Going to bookstores when I’m back in Japan is one of my favorite things to do. Along with going to my favorite ramen noodle shops, hole in the wall cheap udon shops, and meeting friends, bookstores are right at the top of my Tokyo to-do list. Today I took a fellow historian and my host [...]
Last summer, when I was heading on to Norway after a summer of study in Seoul, my fellow passengers and I found ourselves on the plane with the North Korean national soccer team. On Monday I began a repeat of last summer’s travel and next week I’ll begin a second summer of Korean language study [...]
Sayaka is back “home” in Taiwan this week. She is supposed to be doing research and conducting interviews but she also seems to be enjoying all her favorite foods while she is home and meeting her friends. In a recent posting she talked about the differences in average salaries for those tutoring in Japanese and [...]
In the aftermath of orals I have been trying to catch up on some blog reading and reading messages from H-Japan and the Korean Studies email lists. There was an interesting article in the North Korean press recently blasting the idea of a multiracial or multicultural Korea which got a lot of discussion online, including [...]
My orals (PhD general exam) are over and I passed. I don’t think that what I have to say about it differs much from what everyone seems to say about. I was terribly nervous leading up the exam, especially since I knew there were gaping holes in my knowledge. Two days before the test I [...]
I just found out (Via Antti’s posting on it) that you can imbed your Del.ici.us tags easily into a webpage. Mine are below (Because it is shown via javascript they will not show up in the RSS feed for this posting) but are completely disorganized thanks to the hodgepodge of often irrational (or misspelled) categories. [...]
I just came back from my last “mock orals” meeting (for my PhD general exams) today and it will all be over with the main event next Thursday afternoon. After the oral exam, all I have to do in order to get my PhD is write a book about something, right? Instead of plunging back [...]