http://www.froginawell.net/japan The Japan History Group Blog Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:51:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Welcome to the 106th Roundup of History Blogging, a double-sized edition. Fortunately, being a blog, we never really run out of space. First, the two biggest events of the annual calendar happen in January: The American Historical Association Meeting and the Cliopatria Awards. Both, fortunately, have nice, tidy round-up posts I can link to! The [...]]]> http://www.froginawell.net/japan/2012/02/history-carnival-cvi/ In honor of the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the US at Pearl Harbor, the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations has published a series of essays on the event and historical memory issues; HNN has reprinted it (with a useful index post). John Gripentrog’s “The Road to War” is a [...]]]> http://www.froginawell.net/japan/2011/12/shafr-roundtable-on-pearl-harbor-plus-hnn-bonus-article/ For a little entertainment this Thanksgiving, I read Andrew Rankin’s Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide (Kodansha, 2011).1 Since I’m teaching both Samurai and Early Japan this semester, seemed like a good supplemental read, and this is the first thing resembling a lull I’ve had all semester. This is an attractive little book, substantially researched, [...]]]> http://www.froginawell.net/japan/2011/11/seppuku-a-samurai-suicide-miscellany/ The ninja question came up last week in my Samurai class — we were talking about possible writing projects — so I had to do my ninja spiel, which has become a bit of a set piece. The history of ninja in three stages: Sneaky samurai, literary device, and school. The first stage covers the [...]]]> http://www.froginawell.net/japan/2011/09/the-three-stages-of-ninja/ As an historian, I consider anniversaries irrelevant. However, as a social function, naturally, they matter a great deal, and the internet itself moves so quickly at times that it’s worth looking back regularly to maintain perspective. Twitter itself, for example, is less than five years old, and I’ve been using it for about two years. [...]]]> http://www.froginawell.net/japan/2011/09/twitterstorian-anniversary/