Comfort Women at the Japanese Embassy
A huge number of buses lined the central street that leads up to Kwanghwamun gate (which is no longer there, since it has been deemed a worthwhile expenditure t...
Category: Memory
The Rice Bowl and the Bomb
Japan Focus and the NYTimes seem to be in sync at the moment, with a spate of pieces on resurgent nationalism and Japanese war memory.1 Say what you like about ...
Japanese War Memories at ASPAC
I’m not going to go though quite the same song-and-dance I did with Japanese Diaspora or South Asian studies because these issues are much more familiar t...
The June struggle in the British newspapers
Over at my own blog I’ve decided to mark the anniversary of the events of June 1987 in South Korea by following contemporary reports from the British news...
Unity is Almost Always a Myth
In an otherwise interesting discussion of North Korean defector readjustment and North-South relations in the Washington Post, Samuel Songhoon Lee drops this In...
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...
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...
Empire in Sonny Chiba’s Shōrinji Kempō
I just watched an old 1975 movie with Sonny Chiba in it called Shōrinji Kempō 少林寺拳法 (the English title, inexplicably is “The Killing Machine”) which...
That 9.11 Incident
Of course I remember 9/11/01. You don’t forget the day when you think you’re watching a rerun of a terrible accident — how quickly they got fo...
Academia/Archaeology/Art/Blog Carnival/Current/Recent Events/English/Gender/General/Historiography/Japan/Memory/Museums/Nationalism/Politics/Religion/Teaching
History Carnival #38
“For both nations and inviduals have sometimes made a virtue of neglecting history; and history has taken its revenge on them.” — H. R. Trevor...
Defining Japaneseness: a miscellany
This report (with followups here) suggests that Japan is no longer a “classless society” but I wonder to what extent the concept of class simply to ...
More Yasukuni News
In a recent posting I summarized some recent developments related to the Yasukuni shrine issue in Japan. In addition to a steady stream of articles in the Japan...
Feuding clans
There is a fascinating article in today’s International Herald Tribune on Korean family grave sites, feng shui and the long-running feud between the Yoon ...