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...
Category: General
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...
Self-introduction
Hi, Everyone, To belatedly introduce myself, I’m Matthew Mosca, currently a doctoral candidate in the program in History and East Asian Languages at Harva...
Should grad students blog?
There was a rather nasty piece on academic blogging in the Chronicle. Comments at Bitch Ph.D. The basic thrust of it is that grad students should not have blogs...
Dewey In Japan
Naoko Saito takes John Dewey’s visits to Japan as a starting place for questions about “Education for Global Understanding” [registration requ...
Frog in a Well
I’ve noticed that while we call this blog Frog in a Well, we have never actually posted the story. This is from Burton Watson’s translation of Zhuan...
Mickey Mouse in China
There are some interesting articles in the current Modern China, and the one I would like to comment on at present is “Wang Luobin: Folk Song King of the Northw...
1590s Military Technology Gaps
I recently ran across two separate references to the Hideyoshi invasions of Korea, both of which credited Hideyoshi’s initial success to firearms. That di...
ASPAC Notes: Demographics and States
Historian of Empires Niall Ferguson [via Ralph Luker] recently wrote: Since 1989, the Russian mortality rate has risen from below 11 per 1,000 to more than 15 p...
One-Child Policy as History
I just finished teaching 20th century China, and the three biggest issues in the last section of the course were clearly economic growth, political liberalizati...
Self-Intro: Vincent S. Leung
Hi, everyone. This is Vincent Leung, a PhD student in Chinese history at Harvard. I just finished my third year in the program, and hopefully after my general e...
Self-Intro: Tak Watanabe
Hi, I’m Tak Watanabe, and I’ve just recently joined Frog in a Well. I am a cultural anthropologist who is keenly interested in the history of Japan....