Princess Iron Fan and the origins of Asian animation
Like most of you (I assume) I knew that Princess Iron Fan 鐵扇公主 (1941) was China’s first full-length animated film. Also like most of you I assume that you...
Category: Occupation
The Hicswa Court-martial: a Double Murder in Nara, 1945
The US occupation of Japan after World War II was not, relatively speaking, a violent one and though the behavior of occupation troops in Japan did lead to many...
The Red Flag Song
On May 1, 1946 Oscar Olander, a former commissioner of the Michigan State police, entered Tokyo early on the morning of “Food May Day” as part of hi...
The Bow
Via my old friend Scott Eric Kaufman I learned that President Obama’s visit to Japan was drawing criticism from the American right (I also learned that Pr...
ASPAC Blogging: Colonialism and Imperialism
There were quite a few papers at ASPAC this year which addressed Japan’s colonial and imperial relationships: my own discussion of migration as an aspect ...
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...
Academia/China-Japan/Current/Recent Events/English/Historiography/Japan/Korea-Japan/Occupation/photography/US-Japan/War/昭和
What’s New?
The University of Hawai’i at Manoa Center for Japanese Studies has a new collection of Occupation-era photographs. I’m struck by two things in parti...
Archaeology/Blog Carnival/China-Japan/Cultural/Current/Recent Events/Historiography/Japan/Journalism & Mass Media/Korea-Japan/Occupation/US-Japan/War/Web Sites/昭和
Asian History News Dump, March 2007
This is a “dump”: all the Asia related stuff I’ve saved over the last…. two months? Anyway, nobody else has blogged about it, so I thoug...
Grading Finished; Blogging Resumes
She really has no conviction to her writing. It seemed merely argumentative and she was just trying to prove her points through facts. That’s alright to m...
Photos of Japan, 1951
One of my former students and her boyfriend have been scanning in old photos, and they happened upon some gems taken by the young man’s grandfather when h...
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...
The Case of Taiwa Shinron
In addition to preparing for my oral exams, the most significant project I have been working on recently involves research on the early US occupation period in ...