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Japanese Studies
Interviews with scholars of Japan about their new books.
September 8, 2024
The Relations of Estonia and Japan from the 19th Century to the early-21st Century
Is there much to say about historical ties between two countries that are 8000 kilometres apart from each other? Actually, yes. In this episode Ene Se…
September 6, 2024
Black Snow
In our interview about Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), James M. …
September 2, 2024
Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan
In Japan, a country popularly perceived as highly secularized and technologically advanced, ontological assumptions about spirits (tama or tamashii) s…
July 29, 2024
Asian Mobility History as Labor History
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Kate McDonald, Associate Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara, about her fascin…
July 27, 2024
Alternate Currents
In the second half of the twentieth century, Reiki went from an obscure therapy practiced by a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans to a globa…
July 27, 2024
Passing, Posing, Persuasion
Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire (U Hawaii Press, 2023) interrogates the intersections be…
July 23, 2024
Target Hong Kong
In January 1945, the final year of the Pacific War, Japanese-held Hong Kong became the site of coordinated attacks by the U.S. Navy on Japanese warshi…
July 21, 2024
The Same Moon Shines on All
Yanagawa Seigan (1789–1858) and his wife Kōran (1804–79) were two of the great poets of nineteenth-century Japan. They practiced the art of traditiona…
July 19, 2024
Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan
Part of a formidable publishing industry, cheap yet eye-catching graphic narratives consistently charmed early modern Japanese readers for around two …
July 18, 2024
Eliza Scidmore
Eliza Scidmore (1856-1928) was a journalist, a world traveler, a writer, an amateur photographer, the first female board member of the National Geogra…
July 13, 2024
Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution
Recent proposals to revive the ancient Silk Road for the contemporary era and ongoing Western interest in China’s growth and development have led to i…
July 12, 2024
Beauty Matters
The notion of beauty is inherently elusive: aesthetic judgments are at once subjective and felt to be universally valid. In Beauty Matters: Modern Jap…
July 11, 2024
Waiting for the Cool Moon
In Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-Imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan's Empire (Duke UP, 2024) Wendy Matsumura interrogates the erasure of c…
June 22, 2024
Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan
In early modern Japan, upper status groups coveted pills and powders made of exotic foreign ingredients such as mummy and rhinoceros horn. By the earl…
June 19, 2024
Emergent Tokyo
If ancient Kyoto stands for orderly elegance, then Tokyo, within the world’s most populated metropolitan area, calls to mind–– jam-packed chaos. But i…
June 14, 2024
The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism
Sidney Lu’s The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868-1961 (Cambridge 2019) places the concept of “M…
June 7, 2024
A Baseball Gaijin
Like many American boys, Tony Barnette yearned to one day make it to “The Show,” playing baseball professionally. The Arizona State pitcher was drafte…
June 1, 2024
The Book of Japanese Folklore
Discover everything you’ve ever wondered about the legendary spirits, creatures, and figures of Japanese folklore including how they have found their …
May 30, 2024
Judgement at Tokyo
In December 1948, a panel of 12 judges sentenced 23 Japanese officials for war crimes. Seven, including former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, were senten…
May 29, 2024
Imperial Japan and Defeat in the Second World War
Informed Western understanding of Imperial Japan still often conjures up images of militarism, blind devotion to leaders, and fanatical pride in the c…