Yi Soon Shin: Warrior and Defender and Yi Soon Shin: Fallen Avenger: Bad
At Planet Comicon in Kansas City last month, I came across a gentleman selling a comic book series based on the Hideyoshi invasions of Korea, known in Korea as ...
Category: Foreign Views
Articles/Authors/Books/China/China-U.S./Christianity/East vs West/Foreign Views/Frog in A Well/Historiography
China from “Over There” to “Back Then”: A Second Helping on E.A. Ross
Alan Baumler’s juicy February 19 post “Edward Alsworth Ross and The Good Old Days of Scholarship,” inspired me to look back through my notes.1...
Dastardly, Diabolic, Secret, Silent and Deadly Saboteurs
It’s almost like he’s kidding, but surely a professional writer would know that sarcasm doesn’t translate to the page, right? NPR’s Lint...
ASPAC 2014 Abstract: Japanese Historical Process in Anglophone Cinema
It’s that time of year again, when procrastinators do their taxes, spring cleaning, and summer abstract writing in one weekend! My proposed paper for ASPA...
American contempt for China
As it is the beginning of the semester, I went to dig up the famous quotes from Emerson and Adams on what is wrong with China. If you find yourself needing thes...
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...
The over-populated, misery-ridden East
I was reading Leyland Stowe’s They Shall Not Sleep Stowe was a WWII journalist, and I was interested in his time in SW China. While on the Burma Road he ...
Senkaku Islands: New Sources, New Clarity?
NYT reporter Nick Kristof brought in a guest blogger, Han-Yi Shaw of Taiwan, to examine some new mid-Meiji documentation about Japan’s relationship with t...
Atomic Bomb Symposium at Federation of American Scientists
There’s almost no new historical content here, aside from some biographical ruminations. Stanley Kutler’s, reprinted at HNN, is the most historicall...
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...
SHAFR Roundtable on Pearl Harbor (Plus HNN Bonus Article)
In honor of the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the US at Pearl Harbor, the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations has published a ser...
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...
Turnbull Book on Ako
Stephen Turnbull, one of the most prolific and controversial writers on Japanese military history, has written a book on the 47 Samurai incident. The Samurai Ar...
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...