Opening vignettes on Tokugawa prostitutes
I never really responded to Jonathan’s post on opening vignettes as pedagogy, but I do like using them. In fact, I will be using a couple Monday. Sometime...
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Classical Chinese for Everyone
Looking for a fun book? Look no further! Bryan Van Norden’s Classical Chinese for Everyone: A Guide for Absolute Beginners is it. This is a book for anyon...
Revolutionary China
Looking to spend some money? There are a lot of good essays in the Routledge Handbook of Revolutionary China. The editing is not that good, but there are some r...
Bullets and Opium-Tiananmen thirty years later
Part of my summer reading has been Liao Yiwu‘s Bullets and Opium: Real-Life Stories of China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Liao got in trouble afte...
“What I Read Over Summer Vacation” (part one?)
I’ve been on something of a tear through my to-read pile in search of… well, I’m not entirely sure some days. A lot of what’s in that st...
The soldier-archeologist
Among other things, the Japanese empire was an empire of science. Conquest led to (or was proceeded by) masses of geographers, anthropologists, geologists etc. ...
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,...
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. ...