Remembering Meiji: Translations
Keene includes several extended reminiscences of Meiji published immediately after his death. Unfortunately, some are included in the original French (pp. 707 a...
Category: General
Korean War Criminals in the Movement to “Set History Straight”
Frog in a Well welcomes a guest posting from Sayaka Chatani on the issue of Korean War Criminals and the difficulty Korean historians have found in addressing t...
The race between the Totman and the Hane
Like most teachers, I have a tense relationship with textbooks: too much of one thing, not enough of another; too old, or updated annually; too hard to read, or...
Macroeconomics never gives you more than an overview
Stephen Roach, Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia has an op-ed in the New York Times (UPDATE: reprinted in Japan Focus) arguing that Japan’s post-bubble rece...
Shanghai and Modernity
I am currently working on a paper about Shanghai and modernity – obviously a lot of work has been done on that from the perspective of Chinese modernity b...
Korea: Better than Vietnam, anyway
Thomas C. Reeves, perhaps my least favorite HNN blogger, is arguing that the success of South Korea justifies our Middle East policies, especially Iraq. The com...
Disparity Studies
In my discussion of the job market I said “I only saw two Korea positions, which seems about par for previous years: at some point, though, Korea position...
The Job Market for Japanese Historians
This could be a very interesting year for the job market, not to mention for Asian history blogging. I know of three Asian history bloggers on the hunt for new ...
Diasporic Remnants
I’m always interested in interesting tales and connections regarding the Japanese diaspora. Here’s a couple that I’ve run across: New research...
Hawaiian Kanji
No, I’m not going to show you some cartoon of a spam musubi or a “remove your shoes” sign. This is, apparently, serious stuff: Educators worki...
Seidensticker’s Passing
I’m not one of those Japan scholars who came to the field as a Japanophile1 , and my preferred literary reading tends to speculative fiction, humorous ver...
Useful, Inconvenient History
President Bush cited John Dower regarding the potential for post-war democratization. Bush was using Dower’s Embracing Defeat to ridicule those who believ...
Asia as a Marginal Category
Here we go again. The American Historical Association has proposed new rules for adding and eliminating membership categories, those “areas of scholarly i...
KTX female attendants – “contingent labour” fights back
There was a time in Korean labour movement history in the 1970s when it were the female workers who actually led the most militant part of the struggle. The rea...