President Trump’s Historical Consciousness: Bowling Ball Edition
President Trump, at a recent event, recycled an old chestnut I haven’t heard in years He accused Japan of using gimmicks to deny U.S. auto companies acces...
Category: US-Japan
Oh, internment again.
This is something I wrote for my Asia-US migration class this week. We’re reading Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America. You can figure out which ...
Immigrant Panics, then and now.
There’s not all that much to add to George Takei’s devastating response to Roanoke Mayor David Bowen’s attempt to rationalize refusing Syrian ...
Doing Ironic Irony Ironically: Play-Acting Satires of Orientalist Japonisme?
Update at end Evan Smith of “Big, Red, and Shiny” reports: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has found itself mired in controversy over an in-gallery ...
Dastardly, Diabolic, Secret, Silent and Deadly Saboteurs
It’s almost like he’s kidding, but surely a professional writer would know that sarcasm doesn’t translate to the page, right? NPR’s Lint...
ASPAC 2014 Abstract: Japanese Historical Process in Anglophone Cinema
It’s that time of year again, when procrastinators do their taxes, spring cleaning, and summer abstract writing in one weekend! My proposed paper for ASPA...
Leave WWII out of it, OK?
There are good reasons to bring Japan into the gun control debate in the United States: the relative success of firearms regulation in Japan, the recent rise of...
What do Samurai Have To Do With It?
I saw Margi Preus’s Heart of a Samurai (Amulet, 2010) and the title alone made me cringe: just what the world needs, another kid book touting the putative...
Atomic Bomb Symposium at Federation of American Scientists
There’s almost no new historical content here, aside from some biographical ruminations. Stanley Kutler’s, reprinted at HNN, is the most historicall...
Diaspora And Diplomatic Communities Memorialize Conflict
A memorial plaque was dedicated in a park in Palisades Park, New Jersey in 2010 which reads In Memory of the more than 200,000 women and girls who were abducted...
Real History, alternate possibilities: Nuclear Weapons Edition
Not much of a post, given the nature of my frenetic academic life these days, but Alex Wellerstein’s post at Nuclear Secrecy raises fascinating question a...
SHAFR Roundtable on Pearl Harbor (Plus HNN Bonus Article)
In honor of the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the US at Pearl Harbor, the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations has published a ser...
Academia/Cultural/Current/Recent Events/English/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/Memory/Nationalism/US-Japan/平成
Old Myths, New Myths: Problems of Informed Punditry
The Asia/Pacific Journal, aka Japan Focus, has a fascinating interview with Heinrich Reinfried, Senior Lecturer in East Asian Studies at the University St. Gall...
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...