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Japanese Studies
Interviews with scholars of Japan about their new books.
November 23, 2024
Music and the Making of Modern Japan
Margaret Mehl’s Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert (Open Book 2024) examines the ways in which Western classical (or “ar…
October 31, 2024
Beverly Hills Spy
Frederick Rutland—”Rutland of Jutland”—was a war hero, renowned World War I aviator…and a Japanese spy. In the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, Rutla…
October 18, 2024
Samurai with Telephones
What is going on when a graphic novel has a twelfth-century samurai pick up a telephone to make a call, or a play has an ancient aristocrat teaching i…
October 11, 2024
Neutrality and Collaboration in South China
The South China enclave of Macau was the first and last European colonial settlement in East Asia and a territory at the crossroads of different empir…
October 11, 2024
Afterlives of Letters
When East Asia opened itself to the world in the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals had shared notions of literature bec…
October 9, 2024
The Tormented Alliance
The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949 (UNC Press, 2022) explores the wartime partnership between China an…
October 8, 2024
Awaiting MacArthur's Return
Over the course of World War II, guerrillas from across the Philippines opposed Imperial Japan's occupation of the archipelago. Although the guerrilla…
October 5, 2024
Technology and the Rise of Great Powers
When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the mom…
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
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 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 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…