Japanese Counter-Insurgency: Strategy or Tactic?
Robert Farley’s article on Japan’s WWII Counter-Insurgency planning and implementation begs the question of whether COIN, as it’s called now, ...
Category: War
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...
Senkaku Islands: New Sources, New Clarity?
NYT reporter Nick Kristof brought in a guest blogger, Han-Yi Shaw of Taiwan, to examine some new mid-Meiji documentation about Japan’s relationship with t...
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There’s almost no new historical content here, aside from some biographical ruminations.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...
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...
Seppuku: A Samurai Suicide Miscellany
For a little entertainment this Thanksgiving, I read Andrew Rankin’s Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide (Kodansha, 2011).1 Since I’m teaching bot...
The good old days of empire
My local paper ran an editorial (version here) by Rich Lowry which gave readers more Qing dynasty history than they normally get. As an American conservative h...
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...
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...
It's a man's life
From Gawker a set of military recruitment ads from around the world. Representing East Asia we have Taiwanese who gain skills while defending 20 million people ...
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...
The Japanese to the Rescue
From 1902 until 1923 the British and Japanese were military allies, bound to support each other in the case of a war with more than a single power and a promise...
Japanese Soldiers Use an Accountant’s Trick
I haven’t been making any substantial posts to Frog in a Well of late even though I have been buried in fascinating historical materials as I write my dis...