Education About Asia: Online Archives

NEW FOR 2023: Beginning with Spring 2023, subscribers to the print edition of Education About Asia (EAA) will receive additional exclusive digital access to the current year’s three issues (spring, fall, and winter) as an online flipbook for the duration of their active subscription. Articles from the three print issues for 2023 will be uploaded to the EAA Digital archives in 2024. View the TOC and Editor’s Message for the Spring 2023 issue. Subscribe today to stay up to date with EAA!

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Feature Article

Poverty in Late Meiji Japan: It Mattered Where You Lived

by James L. Huffman

We know only a few things about the coal collector who eked out an existence in Osaka’s slum neighborhoods early in the 1900s. He had a twenty-four-year-old wife, a three-year-old son, and wages of ¥12 or ¥13 a month—about half of what a railway con­ductor made, and a third as much as an ironworker. We know too that these wages barely covered food, housing, and rented bedding, leaving the family dependent for everything else on the ¥2 his wife made each month making straw sandals.1 The g...

Nation Versus People: Ashio and Japan’s First Evironmental Crisis

by James L. Huffman

Farmers along the Watarase River sixty miles northwest of Tokyo had never worried much about the spring and summer floods, even the occasional big ones, because the waters brought rich top soil from the north and with it, better harvests. The floods of 1890 were different, however. New seeds refused to sprout once the waters evaporated; fish in the river died; silkworms ate mulberry leaves along the shore and shriveled up; sores broke out on field workers’ feet. And when even bigger floods cam...

Columns, EAA Interview

Japan and Imperialism: 1853-1945: A Brief Interview with James L. Huffman

by James L. Huffman

Lucien: Jim, many of our readers are responsible for world history courses and, arguably, content selection is the most critical of all issues for instructors in this discipline. Given limited classroom time what are some reasons, in your opinion, why the topic of your booklet is especially important?

Feature Article

Looking Both Ways: The Use of Meiji Travel Literature in the Classroom

by James L. Huffman

Although thirty-seven years have passed since my initial visit to Japan, the memories of my first twenty-four hours in Tokyo remain sharply etched in my memory. I still can see— and feel—it all: the dark rain of the first night, the customs officials’ rigidity, the hard bed at the Asia Center, the spaghetti lunch that came when I thought I had ordered a hot dog, the embarrassment of wearing my shoes into the living room of my new apartment, the lovely sour/sweet taste of the Calpis drink m...

Feature Article

Japanese Society in the Twentieth Century

by James L. Huffman

Most American textbooks do a capable job of summarizing the political and economic facts of Japan's modern history. The country, in their telling, modernized quickly in the late 1800s, turned militant in the 1930s, went to war in the 1940s, reemerged under American guidance in the 1950s, and became an "economic animal" in the 1960s. In the 1990s, the bubble burst. Unfortunately, most of these textbooks ignore the rich and varied lives of the Japanese people themselves: their consumption pattern...

Film Review

Blending with Nature: Classical Chinese Gardens in the Suzhou Style

by James L. Huffman

Students usually react skeptically—or with puzzlement—when I point out that traditional Chinese scholars sought to be Con­fucian in the daytime and Daoist in the evening. The idea strikes them as contradictory. After seeing Blending with Nature, I expect they will understand more easily what I am saying.

New to EAA?

Before viewing the full archives, view Editor’s Choice Articles, handpicked by EAA Editor, Lucien Ellington, which provide a good overview of EAA and introduction for new readers.