While struggling character by character through a particular difficult assignment for Chinese docs class today in Cafe Gata Rojo this afternoon, I got suddenly and completely carried away by a fascination with a song playing in the cafe called Common People (iTunes link), originally by the group Pulp. In this case, it was performed by [...]
It was a toss up so I am going to post both. First we have www.Kokueki.com (National Interest). Sayaka pointed this very interesting site to me. You can get all your Japanese nationalist news here, but don’t worry, the site’s mission is to “transcend ideology” in order to concentrate their focus on Japan’s national interest [...]
One of the many fun things about Japan is that a very large number of bakeries in Japan claim to be “Scandinavian” bakeries (occasionally, they claim to be French). The puzzled Scandinavian visitor who enters them will, of course, find nothing (except perhaps a long loaf of fresh Parisian bread) which is remotely recognizable to [...]
Continuing my study of pre-modern Korean history for class, today I read through the English translation of a classic work on Korean geography and geomancy called 擇里誌 (택리지), written by Yi Chung-Hwan 이중환(李重煥) in the mid-18th century. A partial English translation is available as Yi Chung-Hwan, Inshil Choe Yoon trans. T’aengniji: The Korean Classic for [...]
Sayaka has some good commentary about some of the editorials in Yomiuri. Here are a few lines from recent editorials from Yomiuri and Asahi to give you a sense of their flavor. I have just skimmed them all so if I missed any important statements in them, feel free to email me. I am not [...]
A number of people have noticed (see for example the translation in an article over at EastSouthWestNorth) that the new edition of the controversial textbook is not the biggest concern. Other textbooks approved this year may be dropping some of their coverage of wartime atrocities. As countless commentators have pointed out (but few news articles [...]
In this post I have assembled together as many unique statements including apologies or statements of regret towards China. Please read the introduction to my post on Japan’s apologies to Korea which applies equally here. Briefly, my position is that I think the apology issue is the wrong issue for those concerned with historical revisionism [...]
Jonathan Dresner, the leading contributer at our Japan history blog Frog in a Well and one of the stars of Cliopatria has got History Carnival #6 up online. There is a nice wide selection of entries. In two weeks, we’ll have the next installment hosted by Hugo Holbling at Studi Galileiani. You can send your [...]
Some of you may have heard the news that some MIT students got their computer generated Computer Science paper, consisting of grammatically correct mumbo jumbo, accepted as a non-reviewed paper at some conference. You can create your own paper with their code here. My friend Jai and I were discussing how fun it would be [...]
I usually use the digital Wenlin dictionary because of its convenient look up features, speed, and high quality. Today an assignment I’m working on consists of reading reading a 1936 essay about Shanxi 山西 village life. (I often have to look up older terms in an 1930′s dictionary known as the “Mathews” dictionary. Wenlin is [...]