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Wartime History and Beijing’s Response to the New Defence Minister in Tokyo
In the wake of the Upper House elections in Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has completed a reshuffling of his cabinet. As described by Japan hand Michael Cucek, it was not a particularly inspiring...
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Napalm and Invasion: North Korean War Memory and British Sources
In a recent post on his black-and-white personal blog, the North Korea scholar B.R. Myers criticizes a recent ream of journalistic think pieces about the function of Korean War memory in the DPRK. The...
View ArticleWeaponizing the Past, or, How to Get a Book Contract in Trump’s America
It seems a bit too easy these days to begin any essay with a nod to how disturbed one is by the latest muddy geyser of Presidential discourse. As most sentient beings on the planet today could tell...
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Cruel Resurrection: Chinese Comics and the Korean War
I wrote this article in the early 2000s under the direction of the ageless Chinese art historian Shen Kuiyi, with whom I did a “cognate field” during my doctoral studies at Ohio University, and with...
View ArticleNew Fragments from Mao in the Cultural Revolution
In December 2013, scholars of the history of the PRC were given a shot in the arm via the publication of Mao Zedong Nianpu, 1949-1976, consisting of six volumes of previously obscure materials from the...
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Mistranslating Mao in Chengdu, 1958
If you’re thinking much these days about Mao Zedong’s role in triggering massive famine in China during the Great Leap Forward (1958-61), you aren’t alone. In recent years, big histories in English...
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Robert Jay Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality, and the Chinese Cultural...
In his seminal 1961 study of survivors of detention and interrogation in the new People’s Republic of China, Robert Jay Lifton explains why this topic gripped him so thoroughly: …I arrived in Hong...
View ArticleMemory and Reproduction: A Study of 1980s Chinese Ethnic Korean Revolutionary...
The Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies recently published a new and very exciting paper by two Chinese scholars focusing on an area of great interest to me, and hopefully to readers of this blog:...
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Women and the Workplace in Japan, Abe and the Emperor, Japan and Brexit
I feel this story describes more my mother’s generation than my own — then again Japan never fails to shock on the gender front. Guess my own marriage is hardly typical, what with my Japanese husband...
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Reading the Absences in Ramseyer’s “Comfort Women” Provocation
A new publication on Japan’s wartime system of military prostitution (‘Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,’ International Review of Law and Economics [December 2020]) has generated a whirlwind of...
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