As an American citizen, I am fortunate enough to have the right participate in a process which ultimately determines the ruler of the world for the next four years. I have never been particularly political in my life, in so far as I have had a very realistic view of politics and because I am [...]
I asked my friend Jai Kasturi to take a look at the article that Derek posted a link to here in the Friends section of this site. Jai is a former engineer but now a PhD student at Columbia, studying, well, um, taking another look at the history of the world since Paul. His comments [...]
Great recommended article over at Cliopatria on representations of history.
Here is a posting submitted by my friend Derek: I saw this article on slashdot, which probably means a lot of you have already seen it, but I thought others that might not have seen it already would find it humorous. A suggested read if you’ve ever attended a forum with a lot of literature [...]
Tony took a great picture of some Japanese government propaganda urging Japanese to choose a single citizenship (dual citizenship is not permitted in Japan).
The topic of US-Eurepean relations has been hot in news and also academic journals ever since the war in Iraq. In the October issue of International Affairs Strobe Talbott from the Brookings Institute chimes in on the debate with an article entitled “War in Iraq, Revolution in America.” Great title, but I have mixed thoughts [...]
A lot of excellent bloggers are making their voices heard on the issues of social software or social networking software etc. the definition of which seems to vary with each blogger. I don’t know enough about it to organize my own thoughts, but I was amused by David Weinberger’s characterization of one of the problems [...]
Koizumi has visited the controversial Yasukuni shrine again. I am compiling articles I find on it at my wiki at ChinaJapan.org. I wrote about an earlier visit here. Great collection of articles on the topic at Sina.com (in Chinese). The response is still ongoing but I would say relatively muted compared to some other recent [...]
While chatting on #Joiito I was reminded of a little geography lesson I had with my 8 year old cousin Frida. I asked her (in Norwegian), “What country is next to Norway and speaks a language very similar to our own?” She answered, “Bergen” I couldn’t stop laughing…what a beautiful reply.
While I was back in the US, I went to see the “Last Samurai” and have been promising my family that I would share some of my thoughts on the movie here. There has been a flurry of mails going back and forth on the H-Japan discussion list about the movie so I had read [...]