Japanese History Workshop, The University of Sydney, Dec. 5-7, 2007
I’m headed on Sunday to Sydney to take part in an annual workshop on Japanese history. This is my first opportunity to travel to Australia and I’m e...
Category: Japan
A brief rant at an easy target
So I’m grading my latest World History quiz, and one of the terms is “samurai.” Being a two semester World History sequence, I didn’t sp...
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 ...
Calendar converter
Some of you may know about this tool already, but I just discovered Matthias Schemm’s wonderful NengoCalc, an online or offline converter of Japanese and ...
Controversy over the origins of the Japanese schoolgirl sailor uniform
For years private girls academy Fukuoka Jogakuin in Kyushu has been credited with first introducing in 1921 the famous sailor-style uniform worn by so many midd...
Worth Noting
John Dower kicks off the American Historical Association’s Perspectives newsletter’s new “Masters at the Movies” series with a review an...
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...
Reminder to self: Complicating History
This is an old-fashioned web-log post: links that I don’t want to lose in the ether or the depths of my Eudora folders. Both are from Japan Focus, and bot...
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...