Heroes and big swords in Shanghai
The 1932 Shanghai War produced its share of heroes, since any war needs heroes, both for domestic and foreign consumption. I just found two stories of a Chinese...
Category: Japan
Teaching in Japan
So, we are getting into the late middle of the Fall semester here in North America. If you are finding the whole teaching thing is getting you down, here is som...
Pictures of Japan
Do you teach about Japan? If so you might want to check out the Toshidma Gallery. Teaching is always better with pictures, and if you do Japan you are probably ...
Science, Social Science, and Pseudoscience of Diet/Culture Thesis
Eminent food historian Rachel Laudan alerted me recently to the existence of new scholarship, cultural psychology, giving support to the idea that different bas...
ASPAC 2014 Abstract: Japanese Historical Process in Anglophone Cinema
It’s that time of year again, when procrastinators do their taxes, spring cleaning, and summer abstract writing in one weekend! My proposed paper for ASPA...
Yes, I watched it.
As Jamie Noguchi said, I see these movies so you don’t have to: my review of 47 Ronin is up at HNN. As expected, it’s a blazing failure, with few de...
Pigs in the News and In Wikipedia: Or, Lipstick on a Frog
Vladimir Putin is on a roll. He has been having a fine time poking the US in the eye over the Edward Snowden kerfuffle, but at a news conference he declin...
Leave WWII out of it, OK?
There are good reasons to bring Japan into the gun control debate in the United States: the relative success of firearms regulation in Japan, the recent rise of...
Japanese Counter-Insurgency: Strategy or Tactic?
Robert Farley’s article on Japan’s WWII Counter-Insurgency planning and implementation begs the question of whether COIN, as it’s called now, ...
A memory stirs..
Reading Emily Whewell’s review of this new book on the Chinese and Japanese treaty port systems and extraterritoriality brought back a long-ago scholarly ...
A memory stirs…
Reading Emily Whewell’s review of this new book on the Chinese and Japanese treaty port systems and extraterritoriality brought back a long-ago scholarly ...
Senkaku Islands: New Sources, New Clarity?
NYT reporter Nick Kristof brought in a guest blogger, Han-Yi Shaw of Taiwan, to examine some new mid-Meiji documentation about Japan’s relationship with t...
What do Samurai Have To Do With It?
I saw Margi Preus’s Heart of a Samurai (Amulet, 2010) and the title alone made me cringe: just what the world needs, another kid book touting the putative...
Atomic Bomb Symposium at Federation of American Scientists
There’s almost no new historical content here, aside from some biographical ruminations. Stanley Kutler’s, reprinted at HNN, is the most historicall...