The Marie Kondo thing
I’ve been avoiding getting into the debate about Marie Kondo’s konmari brand of modernist orientalism, mostly because I’m not that interested,...
Category: Uncategorized
On the opening vignette as pedagogy
A passage I wrote for one of my online course discussion boards: One of my pet peeves about textbook, history, and journalistic writing is the use of the “...
Pedagogy In The Wild
In a thoughtful discussion of teaching at USIH, I commented In addition to all the other qualifications and tensions around teaching, there are gaps between dis...
Pinyin is coming to get you!
Here is a CIA report on Pinyin from, I think, 1961 or so. They lay out the history of pinyin as a method of romanization (or latinization) of Chinese, and from ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
1945-1950/1960s/1970s/1980s/Colonial/Current/Recent Events/Imperialism/Japan/Korea/Korea-Japan/North Korea/Uncategorized/US-Korea
“North Korea: Hangover of the 20th Century”
Missouri Southern State, Pittsburg State’s rival/sister school across the state line in Joplin, does “international semesters” in the Fall, an...
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...
On “Buddhist Atrocities”
One of the odd substrains of commentary on the ongoing Rohingya genocide in Myanmar is Americans (mostly, as near as I can tell) shocked that a Buddhist society...
End of an Era
On this date, April 25, in 1644 the Chongzhen Emperor, last ruler of the Ming Dynasty hung himself from a tree on Meishan in Beiijng, bringing an end to Ming (a...