51st State?
From a formal legal standpoint, the United States never ceded possession of Taiwan [via Simon World], which it took from Japan in 1945, to the Nationalist gover...
Category: English
"Big Eyes" and Chinese Children
This is a fascinating essay about a famous Chinese picture known as Big Eyes [Via Simon World]. The followups are fascinating: a bit uncontextualized, but histo...
The Lost Tribe
Ralph Luker sent me a link which I’d seen before, but lost: Arimasa Kubo’s “Israelites Came To Ancient Japan” pages. It’s a great ...
The Wushe Incident on Film
Kerim at his blog Keywords alerts us to a film, currently under production, that reconstructs the Wushe Incident (霧社事件), the famous aboriginal Taiwanese rebelli...
Jazz in Japan
Michael Molasky, who teaches at University of Minnesota and has published on Okinawa literature (this and this), has recently released a book in Japanese on the...
Nearing the End Picture Collection
As we approach the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII and Japan’s defeat, a number of Japanese newspapers are beginning to turn out articles and other ma...
A Cyberpunk-ish Tale of a Young Missing Historian
A Japan historian in a novel! The New York Times has a book review of The Method Actors by Carl Shuker. The review says: Shuker’s basic plot concerns the ...
Nostalgia and Representations of Asia in Japan
Last year I wrote an article entitled Losing the Soul of Japan which was posted on the excellent weblog Chanpon. In the article I made some comments on the topi...
English/Intellectual/International Affairs/Japan/Journalism & Mass Media/Korea-Japan/Nationalism/Science and Technology
Speaking of Japanese Korean relations….
I know as well as anyone that the blogosphere is a self-selected and decidedly non-standard sample of any population (except, of course, bloggers). But, apropos...
Jared Diamond on “The Japanese Race”
At Savage Minds, an anthropology group blog that I contribute to, a heated debate has erupted over Jared Diamond‘s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Hu...
Recent Links
These all deserve separate posts, but here are some links I found in the last few days that I wanted to write about but didn’t have time for (perhaps othe...
Last Prince
The last surviving heir of the Korean Yi dynasty has died. [hat tip to Jerry West] Born in 1931 in Japan to the former Crown Prince of Korea, Yi Ku also died in...
A Poll on U.S.-Japan Relations
Goyaboy, or “the binary identity fo Gerald Figal,” alerts us to the incredulity of the recent AP-Kyodo News poll meant to take the pulse of the U.S....