Nisei and the POWs
I just want to take a moment to share a photo that I think captures an interesting and perhaps a bit of an awkward moment. The photo is taken from a 1946 report...
Category: US-Japan
Books and Articles/English/Foreign Views/globalization/Historiography/Japan/martial arts/US-Japan/安土桃山/江戸
Young Samurai: Way of the Dragon and the Battle of Osaka
The third installment of Chris Bradford’s Young Samurai series shifts modes mid-book, when the action moves from the original Harry Potter-esque bildungsr...
History as it happens
Though I’m usually not shy about speaking historically when big events happen, I’ve been very reticent on the Tohoku disasters. As others have point...
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...
December 7, 1941, Pittsburg, Kansas
One of our graduate assistants came in recently with an old newspaper that her husband had found on a deconstruction job. Considering that it was, apparently, s...
License to Hunt Japanese
John Dower’s book War Without Mercy does a great job at talking about, and showing images of the many ways that race played a role in the propaganda and d...
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...
Books and Articles/Cultural/English/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/martial arts/Memory/US-Japan/江戸
Judge Ooka’s Sidekick, part two: The Ghost In the Tokaido Inn and In Darkness, Death
After reading the last two installments in the Hooblers’ samurai detective series, I got hold of the first two. There are still two I have not read, obvio...
Judge Ooka’s Sidekick: A Samurai Never Fears Death and The Sword that Cut the Burning Grass by Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler
Wandering through the children’s section of our local public library with my son, I encountered a new-to-me children’s mystery series based in Tokug...
Japan as apocalyptic fulfillment
I have to get to my AAS blogging, I know, but I have to share something I ran across reading — of all things — David Walsh’s HNN reports from ...
Aizawa Yasushi on America
In the Prefatory Remarks to Aizawa Yasushi‘s 1825 New Theses (新論) we find an interesting little gloss on the relationship of the “Divine Realm”...
America’s “Lost Decade”
Paul Krugman wrote a column in which he argued that the last decade in the US has been a waste of time, economically speaking: But from an economic point of vie...
TR’s legacy for FDR: Japanese Aggression?
I really didn’t want to get into the discussion about James Bradley’s op-ed and interview because it’s finals season, and because the argument...
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...
HNN, NYT Post Competing Japan Election Analysis
HNN has posted an extended version of the Soft and Fuzzy history I posted a few days ago. What I’ve added, for the general readership, is more background ...