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Japanese Studies
Interviews with scholars of Japan about their new books.
April 14, 2024
The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales
Adam Kabat’s The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales: Monster Comics from Edo Japan (Columbia UP, 2023) is an in-depth introduction to the …
April 4, 2024
Eight Dogs, Or Hakkenden
Glynne Walley, translator of classic Japanese novel Hakkenden, joins us on the podcast again to talk about his second translated volume: Hakkenden, Pa…
April 3, 2024
Hokkaido Dairy Farm
As an ethnography of a Japanese dairy farm while having theoretical values going beyond the specific context, Hokkaido Dairy Farm: Cosmopolitics of Ot…
March 30, 2024
A Gentleman from Japan
On November 12, 1588, five young Asian men—led by a twenty-one-year-old called Christopher—traveled up the River Thames to meet Queen Elizabeth I. Chr…
March 17, 2024
Kings in All But Name
In the sixteenth century, members of the Ouchi family were kings in all but name in much of Japan. Immensely wealthy, they controlled sea lanes stretc…
March 7, 2024
Naomi Osaka
In July 2021, Naomi Osaka—world number 1 women’s tennis player—lit the Olympic Cauldron at the Tokyo Olympic Games. The half-Japanese, half-American, …
March 3, 2024
Anime's Knowledge Cultures
With comics franchises getting turned into multi-billion dollar revenue opportunities and consumer technology companies dominating daily headlines — t…
February 29, 2024
The Gods of the Sea
Japan is often imagined as a nation with a long history of whaling. In The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c.1600-…
February 28, 2024
Bernhard Sindberg
In December 1937, the Chinese capital, Nanjing, falls and the Japanese army unleash an orgy of torture, murder, and rape. Over the course of six weeks…
February 26, 2024
Shanghai 1937
Peter Harmsen's book Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Casemate, 2015) describes one of the great forgotten battles of the 20th century. At it…
February 22, 2024
Koume's World
In 1864, on a midsummer’s day, Kawai Koume, a 60-year old matriarch of a samurai family in Wakayama, makes a note in her diary, which she had dutifull…
February 21, 2024
Thought Crime
Max Ward’s Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019) analyzes the trajectory and transformations of the …
February 20, 2024
Transnational Nazism
In his new book, Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919-1936 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), associate prof…
February 19, 2024
Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki
On 9th August 1945, the US dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Of the dead, approximately 8500 were Catholic Christians, representing over six…
February 10, 2024
Irresistible
Why are some things cute, and others not? What happens to our brains when we see something cute? And how did cuteness go global, from Hello Kitty to D…
January 22, 2024
Kondo the Barbarian
Kondo the Barbarian: A Japanese Adventurer and Indigenous Taiwan's Bloodiest Uprising (Eastbridge Books, 2023) is a gripping and revealing account of …
January 17, 2024
Wombs of Empire
In 2007, Japan’s health minister referred to women ages 15-50 as “birthing machines.” The context was a speech about Japan’s declining birthrate and p…
January 4, 2024
Alice in Japanese Wonderlands
Since the first translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books appeared in Japan in 1899, Alice has found her way into nearly every facet of Japanese lif…
December 29, 2023
Grammar, Identity, and Ideology in Early 20th-Century Japan
Have you ever felt that the grammar of Asian languages does not fit with the framework that we use to describe them? In the late 19th century, Asian g…
December 29, 2023
Meanings of Antiquity
Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, record…