I Wanna be Bob Dylan
A fun book to draw from when teaching modern Japan is Soeda Azembo and Michael Lewis, A Life Adrift: Soeda Azembo, Popular Song and Modern Mass Culture in Japan...
Category: Japan
Syllabus Blogging Fall 2024
As is the tradition here, I am posting my syllabi so people can make suggestions, although I m doing so too late to take much advantage of your helpful advice....
Air Policing on Taiwan
“Air policing” was a term the British seem to have come up with after the Great War. Although using the new technology to keep the natives down star...
Grilled Playboy
If you are looking for something fun and useful to teach in a Tokugawa class, I recommend Santo Kyoden Playboy Grilled Edo Style from Kern, Adam L. Manga from ...
Tokugawa Japan-What’s the question?
So, again this fall I will be having students in my upper-level class (in this case Early Modern Japan) do a group research project. The end of the project wil...
Taisho Project assessment
The project is here I thought it went pretty well, although there are some things I need to work on. I had the students do a survey about it, and most of them f...
Syllabus blogging HIST 437 Modern Japan and the Taisho project
Update Here is the more or less final draft So, a bit late,but some syllabus blogging for Fall. At present this is supposed to be an in-person class. Thi...
A Child’s Guide to Japanese Empire
I recently had the pleasure of browsing the 1936 edition of a most interesting children’s almanac or encyclopedia called the Gakuyū Nenkan (学友年鑑 School fr...
Opening vignettes on Tokugawa prostitutes
I never really responded to Jonathan’s post on opening vignettes as pedagogy, but I do like using them. In fact, I will be using a couple Monday. Sometime...
Ichi-F -Japanese workingman’s blues
One of my Christmas gifts was Ichi-F: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant As it says on the cover, it is a worker’s memoir. The...
Was Hirata Atsutane Japan’s first Science Fiction writer?
Maybe. Well, sort of. It kind of depends on how you define things. Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) was one of the key thinkers and popularizers of Japanese Nativism...
Pan-Asian Hell
People like Hell. Most religions seem to have one, and depicting it is a classic way of instructing the masses about the wages of sin. Reproducing these images ...
President Trump’s Historical Consciousness: Bowling Ball Edition
President Trump, at a recent event, recycled an old chestnut I haven’t heard in years He accused Japan of using gimmicks to deny U.S. auto companies acces...
Teaching Tokugawa math
Do you teach Tokugawa Japan? If so you probably spend some time talking about the rise of popular education, the terakoya temple schools etc. I found a good boo...
1945-1950/1960s/1970s/1980s/Colonial/Current/Recent Events/Imperialism/Japan/Korea/Korea-Japan/North Korea/US-Korea
“North Korea: Hangover of the 20th Century”
Missouri Southern State, Pittsburg State’s rival/sister school across the state line in Joplin, does “international semesters” in the Fall, an...