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...
Category: Literature
Exporting Maoism
In my Intro to Asian Studies class this semester I am teaching Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Girl From the Coast The story is a fictionalized account of his...
Seidensticker’s Passing
I’m not one of those Japan scholars who came to the field as a Japanophile1 , and my preferred literary reading tends to speculative fiction, humorous ver...
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...
History ‘faction’
According to the Hankyoreh, historical novels are all the rage at the moment in Korea. This doesn’t really surprise me all that much as historical novels ...
Remixing Tagore
This story in the Korea Times about Rabrindranath Tagore’s poem ‘The Lamp of the East’ caught my eye. In the South Korean nationalist imaginat...
Japanese Culture is global culture
A lot of elements of Japanese culture have become part of the great global mash-up, especially food culture and pop culture. But none, I think, will have the en...
Autobiographical Essays by Donald Keene
Yomiuri newspaper published a long series of autobiographical essays by Donald Keene which I somehow missed until today. Professor Keene is one of the most impo...
Boston and the Bamboo Grove
I must admit that I’ve not felt at all keen on bringing up here the most recent Korea-related history controversy to hit the news. As many readers are pro...
Eloquent oddities
There aren’t a lot of good Japanese-themed quizzes out there…. You Are a Sarariiman! Or “salaryman.” Whatever. Treadmill off, treadmill ...
The good life
I came across this story while reading the Liaozhai 聊斋 The Loyal Mouse According to Yang Tianyi, once he saw two mice coming out of a hole. One was swallowed by...
Voice of the people
One nice thing about Chinese history is that there is a long history of recording popular songs. From the Han at least it was assumed that popular songs reflect...
We’re not in Hebei anymore, Toto
A Chinese Peasant Pearl Buck has been getting a good deal more attention in China of late. Part of it is no doubt the fact that she wrote about China and won th...
Glossing over history
I thought I’d write a quick post about another web resource I’ve just started to use quite a bit recently. This is the online Glossary of Korean Studies put tog...
Six Dynasties blogging
One of the things I have been doing for fun this summer is reading Family Instructions for the Yen clan 顏氏家訓by Yen Chih-t’ui 顏之推 (T’eng Ssu-Yu trans Leiden 1968...