I Wanna be Bob Dylan
A fun book to draw from when teaching modern Japan is Soeda Azembo and Michael Lewis, A Life Adrift: Soeda Azembo, Popular Song and Modern Mass Culture in Japan...
Category: Popular Culture
Who were the people in wartime China?
Just for fun, here is a table I found of those who jumped from the parachute tower in Chongqing between April of 1942 and April 1943. I suppose I should open wi...
Can you speak Chinese?
Friend-of-the-blog Gina Tam1 has a new book out.Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 Cambridge University Press, 2020 It is a really remarkable s...
Masks in recent Chinese History
So this is a post that already seems outdated, but I thought I would do it anyway. Masks now mean something quite different than they did before, and I am sure ...
Radio in China
I was looking around for some information on Chinese radio during the Republic and discovered that there is not much out there. There are some cites in this the...
Chinese Anti-Japanese films
There is a new book out, though sadly only in Japanese so far, about Chinese Anti-Japanese films. There are countless Sino-Japanese war movies and TV shows, and...
Pan-Asian Hell
People like Hell. Most religions seem to have one, and depicting it is a classic way of instructing the masses about the wages of sin. Reproducing these images ...
Chinese Manhua and social criticism
I have been preparing a paper for a conference here at IUP, but since the conference is postponed as we are on strike I thought I would share some of it with yo...
Books and Articles/Cultural/English/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/martial arts/Pedagogy/Popular Culture/US-Japan/江戸
Ninjas at Night, Dragons at Dawn: Magic Tree House does Japanese History
Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House series is intended to educate and entertain by taking its protagonists to different times and places, real and mythic...
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...
Young Samurai: The Way of the Sword: Ancient Culture, Modern Politics
Reading The Way of the Sword while listening to the “Restoring Honor” event, I began to wonder if our current shift to discourses of honor and warri...
English/Foreign Views/General/globalization/Japan/Popular Culture/Science and Technology/US-Japan/昭和
Before the miniseries, there was….
I’m not sure when my family got this game, but I remember playing with it in the late 70s. Though Shogun is described as a “digital” game, the...
Books and Articles/English/Foreign Views/Gender/General/globalization/Historiography/Japan/Journalism & Mass Media/martial arts/Popular Culture/江戸
Young Samurai Book One (of at least three): Harry Potter Bushido
I almost didn’t check Chris Bradford‘s Young Samurai: The Way of the Warrior out of the library when I saw it, but some instinct told me that it was...
Say hello to your new robot overlords!
A recent article in the Japan Times, pointed out to me by a resourceful student (thanks Lindsay!), shows that the future imagined in Ghost in the Shell and othe...
The Teahouse Fire: Painstaking
I don’t often get unsolicited books with handwritten notes from the authors, unless I worked with them in some way. What was even more surprising is that ...