Education About Asia: Online Archives

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Teaching Resources Essay

Empathy, Memory, and Teaching East Asia’s World War II

by Emily Matson

Historical memory is a socially based reconstruction of the past that prioritizes the needs of the present over the veracity of the past.4 Originating in the 1920s, the field of memory studies grew increasingly prominent in the 1980s and became closely linked with memories of the Holocaust. Since then, it has spanned “any imaginable historical topic, from the tragic to the mundane, from genocide and war to Mickey Mouse and landscape.”5 In the case of studying historical memory of World War I...

Teaching Resources Essay

Graphic Novels about Japanese Imperialism in East Asia: Shigeru Mizuki’s Showa (vols. 1-4) and Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass

by Peter Braden

Shigeru Mizuki’s sweeping manga history and personal memoir of the reign of the Shōwa Emperor (1926–1989) could be a valuable addition to high school and college classroom discussions of Japanese imperialism before and during the Pacific War, and of the country’s turbulent postwar economic and cultural transformation.

Facts About Asia

Facts About Asia: Transparency International: Asia’s Most Populous Nations

by EAA Editorial Office

Transparency, or the lack thereof, is a critical factor in evaluating any nation. The column that follows focuses upon Asia’s six most-populous countries. In order to enhance teacher and student critical thinking about transparency, the column also includes content on two of the most-populous Western nations, the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany.

EAA Interview

An EAA Interview with the 2022 Franklin R. Buchanan Prizewinners: Anne Prescott, Yurika Kurakata, and John Frank for Walking the Tokaido: A Multi-Disciplinary Experience in History and Culture

by Lucien Ellington

This is our twenty-sixth consecutive interview with the winners of the Franklin R. Buchanan Prize, awarded annually to recognize an outstanding pedagogical, instructional, or curriculum publication on Asia designed for K–12 and college undergraduate instructors and students. This year’s winners are Anne Prescott, Yurika Kurakata, John Frank, and Arlene Kowal for Walking the Tōkaidō: A Multi-Disciplinary Experience in History and Culture (https://tinyurl.com/y3cc5nr3).

Resources

Walking the Tokaido Road with my Students

by Andrew Glasier

In the summer of 2021 I was lucky enough to join a unique professional development opportunity through Five College Center for East Asia Studies. The opportunity was to virtually walk the Tōkaidō Road of pre-modern Japan, while also reading, researching, watching videos, and discussing with other participants along the way at several “stops” that the center had created.

Teaching Resources Essay

Teaching Japanese Popular Culture Online

by Yasue Kuwahara

I started teaching Japanese popular culture in the 1990s when there was an increased interest in Japan due to the country’s economic expansion in the US and the world. I taught it in person first and then shifted to online, using different textbooks, other learning materials and activities. In the essay that follows, I focus on the online format and explain what I teach and how I do it in detail to help others develop their courses. The same format can be used to teach the popular cultures of ...

Book Review

Tsunami Girl

by Rebecca Byrd

The remarkable novel Tsunami Girl is the story of fifteen-year-old Yuki, who lives in the United Kingdom and had just arrived in Japan for a visit with her grandfather in the fictional town of Osoma when the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami struck on March 11, 2011. The narrative is an account of Yuki’s survival and emotional recovery from the trauma of that day. The part-story, part-manga weaves together elements of Japanese folklore, including shape-shifters and ghosts, with the story...

Book Review

While I Was Away

by Molly DeDona (Reviewer)

While I Was Away’s prose is almost identical to a young adult novel, but is instead a memoir based on the author’s own life experience. Waka Brown tells the story of five months in summer 1984 where she lived in Japan, torn from all that is familiar in her rural Kansas home. Waka, whose parents emigrated from Japan to America before she was born, has only visited Japan a handful of times with her family before this fateful trip. The earnestness of Brown’s younger voice resonates well throu...

Teaching Resources Essay

Teaching How Do You Live? in Middle School Classrooms

by Nancy Neff (Reviewer)

In 1937, Genzaburō Yoshino wrote a charming coming of age story in his young adult novel How Do You Live? The reader learns much about life in Tokyo and its neighborhoods in pre-World War II Japan. However, it is so much more than a simple tale of a teenage boy, his friends, and their adventures; this work encompasses science, philosophy, history, geography, physics, economics, and more. It is a moving, engrossing narrative that is at times deceptively straightforward but also complicated and ...

Resources

Teaching the Tōkaidō Road: The Visual Arts, Geography, and History

by Angie Stokes

Journey Along the Tōkaidō: Exploring Japan’s National Road1 is an online curriculum developed by the Ohio State University’s East Asian Studies Center with support from the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership. This comprehensive collection of resources includes a series of sixteen lesson plans designed by K-12 teachers providing a wide range of opportunities for educators to bring the adventures of the Tōkaidō to life in their classrooms using primary source materials. This cu...

Feature Article

Kimono: The Global Adventures of a Fashion Icon

by Gavin James Campbell

Clothing is a fun and accessible way to show students global connections. Tracing the odyssey by which a “simple” t-shirt was conceived, resourced, designed, woven, sewn, marketed and delivered reveals the far-reaching networks that keep us clothed. Fast fashion and modern technology has considerably sped up this process, but the global fashion industry is ancient. Most of humanity’s earliest overland and maritime trade routes were an attempt to get beautiful cloth and dyestuffs from one r...

Essay

Japan’s Impact on World History

by Peter K. Frost

Many of us might find it hard to imagine Japan having a big impact on twentieth century world history. How could a nation smaller than the state of California, and dwarfed by its much larger neighbor China, possibly be a big player? Hopefully, the fact that Japan has the world’s eleventh-largest population and is now the world’s third-biggest economy may explain why Japan has had at least two different kinds of impacts on world history, each of which was a major influence in its own par...

Feature Article

Japan Meets Russia

by Viktor Shmagin

Japanese, Ainu and Russians, 1702–1792 Most people today think of the Russo–Japanese War (1904–1905) as the first time Russians and Japanese came into conflict in Asia. Yet in fact, by 1904 they had been viewing each other as imperial rivals for over a century. Edo Period (1600–1868) Japan was keenly interested in the world beyond its borders. Indeed, despite the persistence of the sakoku (closed country) narrative in the popular imagination, Japan was anything but secluded during this ...

Teaching Resources Essay

Reacting to the Past: Teaching Asian and World History through Role-Playing Games

by Yidi Wu

Teaching world history as a survey course is difficult for both faculty and students: the course requires a temporal and geographical scope that is often beyond individual faculty’s expertise, and for a variety of reasons, most American students, unless they have a love of world history or possibly intend to major in history, have either low level of knowledge in history or, are historically illiterate.1 Although most states require high school students to take some form of world or American h...

Feature Article

Kūkai in China, What He Studied and Brought Back to Japan

by Ronald S. Green

The Japanese Buddhist priest Kūkai (774–835 CE) continues to be one of the most popular historical figures to persist in imagination and images around Japan. For introducing Shingon esoteric Buddhism into his country in the early Heian period (794–1184), the emperor awarded him the posthumous title Kōbō Daishi, literally “Great Master Who Propagated the Dharma.” Yet far from this being the extent of his accomplishments, Kūkai also exerted major influences on the development of Japane...

Feature Article

Beyond the Sinosphere in Early Japan: Nara and the Silk Roads

by Todd Munson

A startling archeological discovery in 2009, near the ruins of the Heijō Palace in Nara: nineteen dark green shards, later determined to be ceramics produced during the Abbasid Caliphate in present-day Iraq. The shards were originally from a jar, perhaps used to carry spices or dates; a wooden tablet found nearby records the date as 768 CE. How might such an object have found its way to the Japanese archipelago, some 5,000 miles away, over 1,000 years ago? Anyone traveling with ceramics, even f...

EAA Digest Exclusive, Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

Back to School Special: “The Top Ten Most Viewed” and More

by EAA Editorial Office

As a teenager, I was interested in lists of the top ten most popular songs and for most of my life, various top ten lists of books have always garnered my attention. Having a top ten “most viewed” EAA archived articles list is a never-ending source of personal interest. Digest readers are cordially invited to check out our "most viewed" EAA archives list (see the right side of the main EAA archives page) and speculate on what trends our list might indicate. Your feedback is of great inter...

EAA Digest Exclusive, Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

International Politics and Archeology: Disparate Critical Teaching Topics

by EAA Editorial Office

Although these two topics will probably attract different readers, they both are important components of a liberal arts education. Virtually all high schools and colleges in North America and elsewhere offer modern world history; in the US, AP Comparative Government and Politics; and in Europe, the US and elsewhere, International Baccalaureate Programs courses in the “individual and societies” curriculum focus upon international politics and issues. Increasingly, college and universities of...

EAA Digest Exclusive, Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

Teaching Asia through Literature: China, Japan, Korea

by EAA Editorial Office

Teaching Asia through Literature: China, Japan, Korea [caption id="attachment_18783" align="alignleft" width="200"] Book cover for My Borther's Keeper by Julie Lee[/caption] Contemporary education at almost every level, through its seeming obsession with "Objectives," "Learning Outcomes," and intensely political ideologies, seems to be minimizing the pleasure, varying emotions, and truth that literature conveys about the human condition. EAA readers and subscribers familiar with Asia wil...

EAA Digest Exclusive, Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

Rethinking our Notions of Asia

by EAA Editorial Office

Fifteen years ago, we published a special section titled “Rethinking our Notions of Asia.” This column will hopefully help EAA readers and their students continue this process in multiple ways. Most fundamentally, students should first learn basic information about Asian cultures. That said, instructors and students in middle school, high school, and undergraduate classes can learn even more about Asia and the world through considering the essays below.

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.