Category: US-Japan
Hawaiian Kanji
No, I’m not going to show you some cartoon of a spam musubi or a “remove your shoes” sign. This is, apparently, serious stuff: Educators worki...
Seidensticker’s Passing
I’m not one of those Japan scholars who came to the field as a Japanophile1 , and my preferred literary reading tends to speculative fiction, humorous ver...
Useful, Inconvenient History
President Bush cited John Dower regarding the potential for post-war democratization. Bush was using Dower’s Embracing Defeat to ridicule those who believ...
The Rice Bowl and the Bomb
Japan Focus and the NYTimes seem to be in sync at the moment, with a spate of pieces on resurgent nationalism and Japanese war memory.1 Say what you like about ...
Oh Tempura, Oh Mores!
The New York Times has been on a Japanese culture kick this week which I just couldn’t let pass without note. There have been not one, but two articles in...
Japanese Diaspora at ASPAC
As I mentioned here and here, I had some great discussions about the question of diaspora at ASPAC. The dividing line between Asian studies and Asian American s...
Vagaries of Honolulu
One of the things I always look forward to when I go to Honlulu is visiting the Okonomiyaki restaurant in the International Marketplace — there just aren&...
What’s New?
The University of Hawai’i at Manoa Center for Japanese Studies has a new collection of Occupation-era photographs. I’m struck by two things in parti...
Asian History News Dump, March 2007
This is a “dump”: all the Asia related stuff I’ve saved over the last…. two months? Anyway, nobody else has blogged about it, so I thoug...
Origami Revolution
I can’t recommend highly enough Susan Orleans’ profile of Origamist Robert Lang, in which she describes not only his groundbreaking technical and ar...
Autobiographical Essays by Donald Keene
Yomiuri newspaper published a long series of autobiographical essays by Donald Keene which I somehow missed until today. Professor Keene is one of the most impo...
Pearl Harbor and the longue duree
In honor of the 65th anniversary, HNN has a Pearl Harbor extravaganza this week. There’s a little recap, and the obligatory zombie error smackdown, which ...
Photos of Japan, 1951
One of my former students and her boyfriend have been scanning in old photos, and they happened upon some gems taken by the young man’s grandfather when h...