A few weeks ago I attended a fascinating talk at Waseda by Emer O’Dwyer, one of my 先輩 (seniors) also studying under Andrew Gordon at Harvard. She has been very helpful in giving me advice on the PhD program, and I was impressed by her recent talk. She presented her research on “Emigration, Settlement, and [...]
Joel at Far Outliers mentions an article about a trend towards the “suppression of free speech” in South Korea. In addition to the harassment that a “free North Korea” group has apparently gotten from “self-styled ‘progressive’” protesters discussed in the article by Aidan Foster-Carter, Joel mentions the recent bizarre (and inexcusable) banning of online blogs [...]
Brian at Crooked Timber, mulls over the dilemma he faces answering the following question on his application for a US visa: Do You Have Any Specialized Skills or Training, Including Firearms, Explosives, Nuclear, Biological, or Chemical Experience? (US Visa form DS-157)
Karen Wigen, a scholar of historical geography at Stanford, gave a fascinating talk last night at Keio University on “Moving Mountains: Creating the Modern Japanese Alps” She looked at the “discovery” of the Japanese Alps (a term given to three chains of mountains in Japan by an Englishman) in the Meiji period by metropolitan and [...]
Prasenjit Duara is a scholar whose writing which I find nothing short of inspirational. That is no small feat for academic history writing, I assure you. Reading his work is difficult and sometimes confusing, but there are moments when he writes with an eloquence and lucidity which I can only hope to reproduce in my [...]
Matt over at No-Sword records how to get a Re-entry Permit in Saitama. For those of you living in Tokyo, I recorded some info in my own earlier posting.
Sayaka has deeply immersed herself in reading related to her potential topic for PhD research: civil-military relations. She will be applying to PhD programs in the fall. I can tell it is getting serious—she has a great posting about Spiderman 2 and its connection to her topic. I also watched the movie in Korea (the [...]
An alternative title for this post might be, “Everything you didn’t understand your Korean friend say but were afraid to ask.” While browsing through the more useless features of my new EW-K3000 I found a section on Korean-English expressions in something called eBoyoung’s Dictionary of English Conversational Expressions. I also found more Konglish words on [...]
Ok, I don’t want to seem fixated on the subject of bathrooms here, but I saw signs on the outsides of a lot of restaurants in Seoul which resembled this one. I think the text under the sign (click on the picture for a larger version) says something like, “The restrooms in our establishment are [...]
So last night I was in an underground shopping mall in Jongno looking for a bathroom. I thought I had found one until I approached the sign and noticed it was a little bit different than what I was expecting. Could Korea, one of the most conservative countries in the world, actually have co-ed bathrooms? [...]