井の中の蛙

A recent exchange on H-Asia mentioned the Asian Studies Toolbar, which I first read about in March of last year when the maker, John Noyce (”a librarian turned writer/historian”), wrote about it on the same list. At the time I was very disappointed to read that it only worked on Windows. However I just successfully downloaded and installed it on Firefox running on my iMac, and it is AMAZING. It allows instant searches of a variety of Asian engines and blog aggreggators, it lists hundreds of Asian academic and popular journals, newspapers, and other sources as live RSS feeds, and it even includes blogs related to Asia - including the three flavors of Frog in a Well. Links to online atlases, image banks, and other sources really make this a useful tool.

This is a “dump”: all the Asia related stuff I’ve saved over the last…. two months? Anyway, nobody else has blogged about it, so I thought I’d toss it out there. I hope to resume more … measured blogging soon.
[Crossposted at all three Frog Blogs; sorry about the irrelevant stuff.]

(more…)

I know as well as anyone that the blogosphere is a self-selected and decidedly non-standard sample of any population (except, of course, bloggers). But, apropos our vigorous discussion of Jared Diamond on Japanese origins, comes an analysis suggesting a rising tide of anti-Korean patriotism among Japanese bloggers. [via Kirk Larsen] At the risk of sounding snippy, apparently several decades of research on the common origins of Koreans and Japanese, popularized in the best English-language venues, has made little difference…