I had a very productive day. I went to the Oya Sôichi Library and found an article I have been looking for now for some time. It is an article written by Kawashima Yoshiko about her own life, including her intelligence work, published in the September 1933 issue of 婦人公論. The library, which is an [...]
In my posting Dean against the Incombent I was extremely confident Dean was going to sail through the primaries and face a tough battle against Bush. After Dean’s failure to win a state so far, and especially his losing Washington, it looks like I was completely off the mark. He did amazing things for politics [...]
Lago, on the blog Rational Ignorance brought up an issue in response to a blog entry by Joi Ito (Joi’s response) that I think is very important for the academic world to chew on. The net, in many respects, reproduces, in a warped and tilted fashion, the offline state of debate on almost any issue. [...]
I got to be tea lady again for the Sino-Japanese history research society (日中関係史研究会) which my professor Hirano helps run. It is great opportunity because in exchange for pouring tea I get to hear some interesting presentations on the Sino-Japanese war that usually only a small group of professors get to attend. The group is [...]
I attended the DIJ forum on Thursday. The presentation, 「国際刑法からみた東京裁判」 was in Japanese and given by a young German scholar Philipp Osten. Since he was looking at the Tokyo War Crimes trials from a legal perspective, I didn’t expect the talk or the discussion to get that controversial and that he would most likely delve [...]
Skip reading this unless you need help synching your Clie with iCal. I bought a used Clie PEG-T650C at the used PDA shop in Akihabara. Beautiful model, and doesn’t have the silly keyboard on newer models. Unfortunately, I could only synch with my mac, and only with Palm Desktop when I set OS X to [...]
My friend Jae posted a great quote about nations and narcissism.
Shaviro at The Pinocchio Theory has posted an entry about the movie Swallowtail Butterfly directed by Iwai Shunji. The movie is one of my favorites for a number of reasons. It is, as Shaviro notes, a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic movie set in Japan (Yen town) and it is full of ambiguous identities. Shaviro concludes with, [...]
I downloaded a style sheet from Movable Style and modified it a bit before installing it for this blog. I also added a few things to the list of links, and the Muninn raven picture. I don’t know if I’ll keep it, but for the time being this is how the site will look. Let [...]
For people doing research on Japan, just a few quick random notes. Steven Clark, a Phd student at Yale has just put of a page of great quick and useful information he is calling Tokyo Archives. The blog Ubiquitous Gaze is a great blog with information related to Japan Studies and lists of resources. I [...]