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...
Category: Japan
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...
Art and War in Modern Japan
If you teach Modern Japan you are probably used to having lots of cool pictures to show your students. You probably pinch a lot of them from the MIT Visualizing...
Where’s my Flying Imperialism?
While googling around looking for advertising posters for Asian airlines of the 20’s and 30’s I found this. It is from a series of prints showing the Japanese e...
Teaching Japan with films
Next semester I will be teaching a class on Modern Japan (Meiji to the present) and I was thinking of having them watch some films. I am guessing this will be d...
Immigrant Panics, then and now.
There’s not all that much to add to George Takei’s devastating response to Roanoke Mayor David Bowen’s attempt to rationalize refusing Syrian ...
The Chinese as children of Japan
Above is a nice image that I use in class. I think I got it from Fairbank. I am not quite sure where it comes from, but it is clearly dealing with the Anglo-Jap...