Turnbull Book on Ako
Stephen Turnbull, one of the most prolific and controversial writers on Japanese military history, has written a book on the 47 Samurai incident. The Samurai Ar...
Category: Japan
Academia/Cultural/Current/Recent Events/English/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/Memory/Nationalism/US-Japan/平成
Old Myths, New Myths: Problems of Informed Punditry
The Asia/Pacific Journal, aka Japan Focus, has a fascinating interview with Heinrich Reinfried, Senior Lecturer in East Asian Studies at the University St. Gall...
Academia/Books and Articles/Current/Recent Events/General/globalization/Historiography/Japan/Nationalism/昭和
Feeling Like an Empire: Colonial Radicalization
What makes Louise Young’s Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism such a fascinating, troubling work is that she deta...
Books and Articles/Cultural/English/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/martial arts/Pedagogy/Popular Culture/US-Japan/江戸
Ninjas at Night, Dragons at Dawn: Magic Tree House does Japanese History
Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House series is intended to educate and entertain by taking its protagonists to different times and places, real and mythic...
Books and Articles/English/Foreign Views/globalization/Historiography/Japan/martial arts/US-Japan/安土桃山/江戸
Young Samurai: Way of the Dragon and the Battle of Osaka
The third installment of Chris Bradford’s Young Samurai series shifts modes mid-book, when the action moves from the original Harry Potter-esque bildungsr...
History as it happens
Though I’m usually not shy about speaking historically when big events happen, I’ve been very reticent on the Tohoku disasters. As others have point...
New Offerings from Hawai’i
I’ve been absent from Frog in a Well for some time for reasons I explain here, so feel a bit rusty at this. But I was inspired by my receipt of the new Un...
Syllabus Blogging: Modern Japan and World History
It’s been a while since I did some syllabus blogging, but the most interesting course I was going to teach last semester didn’t come through,1 so it...
Monumental Histories
Quite by coincidence, I ended up reading three books on Chinese monuments, but not until the third did I realize that what I was reading was a history of modern...
December 7, 1941, Pittsburg, Kansas
One of our graduate assistants came in recently with an old newspaper that her husband had found on a deconstruction job. Considering that it was, apparently, s...
Announcements and Encouragements
While the discussions on the Asia lists have been a bit wooden for a while, other H-Net communities are lively and thriving, and the book reviews are a fantasti...
Announcements and Remembrances
While the discussions on the Asia lists have been a bit wooden for a while, other H-Net communities are lively and thriving, and the book reviews are a fantasti...
Data Visualization and Data Quality
The inestimable Rob MacDougall is running a course on Digital History, and even better, he’s running it more or less publicly! I’m getting all kinds...
The Lead Poisoning Thesis
Some research is startling, and some research confirms what we already guessed or assumed, but there’s some research which falls between these categories:...
Young Samurai: The Way of the Sword: Ancient Culture, Modern Politics
Reading The Way of the Sword while listening to the “Restoring Honor” event, I began to wonder if our current shift to discourses of honor and warri...