If you are looking for something fun and useful to teach in a Tokugawa class, I recommend Santo Kyoden  Playboy Grilled Edo Style from Kern, Adam L. Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyoshi of Edo Japan 2d Edition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. This is actually a piece that has been anthologized a lot.  There is a version in Sumie Jones and Kenji Watanabe. An Edo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Mega-City, 1750-1850. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013. (translation by Sumie Jones) and one in Shirane, Haruo. Early Modern Japanese Litera ..read more

In keeping with tradition, here is the Tokugawa group project for this semester. I probably could have made more categories, but this should be enough. The rest of the class is pretty traditional.Any advice welcome! Tokugawa-Project-.f23 ..read more

Major and Cook’s Ancient China: A history is now available as open access  via Routledge. This is good news, and got me to thinking about teaching and textbooks, a perennial topic. What is workable for assigning to students has evolved a lot over time. When I was an undergraduate (Gil-galad ruled in Gondolin, Elizabeth II was Queen of England etc. etc.) teachers had to have students buy books. Even things like packets of photocopies were a bit of a hassle, even before the copyright mess. Textbook publishers helped out by not “revising” their books every 15 minutes to kill the used book ma ..read more

So, again this fall I will be having students in my upper-level class (in this case Early  Modern Japan) do a group research project. The end of the project will involve them writing an essay in response to a pretty broad prompt from me. For the Modern China class, the prompt was easy. “Republican China-Abortive Revolution or not?” Modern Japan was also easy. “Taisho-WTF?”. For Early China I had them read Huainanzi and write about it as the Outcome of Classical Chinese philosophy.1 What to do for this class? In general, framing the “big question” at the end is the thing I struggle with mo ..read more

Today I was browsing through US national archives microfilm reels containing state department records related to British Asia, 1910-29.1 There is always fun and unexpected materials in these collections and I thought I would share one that offers a little snapshot of what children in “Vernacular” (Chinese language) middle and primary school students were assigned to study in 1920s. In February, 1929 the US consul to Hong Kong 1926–29, Harold Shantz composed a report on “Educational System of Hong Kong” which runs to some 34 pages, including a nice (but incomplete) list of the sources used. At ..read more

Sayaka Chatani, Hiro Fujimoto, and Maho Ikeda are starting a new bilingual Japanese and English research exchange seminar series. The first of these is coming up on 18 May: an online manuscript workshop featuring a manuscript workshop with Yuri Ōkubo, “Ambivalent Aspirations: Okinawan Collaboration with the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”. You can register for this Zoom event online here. As Sayaka, who was one of our early Frog in a Well members, puts it, “Use Japanese or English, whichever you feel more comfortable speaking in, to participate.” I find this to be a really exciting new ..read more

I’ve been following with interest the debates around the rapid emergence of powerful large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, its Bing sibling Sydney, Meta’s Galactica, and Google’s Bard. One important recent discussion of this can be found here. My current status: deep concern mixed with pragmatic curiosity. Given the propensity of ChatGPT (mid-February, 2023 version) to happily invent facts, people, nonexistant citations, and quotations, I’m not yet too worried about how this impacts historical essays produced by students. However, while its shortcomings in this regard may give only ..read more

克己復禮 Keji fuli (restrain the self, restore the rites). Kong Qiu, Kongzi, or Master Kong, known in English as “Confucius,” marked the passing of the decades: At fifteen I set my heart upon learning. At thirty, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground. At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities. At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of Heaven. At sixty, I heard them with docile ear. At seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart;for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right. But eighty? Nothing. No help at all, perhaps because he had died? So when I passe ..read more

Final report on group research assignment. It  seems to have gone pretty well. Of the 22 students who finished the class 14 did the survey about it (anonymous, but they got points for it) All of them claimed to have liked the assignment, and learned something from it, and, most importantly, to have learned things from other students presenting their research and from the group part of it. This is the third time I have done this. Abortive Revolution (Modern China) Group research project -Abortive Revolution Taisho project (Modern Japan) Syllabus blogging HIST 437 Modern Japan and the T ..read more

While poking around for English language materials to offer students on post-1945 South Korea, I came across The New Spirit Movement, a 1979 collection of short speeches by Park Geun-hye (Pak Kŭnhye, Park Keun Hae), president from 2013-2017 and thereafter convicted and jailed until 2021 on charges of bribery and various abuses of power. I believe the work is an English language edition of 『새마음의 길』published in the same year. Park was daughter of the Korean president and dictator Park Chung Hee, who took power following a 1961 military coup and ruled as president from 1962 until his assasination ..read more