Dragons, Dragons Everywhere! But They Don't Shake the World
This week you run across dragons just about everywhere. President Obama welcomed the Year of the Dragon from the White House (here), while Paul French did likew...
Category: English
Dragons in the News: Is a Long a Dragon?
The Year of the Dragon is upon us – should we be afraid? Around the English speaking world, magazine covers and editorial writers rely on the dragon as a colorf...
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...
The good old days of empire
My local paper ran an editorial (version here) by Rich Lowry which gave readers more Qing dynasty history than they normally get. As an American conservative h...
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...
Names and Dates In English and Chinese
I recently discovered Beijing Time Machine, run by Jared Hall. His recent piece Time over Place: Naming Historical Events in Chinese (ironically, it is not dat...
From Hirohito to Chiang Kai-shek
I posted this on Frog in a Well Japan. — Earlier this month, I met a descendent of the Taiwanese aboriginal group, Sysiyat tribe (賽夏族), and his wife. The ...
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/English/Foreign Views/globalization/Historiography/Japan/martial arts/US-Japan/安土桃山/江戸
Young Samurai: Way of the Dragon and the Battle of Osaka
The third installment of Chris Bradford’s Young Samurai series shifts modes mid-book, when the action moves from the original Harry Potter-esque bildungsr...
Make it Just So, Mr. Fukuyama
I have been reading Francis Fukuyama’s new book The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. It is, as the title suggests...
Japan and Catfish
On the assumption that some of our readers teach East Asian History and thus may on occasion have to talk about Japan, history, and earthquakes, I offer two lin...
Zhang San and Li Si's Excellent Adventure
China Hush reports that the Chinese film and TV industries have been ordered to stop making time-travel dramas, on the grounds that “The producers and wri...
Assassination and uprisings
On April 8th, 1911 five days before the scheduled Canton revolt an independent radical from Singapore assassinated the Manchu governor of Canton, Fu Qi. This t...
History as it happens
Though I’m usually not shy about speaking historically when big events happen, I’ve been very reticent on the Tohoku disasters. As others have point...
Widespread Panic in 1911
On March 31, 1911, the Japanese consul in Fuzhou filed a report on Chinese concerns about foreign invasion. That foreigners were going to divvy China up into co...