Only in Japan: Yakuza Sued
The New York Times is reporting on tensions between the Dojinkai and the civilians living in the neighborhood of their headquarters. Two features of this are wo...
Category: Law
Constitutional and Legal issues
Migration, Nationalism, Empire
Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s recent Japan Focus article, “Migrants, Subjects, Citizens: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar Japanese Empi...
Korean War Criminals in the Movement to “Set History Straight”
Frog in a Well welcomes a guest posting from Sayaka Chatani on the issue of Korean War Criminals and the difficulty Korean historians have found in addressing t...
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...
National Archives: Captured North Korean Documents
I returned last week from the second of what will be four trips to the National Archives before I leave for Korea in June. On my first trip I had only two days ...
Getting Out the Vote
In the weeks leading up to May 10th, 1948, the United States run interim Military Government in southern Korea was busy preparing the national assembly election...
2007: Japanese Works Now in the Public Domain
Matt over at No-Sword has listed and linked to a few Japanese authors who, due to the life+50 years copyright rule, now have all of their works released into th...
History news round-up (brought to you by the Korea Times)
For some reason the Korea Times seems to be quite a decent source of history news these days, so in the absence of a more heavyweight post, here’s a round...
Shades of Mori Arinori
Recently the Japanese Diet has been debating several competing bills to revise the Fundamental Education Law of 1947. One of the most contested issues is an ef...
The Marijuana Crisis of ’75
I’ve been dipping into an excellent book on the history of Korean popular music now and then (이혜숙 & 손우석 – 한국대중음악사) and came across a fascinatin...
Data: Personal v. Historical
A recent initiative in the US to limit access to birth and death records [via] along with other personal data would severely limit the ability of historical and...
Revision and Revisionism
Deep in the middle of a roundtable about constitutional revision and neo-nationalism in Japan, comes a bit of discussion of historical revision and popular beli...
Akihito as the Sovereign of Japan?
Asahi Shinbun reports that the LDP has accepted plans to push for changing the name “Self-Defense Force”(「自衛隊」) to “Self-Defense Military̶...
Updates: Textbook and Constitutional revision
The Tri-national textbook I wrote about here has been published. The South Koreans, at least, are taking it pretty seriously [via Ralph Luker], with national di...
Stealing 9.99 ryō
In his new book on Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan, Daniel Botsman mentions that it became customary in the Edo period to report the theft of...