Category: Japan
ASPAC Blogging: Japan’s Political Present and Future
My copanelists on Saturday were political scientists, and it was a good update for me on what what’s going on with Japan in the last ten years or so. R...
ASPAC Blogging: Colonialism and Imperialism
There were quite a few papers at ASPAC this year which addressed Japan’s colonial and imperial relationships: my own discussion of migration as an aspect ...
ASPAC Blogging: Art and Ecology in Japan
It’s possible that my favorite single panel at ASPAC this year was the first one I attended on Friday: three papers linking art and reality. In all three ...
Conference Blogging: ASPAC 2009 at Soka University
ASPAC was at Soka University of America this year. It’s in the hills above Laguna Beach, just down the road from Irvine, on the edge of a nature reserve. ...
Before the miniseries, there was….
I’m not sure when my family got this game, but I remember playing with it in the late 70s. Though Shogun is described as a “digital” game, the...
The (Ongoing) Economic Crisis
One of my students is doing a summer research project on the Japanese financial crisis of the 1990s and we just looked at Jon Woronoff’s book The Japanese...
Tomb Near Artifacts that Date to Himiko’s Purported Reign Dates Identified
Am I the only person who had a bad reaction to the Tomb of legendary Japanese Queen Himiko found headlines I’ve been seeing? The article says Archaeologis...
Ron Takaki has passed away
AndrewMc passes on the word from AsianWeek that one of the founders of ethnic studies and real multi-ethnic immigration history has passed away. Takaki was an A...
Association for Asian Studies Publications
I just received Tools of Culture: Japan’s Cultural, Intellectual, Medical, and Technological Contacts in East Asia, 1000s-1500s, part of the Asia Past and...
Young Samurai Book One (of at least three): Harry Potter Bushido
I almost didn’t check Chris Bradford‘s Young Samurai: The Way of the Warrior out of the library when I saw it, but some instinct told me that it was...
Productive Procrastination
The Journal of the Historical Society has put five recent articles up for free, including a four-year old essay by Herman Ooms on the state of Tokugawa intellec...
Dangerous Data
By now most of you have probably heard of the erasure of buraku — the segregated communities of Japanese outcastes — from Google Earth.1 The continu...
Film Festival
Just received this from friends at the Japanese American National Museum: The Japanese American National Museum is accepting film & video submissions for th...