
Doing Ironic Irony Ironically: Play-Acting Satires of Orientalist Japonisme?
Update at end Evan Smith of “Big, Red, and Shiny” reports: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has found itself mired in controversy over an in-gallery ...
Food History Themes and Exceptions
Once is a fluke. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a conspiracy. There’s a theme that runs through a great deal of food history writing, nearly all of ...
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...
Credentialism and Other Modern Traditions
The Japan Times article on Japan’s application to UNESCO to have 和食 [washoku, Japanese cuisine] declared an internationally recognized “intangible c...
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...
Academia/Cultural/Current/Recent Events/English/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/Memory/Nationalism/US-Japan/平成
Old Myths, New Myths: Problems of Informed Punditry
The Asia/Pacific Journal, aka Japan Focus, has a fascinating interview with Heinrich Reinfried, Senior Lecturer in East Asian Studies at the University St. Gall...
Books and Articles/Cultural/English/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/martial arts/Pedagogy/Popular Culture/US-Japan/江戸
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...
Books and Articles/Cultural/English/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/martial arts/Memory/US-Japan/江戸
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...
Lines which make me less likely to adopt a world history textbook
So, I got a new one in the mail, and I start scanning through, with the usual particular attention to the Japan material, and right there in the “Cultural...
Imperial Visits and Attitudes
I just learned of the Japanese Emperor and Empress’ visit to Hawai’i [via]. It’s not the first time that a member of the Japanese Imperial fam...