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...
Category: Memory
Books and Articles/Cultural/English/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/martial arts/Memory/US-Japan/江戸
Judge Ooka’s Sidekick, part two: The Ghost In the Tokaido Inn and In Darkness, Death
After reading the last two installments in the Hooblers’ samurai detective series, I got hold of the first two. There are still two I have not read, obvio...
Hiroshima +50 (and +40)
I haven’t participated in that many “historic” events, but I’m now old enough that my early pictures qualify as historic documents, at l...
Hirohito’s last birthday
I’m almost done, I suppose, with the first phase of my image digitization and pedagogy project, namely scanning a significant chunk of my Japan slides and...
Korean War in art
Japan Focus has an article detailing and displaying Gobau’s Korean War art which has a plethora of arresting images. Gobau worked from the Republic of Kor...
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...
“Prosthetic Memories”
Seungsook Moon at Japan Focus has an interesting historiographical essay about the contested life and legacy of Park Chung Hee, who led Korea through the 60s an...
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...
Dokdo is Korean for “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!”
Apparently inspired by the success of other international publicity campaigns around disputed lands — Tibetan independence, Pakistani claims to Kashmir, t...
December 2008 History Carnival
“In retrospect, historians are usually right.” — Der Spiegel interviewer (11-11-08). This has been a lively month for history blogging, for so...
Academia/Archives/China-Japan/Current/Recent Events/General/Historiography/Japan/Memory/photography/War
Archival Incidents, or What is it with Pictures?
Sean Malloy has withdrawn the pictures once touted as “newly discovered” photographs of Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing. ...
China-Japan/Current/Recent Events/General/Historiography/Japan/Korea-Japan/Memory/Nationalism/Okinawa/War/昭和
How do you say “Fast of the First Born” in Japanese?
I was thinking about whether to even attempt a contribution to the latest symposium on the role of historical animosities — and their appeasement — ...
AHA 2008: a very limited perspective
It was a very busy conference for me, but my meetings didn’t leave me a lot of time for panels.1 None, in fact, except for our own, which was great fun. I...
Reminder to self: Complicating History
This is an old-fashioned web-log post: links that I don’t want to lose in the ether or the depths of my Eudora folders. Both are from Japan Focus, and bot...
Useful, Inconvenient History
President Bush cited John Dower regarding the potential for post-war democratization. Bush was using Dower’s Embracing Defeat to ridicule those who believ...