Sex, Lies, and Okinawa
For anyone interested in Okinawa and the history of journalism in Japan, David Jacobson over at Japan Media Review has recently reported on a new lawsuit by a j...
Category: Politics
Current Affairs
Akihito as the Sovereign of Japan?
Asahi Shinbun reports that the LDP has accepted plans to push for changing the name “Self-Defense Force”(「自衛隊」) to “Self-Defense Military̶...
Post-Anpo Apostasy
During my search for a short article on Anpo (the anti U.S.-Japan Security Treaty movement in 1960), Konrad mentioned that he would be interested in hearing abo...
Hinomaru Mystery
Over at H-Japan, there’s a discussion about the Hinomaru, Japan’s national flag. I was intrigued and clicked over to Wikipedia. I knew that the sun ...
The May 15 Incident (1932): Inukai & Chaplin
Hi I’m Tak Watanabe, and I’m new here. (Thanks Konrad for the invite!) I’ll post a self-introduction soon, but in the mean time I wanted to po...
Updates: Textbook and Constitutional revision
The Tri-national textbook I wrote about here has been published. The South Koreans, at least, are taking it pretty seriously [via Ralph Luker], with national di...
細谷千博、『シベリア出兵の史的研究』
We recently covered the book、『シベリア出兵の史的研究』(細谷千博、岩波現代文庫、2005) in my class. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the first class, so I’ll make some commen...
Nationalistic Internationalism
Prehistory: You could almost write Japan’s entire modern history as the drive for respect from the rest of the world. Starting with the unequal treaties o...
Bamboo v. Lonesome
Japan Focus has a “three-fer” this week on the Korean-Japanese dispute over a rock. Well, technically “islets” but it’s just rocks...
Academia/Books and Articles/China-Japan/Education/English/Japan/Korea-Japan/Memory/Nationalism/Politics
Historiographical Triangulation
This could be good, or it could be awful. Or it might be a good first draft, but the effort certainly seems worth noting (emphasis added): A middle school histo...
Minamata Justice
Japan’s Supreme Court ordered the government to pay compensation to additional victims of one of the most egregious and troubling cases of environmental i...
A Parliamentarian’s Weapon of Choice
I am afraid that most of my postings for the foreseeable future will be snippets from the basic readings on modern Japanese history that are taking up much of m...
Joint Press Conference Predictions: Little Asia
It’s not a debate, in any meaningful sense of the word, unless they break the rules. It’s a joint press conference, and the only thing that makes it...