井底之蛙 Site Launch
Welcome to 井底之蛙, the newest addition to Frog in a Well. This new academic group blog is primarily focused on the study of the history of China, broadly defined,...
Category: English
Self-Intro: K. M. Lawson
My name is Konrad Mitchell Lawson. I have recently finished my first year of a PhD in history and I am currently spending the summer in Seoul to work on my Kore...
Sasakawa Money
Antti Leppänen has written about the controversy in Korea over Yonsei’s acceptance of money from the Sasakawa Foundation. See Hankyoreh’s english ed...
Savage Minds
Just wanted to mention that there is a new academic group blog in town dedicated to Anthropology. Like Frog in a Well, Savage Minds is maintained by a number of...
Updates: Textbook and Constitutional revision
The Tri-national textbook I wrote about here has been published. The South Koreans, at least, are taking it pretty seriously [via Ralph Luker], with national di...
More Former Japanese Soldiers
There has been some news in the last two days about the possibility that two more Japanese soldiers left behind in the Philippines being “discovered”...
ASPAC 2005 Program on-line
The program for the ASPAC 2005 meeting is on-line. In spite of my involvement, it should be a lot of fun! Among other things, I’ll be talking about Japane...
China-Japan/Drama/English/General/International Affairs/Japan/Korea-Japan/Memory/Nationalism/Political/昭和
It’s final’s week: Discuss
Via HNN’s Breaking News, a New York Times quickie: JAPAN: HOLIDAY FOR HIROHITO Japanese lawmakers overwhelmingly voted to honor Emperor Hirohito by renami...
Nationalistic Internationalism
Prehistory: You could almost write Japan’s entire modern history as the drive for respect from the rest of the world. Starting with the unequal treaties o...
April 15th — Date of Destiny
Three significant events converge on April 15th this year: First, it is US Tax Filing Deadline Day. How is it that you can live almost identical lives from year...
Bamboo v. Lonesome
Japan Focus has a “three-fer” this week on the Korean-Japanese dispute over a rock. Well, technically “islets” but it’s just rocks...
Stealing 9.99 ryō
In his new book on Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan, Daniel Botsman mentions that it became customary in the Edo period to report the theft of...
Renaissance Japan
Epochal analogies are some of the trickiest traps in our historical discourse. Whether it’s the Medieval v. Feudal snake pit or the quicksand of finely gr...