The Jiankang Empire
I don’t usually post book reviews here, and this is not really a book review, but I got a lot out of Andrew Chittick’s new book The Jiankang Empire in Chinese a...
Category: Medieval
Kamakura-Muromachi-Warring States period
Seppuku: A Samurai Suicide Miscellany
For a little entertainment this Thanksgiving, I read Andrew Rankin’s Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide (Kodansha, 2011).1 Since I’m teaching bot...
The Three Stages of Ninja
The ninja question came up last week in my Samurai class — we were talking about possible writing projects — so I had to do my ninja spiel, which ha...
Dinner first, then dessert
I was going to post about it here, but Another Damned Medievalist raised the question of how to deal with primary sources in a class where students lack importa...
Mystery Circles on Early Armor
What is that circular disk which early medieval samurai wear over their swords? Is it a weight, to keep it from flopping around while horseriding? That’s ...
Relationship between Modern and Pre-modern studies
The relationship between modern and pre-modern studies in history is the source of lively debate and often much mutual misunderstanding. I’d like to welco...
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...
The Soul of Japan
I’m teaching a survey course on premodern Japanese history this semester. It focuses on medieval and early modern Japan, and I wanted the first paper to d...
A brief rant at an easy target
So I’m grading my latest World History quiz, and one of the terms is “samurai.” Being a two semester World History sequence, I didn’t sp...
Update on Honnôji
Professor Matthew Stavros of the University of Sydney (seen in the third photo below) wrote in response to my post on the discovery of roof tiles from Honnôji a...
Reflecting on a semester
We’ve been talking about our syllabi for a while here at the Frogs, but we haven’t done a lot of post-semester commentary. I had two Asia courses th...
The course we all have to teach
Alan Baumler, my colleague from next door has sent along this “call to arms” As some of our regular readers may remember, there is a Frog tradition ...
Summer Reading Note: Ninja
I’ve finished Stephen Turnbull’s Ninja: the True Story of Japan’s Secret Warrior Cult, and I have good news for current and prospective gradua...
1590s Military Technology Gaps
I recently ran across two separate references to the Hideyoshi invasions of Korea, both of which credited Hideyoshi’s initial success to firearms. That di...