Category: Asia
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Tanegashima Island: A strategic casualty
The day we flew out of the “cosmoport” of Tanegashima, a remote island (ritō) off the southern coast of Kyushu, was actually historically significant. Not because of my presence of course.
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“Truly Asia” Pt 2: Melaka
Read Part 1 “Kuala Lumpur” here → It took about two and a half hours to reach Melaka from the busy bus depot in southern Kuala Lumpur. We had loaded up on snacks and sandwiches for our lunchtime departure, just liking getting the “ekiben” or packed lunches in Japan before getting on the Shinkansen for…
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“Truly Asia” Pt 1: Kuala Lumpur
PREFACE: this is a whirlwind post meant to give you the tiniest sliver of context for the accompanying photos which I hope you have a spin through. They are at the bottom of the post. Back in about 2018 my wife and I started talking about living in a third country for a while. My…
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Michiko
On the Nordic Asia podcast this week Dr Satoko Naito interviewed Dr Kanako Kuramitsu about her research on an unseen population: children of consensual relationships between Japanese fathers and Chinese mothers in the war years. The emphasis on the word “consensual” is mine, meant to underscore that this is not the most commonly heard narrative…
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From the Ruins of Empire — a review
Books On Asia asked reviewers to pick their top books for 2020. I submitted my four along with the other contributors and gave a short comment. Below is a more fleshed out review. For more reviews, check out booksonasia.net Pankaj Mishra delivers a sweeping account of the intellectual history of anti-colonial thought in the early…
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Advocating for the teaching of knowledge to kids
Having been in the Canadian education system for a few years now, I am very impressed with the high-minded ideals of the early education system here. Things like teaching critical thinking, creativitiy, breaking down a problem, LID, etc are challenging and interesting, and meant to get a jump on the future. However it is pretty…
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Sharing some Asia podcast discoveries
I love podcasts, and have been a regular user for about 15 years. I also love audiobooks, which means when I discover a podcast and start going through the backlog, my GoodReads Reading Challenge suffers. This year I have discovered a number of deep podcast catalogs that I thought I would share (in no particular…
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Learning about the Asian fintech boom
After reading Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built with a friend, we decided to get together for a discussion with the old #StartupCoffeeKL group to go over some of our learnings. For me, the biggest takeaway was the impact Alibaba was having on the financial world. As Mary Meeker points out in the 2018…