Art and War in Modern Japan
If you teach Modern Japan you are probably used to having lots of cool pictures to show your students. You probably pinch a lot of them from the MIT Visualizing...
Category: Sino-Japanese Wars
China-Burma-India and popular history sources
Looking for information on the American involvement in China in World War Two? Not too long ago that would have been the last thing anyone who did serious China...
Patriotic, airminded, Mahjong
Via Peter Harmsen’s WW2 In China blog I found a link to this post from Mahjong Treasures. The post describes a mysterious Mahjong set that left China in t...
Oriental Women
I have been reading about Lee Ya-Ching, who is billed (incorrectly) by Wikipedia as the “First Chinese civilian aviator.” In her various tours of No...
Bombing makes China modern
One thing that made China truly modern in 1932 and then again in 1937 was that its cities were being bombed. Here is a cartoon by Sapajou, the White Russian car...
So that's why..
I’ve been reading Peter Harmsen’s Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze. I like it a lot. Part of the reason I like it is that he is a journalist...
China becomes air-minded
So, I presented a paper at AAS in San Diego. Obviously the high points were meeting Konrad Lawson in person and eating really good fish tacos, so I could taunt ...
Are Japanese people evil?
There has been some commentary, both on well-known blogs and obscure ones on Robert Farley’s Diplomat article on Japan’s WWII Counter-Insurgency planning and im...
Japanese views of China
December 13 seems as good a day as any to talk about Japanese imperialism. One of the books I taught this semester was Ishikawa Tatsuzo Soldiers Alive.1 It̵...
Very superstitious
Above is a charm carried by a Chinese soldier in 1938, re-printed in the journal Youth Front in 1938. It seems to be a Communist publication, although this bein...
Celebrate the working class
So, today is Labor Day in the U.S.A., which means that you can celebrate the achievements of the working class without being a Communist. The rest of the world,...
30 seconds over Taihoku
On February 23, 1938, the Russians bombed Taipei. Given how worried the government was about Taipei being bombed by communists when I was first there in the 80&...
War cartoons
I’ve been doing a class that deals with cartoons, and Feng Zikai is a major part of it One problem with teaching popular art is that a lot of the work of ...
Sweaty Traitors – Character Simplifications That Just Weren't Meant to Be
I had an old instructor of Chinese language many years ago who took every opportunity to pick fun at the evil Reds on the mainland. I think he fled China in 194...
Private views of Chinese history
Recently I went to the Jianchuan museums, which are in Anren, just outside Chengdu. It is an interesting place first because it is huge, financed by mogul Fan J...