Category: General

I have been living in Japan for almost two years now and exactly two weeks before I leave, I found what is perhaps Tokyo’s best non-used bookstore for academic nerds. Many friends have told me that there is a great bookstore in Ikebukuro (池袋) and I thought I had found it long ago. There is a nice multi-story bookstore near the station but yesterday I realized they were all referring to a completely different 9 floor bookstore: the ジュンク堂書店 (本店）. It is not far from the south exit, closest to the 西武池袋駅. The store has lots of academic books and like many Japanese bookstores, their in-store search engine (on each floor) is great (you can quickly print out lots of little book detail slips). History and philosophy (my favorites, as always) are both on the 4th floor. The philosophy section also has lots of English books (with separate sections divided into “analytical” philosophy, “post-structuralist”, and “Japanese thought” – we could have an interesting discussion just about this division itself). What is different about this store is that they keep in stock a lot of huge collections of 資料 which usually have to be ordered, and some of the more obscure history books that would never make it to regular bookstores (though usually only very recently published ones).

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 archive of magazines and journals in modern Japan, was fantastic but extremely expensive for photocopies. I got the article, which helps feed the myths about her, created in part by the novel 『男装の麗人』（”A Beauty in Male Attire”). I shall have occasion to write much more about her interesting case later.

The article I found today may no longer be protected by copyright. If I can confirm this I will put the whole thing online, and if I get around to it, I’ll translate it to English for inclusion on a website I will be creating about this fascinating woman and the many representations of her in Japan and China. I will also fix that retarted Wikipedia entry about her that I linked her name to above. I’ll keep to web stuff, however, because there are already two scholars in the US working on her (in addition to the legions of journalists, fans, and others who have studied her in Japan). Dan Shao, a former student of Joshua Fogel, has written a dissertation on her and is publishing a chapter on her in a soon to be released book on Manchukuo, and Barbara Brooks is also apparently working on her.

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 use Japanese as the primary language. I bought the “missing Synch” program thinking that would help but to no avail. Tonight, however, I gave it another try and it worked great so I wanted to pass on the simple procedure here…
Continue reading Synching Japanese Sony Clie with iCal on a Mac

While chatting on #Joiito I was reminded of a little geography lesson I had with my 8 year old cousin Frida. I asked her (in Norwegian), “What country is next to Norway and speaks a language very similar to our own?” She answered, “Bergen”

I couldn’t stop laughing…what a beautiful reply.

I’m back in the US, spending a quiet Christmas with my family. Until my uncle Thomas, and my cousins Frida and Alex arrived, I spent much of my time the last few days in the Bartlesville, Oklahoma library where my sister works, making slow progress on translation and catching up on various journals that I subscribe to that pile up at my parents’ house. As a break, I sometimes pick up interesting looking books from the nearby shelf. My most interesting recent find is the bookThe ISI Guide 2004: Choosing the Right College: The Whole Truth About America’s Top Schools. I didn’t notice when I took the book off the shelf that the phrase “the Right” was a different color from the rest of the title, nor should I have, since the Intercollegiate Studies Institute is described as a “a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization”. The cover and back of the book also professed an objectivity that I would find growingly amusing as I flipped through the contents….
Continue reading Choosing the “Right College”