Japan’s Imperial Universities Today
The last time I looked at Japanese universities in a global ranking, I commented that most of the universities on this list were the product of the US Occupatio...
Category: Foreign Views
HNN, NYT Post Competing Japan Election Analysis
HNN has posted an extended version of the Soft and Fuzzy history I posted a few days ago. What I’ve added, for the general readership, is more background ...
World War Wannabee: Russo-Japanese War?
Brett Holman notes a new contender in the “really First World War” sweepstakes — the Seven Years War and Napoleonic Wars being leading early c...
Imperial Visits and Attitudes
I just learned of the Japanese Emperor and Empress’ visit to Hawai’i [via]. It’s not the first time that a member of the Japanese Imperial fam...
English/Foreign Views/General/globalization/Japan/Popular Culture/Science and Technology/US-Japan/昭和
Before the miniseries, there was….
I’m not sure when my family got this game, but I remember playing with it in the late 70s. Though Shogun is described as a “digital” game, the...
The twentieth anniversary
I have, as it turns out, very little to say that I didn’t say five years ago, but I’ll reproduce it under the fold. Reading this year’s crop o...
Books and Articles/English/Foreign Views/Gender/General/globalization/Historiography/Japan/Journalism & Mass Media/martial arts/Popular Culture/江戸
Young Samurai Book One (of at least three): Harry Potter Bushido
I almost didn’t check Chris Bradford‘s Young Samurai: The Way of the Warrior out of the library when I saw it, but some instinct told me that it was...
Following Younghusband to Lhasa
Just a quick post of a wonderful website I stumbled upon doing a bit of background research for a point I needed to make in the chapter I’m currently work...
Zhou Confucianism? Ming Quality Control?
In an absolutely fascinating article on the modern petition redress system1 focusing on attempts by regional officials to prevent petitions from reaching a nati...
When America looked East (or maybe West)
Speechwars.com lets you see how many times American presidents have used various words in their State of the Union addresses. This is not a perfect representati...
Sumo and tradition
The NYTimes Lede blog [thanks, Mom!] linked Michael Phelps’ marijuana scandal to a scandal in Japanese sumo1 which has resulted in four retirements. They ...
Dutch Futurists
Alan Baumler pointed me to peacay’s recent post of Dutch images of 17th century Japan. Some of them are quite accurate — the images of samurai, in p...
Liveblogging the Boxers
Military historian David Silbey is going to be blogging through the Boxer Uprising as seen through the New York Times. Though this is a little more of a distant...
Great Expectorations: Puke, Spitting, and Face
What’s the difference between puking and spitting? Is one involuntary and the other on purpose? Joel, at China Hope Live reports that maybe you see the di...
奥巴马mania
I just joined this website, but I was surprised to see no post about the American elections in China (perhaps I found it surprising because it has been so press...