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...
Category: Japan
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...
Update on Honnôji
Professor Matthew Stavros of the University of Sydney (seen in the third photo below) wrote in response to my post on the discovery of roof tiles from Honnôji a...
Nobunaga’s death spot, Honnôji, discovered
Those of you who are, like me, interested in that brief era in the late 16th and early 17th centuries known as the Momoyama period (or the Azuchi-Momoyama perio...
Akutagawa the Pacifist
Japan Focus has expanded its mission one more time, this time to include new literary translations! They’ve published a Jay Rubin translation of an Akutag...
The Rice Bowl and the Bomb
Japan Focus and the NYTimes seem to be in sync at the moment, with a spate of pieces on resurgent nationalism and Japanese war memory.1 Say what you like about ...
Oh Tempura, Oh Mores!
The New York Times has been on a Japanese culture kick this week which I just couldn’t let pass without note. There have been not one, but two articles in...
Japanese War Memories at ASPAC
I’m not going to go though quite the same song-and-dance I did with Japanese Diaspora or South Asian studies because these issues are much more familiar t...
Japanese Diaspora at ASPAC
As I mentioned here and here, I had some great discussions about the question of diaspora at ASPAC. The dividing line between Asian studies and Asian American s...
(A Little) Chinese History at ASPAC
There was, I’ll admit, a lot of Chinese content at ASPAC which I didn’t see. Such is life. I did see two papers which I want to discuss here briefly...
Vagaries of Honolulu
One of the things I always look forward to when I go to Honlulu is visiting the Okonomiyaki restaurant in the International Marketplace — there just aren&...
Taiwan gained and lost
Japan (ahem) Focus has a great excerpt from MIT’s Emma J. Teng’s Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing, 1683–1895 up this wee...
Upcoming: ASPAC Blogging
Later this week I’m going to be going over to Honolulu for ASPAC 2007, the Pacific Region Asian Studies conference. The program is here: I’ll be pre...
China's Traditional, right?
Cultural Revolution? Yan’an Purge? It’s an ugly campaign season, a mix of talent show, debate, old-fashioned politicking and dirty tricks. It’...