Category: history
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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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Unzen – Where foreigners go to hell to cool off
From a tiny speck on the horizon, the volcano slow grew as I crossed first the mud flats of Kumamoto and then the shallow waters of the Ariake Sea. Now, at the foot of the volcano, looming over the small city of Shimabara, there was only one way to go: up! Unzen, the central volcano…
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The nearly 400 year legacy of a cutting edge ceramic coffee filter
This NY Times piece on a 1,020 year old shop in Kyoto has been making the rounds online. It got me thinking about other examples of products or skills that have traversed centuries, and a random discovery we made at a shopping stall: a paperless ceramic coffee filter. Last October we travelled to Imari and…
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Invoking the God of Letters to fight Coronavirus
In the fight against coronavirus, some in Japan are pulling out all the stops. Kyodo reports that a temple in Kyoto recently held the Kitano Goryoe, a Shinto-Buddhist rite which hasn’t been held since since 1467. The rite originates to the 10th century, and was meant to appease Tenmantenjin (Tenjin for short), a raijin or…
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75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki
The 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb was a couple of days ago. The second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki 75 years ago today, on 9 August 1945 at 11:02. I was in Nagasaki a couple of weeks ago and stopped at the hypocenter monument pictured above. The black monolith points up where at 500…
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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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Timeline of Japanese in the Okanagan
May is Asian Heritage month in Canada. Here in the Okanagan our local Asian Heritage Month committee has been working for months to ensure that there are a number of events and activities to raise awareness of Asian-Canadian contributions to our communities, and empower immigrants. It all kicks off next week. This year, the Japanese…
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A hypercompetitive race — review of The History of White People
The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter By default, any book claiming to be a history of “white” people must necessarily be a history of “race science.” Surely one must clearly define the boundaries of your subject? It is Nell Irvin Painter’s careful historiography of those shifting boundaries that make up most of…
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Clausewitz Roundtable released as book
Many years ago I participated in an inter-blog (and very detailed!) discussion of the military classic On War by Carl von Clausewitz. The proceedings of that endeavour have been collated into 553 page book, released this week by Ever Victorious Press. I submitted three chapters under my alias at the time “Sir Francis Younghusband.” My…
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Shinran and the Buddhist Evangelical movement of Japan
A fifth of Japanese — about 25 million people — identify as practitioners of Jōdo Shinshū, the largest denomination of Buddhism in Japan. My family in Japan are all Jōdo Shinshū, also known as “Shin” Buddhism. I am currently here in Japan, and this weekend we will be performing the 13th memorial service for my…