The Teahouse Fire: Painstaking
I don’t often get unsolicited books with handwritten notes from the authors, unless I worked with them in some way. What was even more surprising is that ...
Category: Cultural
Cultural history.
Only in Japan: Yakuza Sued
The New York Times is reporting on tensions between the Dojinkai and the civilians living in the neighborhood of their headquarters. Two features of this are wo...
South Korea As Seen from Singapore: The “Korea Boom,” “Korea” Mobilized~
I can’t resist adding this, my admittedly very superficial observations based on slightly more than two months of residence in Singapore: South Korea...
Colonial Period School Architectural Archive
Thanks to a posting at The Marmot’s Hole I learned about a project being undertaken by the National Archives to display a variety of information, archival...
Controversy over the origins of the Japanese schoolgirl sailor uniform
For years private girls academy Fukuoka Jogakuin in Kyushu has been credited with first introducing in 1921 the famous sailor-style uniform worn by so many midd...
Reminder to self: Complicating History
This is an old-fashioned web-log post: links that I don’t want to lose in the ether or the depths of my Eudora folders. Both are from Japan Focus, and bot...
Akutagawa the Pacifist
Japan Focus has expanded its mission one more time, this time to include new literary translations! They’ve published a Jay Rubin translation of an Akutag...
Oh Tempura, Oh Mores!
The New York Times has been on a Japanese culture kick this week which I just couldn’t let pass without note. There have been not one, but two articles in...
History ‘faction’
According to the Hankyoreh, historical novels are all the rage at the moment in Korea. This doesn’t really surprise me all that much as historical novels ...
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...
Unity is Almost Always a Myth
In an otherwise interesting discussion of North Korean defector readjustment and North-South relations in the Washington Post, Samuel Songhoon Lee drops this In...
Archaeology/Blog Carnival/China-Japan/Cultural/Current/Recent Events/Historiography/Japan/Journalism & Mass Media/Korea-Japan/Occupation/US-Japan/War/Web Sites/昭和
Asian History News Dump, March 2007
This is a “dump”: all the Asia related stuff I’ve saved over the last…. two months? Anyway, nobody else has blogged about it, so I thoug...
Origami Revolution
I can’t recommend highly enough Susan Orleans’ profile of Origamist Robert Lang, in which she describes not only his groundbreaking technical and ar...
Japanese Culture is global culture
A lot of elements of Japanese culture have become part of the great global mash-up, especially food culture and pop culture. But none, I think, will have the en...