I leave for a few days visiting Sayaka in Taipei tomorrow but I’ll be back in Tokyo on the first of March. I’ll be in Taiwan again for research from the 18th until the 28th of March. I’m moving out of my “lucky house” tomorrow and will be staying with friends for most of the [...]
I’m still waiting to hear back from some grad schools on my application for a history Phd. However, after some unofficial rejections and acceptances via email, two official letters in the mail, and lots of help and advice from friends I think I’m finally over the anxious period of waiting. I cannot emphasize enough how [...]
I added a half a dozen pictures from the last few months to the People Gallery.
Last week I paid a visit to the beautiful International Library of Children’s Literature on the edge of Tokyo’s Ueno park. I added an entry about it on my reference wiki with useful information for others who might also be interested. The library shares an old but nicely renovated building with a museum related to [...]
Together with my friends Jens and Youngsoo I spent a chunk of this past Saturday afternoon at ICU for an event which ended up being broadly related to modern Korea. There were two main speakers, 池明観 who anonymously wrote the “Report from South Korea” for 『世界』 magazine from 1973 until 1988 under the alias “T. [...]
There is a “gangster war” going on now between the huge Yamaguchi-gumi and something called the “Iijima-kai” (飯島会). Over the weekend there were a spat of murders of the Iijima-kai (More on the war in Japanese). I’m not usually interested in Japan’s crime, except when spending a pleasant evening with a couple of Yakuza movies. [...]
I’ve started getting unofficial results on some of my graduate school applications and I am happy to say that it looks like I will indeed begin a PhD in history somewhere in the US this coming fall. I will reveal what part of the country I end up in here at Muninn.net once all the [...]
I got off my nocturnal schedule and left early to visit the national museum of Japanese history outside of Chiba. I added an entry about the museum on my reference wiki. The grounds for the museum are on the old site of Sakura castle and it is surrounded by a very charming park. I ended [...]
I had the honor of serving as tea lady again for the Sino-Japanese History study group. Today was a special round-table of Chinese and Japanese scholars working on research of the Sino-Japanese War, beginning with a speech by 張海鵬 who is the 中国社会科学院近代史研究所所長 and followed by other Japanese and Chinese scholars making their own ten [...]
On Wednesday I visited the Showa National Memorial Museum and collected various reference information about the museum and its libraries which I added to my reference wiki. The 6th and 7th floor are fixed exhibitions of life in the Showa period, particularly wartime Japan and caused a bit of a stir when it was opened [...]