Canadian pot and the lessons of opium
Apparently Canada has legalized pot. The New Republic is speculating that they may find it hard to get an official distribution system to replace the old illega...
Author: Alan Baumler
Chinese Anti-Japanese films
There is a new book out, though sadly only in Japanese so far, about Chinese Anti-Japanese films. There are countless Sino-Japanese war movies and TV shows, and...
Syllabus blogging for Fall 2018
So, as is our tradition, a bit about what I will be doing in my classes in the Fall. As is also tradition, I am doing this way too late to incorporate any of yo...
Is the Shanghai Textile Museum the best museum in China?
The Shanghai Textile Museum 上海纺织博物馆 150 Aomen Rd; 澳門路150号(right near the M50 art district) is not one of the most famous museums in China. Lonely Planet dismiss...
Visual Shanghai
I went to the Shanghai History Museum today and got some nice teaching-related images. Some of them are useful, but not that exciting, like a nice rickshaw and ...
Was Hirata Atsutane Japan’s first Science Fiction writer?
Maybe. Well, sort of. It kind of depends on how you define things. Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) was one of the key thinkers and popularizers of Japanese Nativism...
Pan-Asian Hell
People like Hell. Most religions seem to have one, and depicting it is a classic way of instructing the masses about the wages of sin. Reproducing these images ...
Who likes short shorts?
Columbia University Press sent me a copy of Mu Aili and Mike Smith’s Contemporary Chinese Short-Short Stories: A Parallel Text. The book is, as you might have g...
Teaching Tokugawa math
Do you teach Tokugawa Japan? If so you probably spend some time talking about the rise of popular education, the terakoya temple schools etc. I found a good boo...
Fame! and journalism
Don’t you hate it when a good bit of teaching material comes to your attention just a little too late? I hate it when that happens. In this case the probl...
Syllabus blogging for Spring 2018
This is way too early for me, but I thought I would procrastinate on grading a bit by thinking about what I will be doing in Spring and asking for some advice. ...
Teaching images- Glimpses of Modern China
Do you follow Glimpses of Modern China ( 秋海棠民國史地 ) on Facebook? You should, since they post all sorts of interesting images and videos you can teach with. Or th...
Teaching Revolutionary China : China 1927: Memoir of a Debacle
A book that seems to have worked well for me in my teaching is Zhu Qihua China : China 1927: Memoir of a Debacle The class was History of Modern China,, syllabu...
Art and War in Modern Japan
If you teach Modern Japan you are probably used to having lots of cool pictures to show your students. You probably pinch a lot of them from the MIT Visualizing...
Internet Culture and Rough Music
Not really a post, but more of an idea. I ran across this, about victims of the alleged Las Vegas shooting who are being harassed on-line. I say alleged, becau...