By W. Puck Brecher We are pleased to share this excerpt adapted from the newest Asia Shorts volume, Animal Care in Japanese Tradition: A Short History, by W. Puck Brecher (Washington State University). In this book, Brecher offers a brief overview of animals in Japanese culture and society from ancient times to the 1950s. Brecher […]
Interviewed for #AsiaNow by Maura Elizabeth Cunningham When two blue-and-ivory “dumpling-nose” engines departed from Tokyo and Osaka train stations and started racing toward each other at 6:00am on October 1, 1964, the world’s fastest train officially became a reality. Japan’s bullet trains took the old-fashioned railroad industry and updated it with new technology and a […]
Barbara Sato (née Wool) came to Asian Studies with little or no Asia in her personal background. However, as a high school student she was chosen to go to Japan under the auspices of the American Field Service, perhaps one of the last cohorts to actually make the journey by ship across the Pacific. This […]
By Maura Elizabeth Cunningham Discussions of how to address climate change frequently note that one of the most important factors will be breaking China’s “addiction” to coal. Coal-fired power plants have provided electricity to the country’s manufacturing sector and growing cities for decades, while at the same time creating toxic air pollution and carbon dioxide […]
Minamata (Andrew Levitas, director, 2020; Sakamoto Ryūichi, music; Benoît Delhomme, cinematography) Inspired by true events in Minamata, Japan, where the Chisso chemical factory poisoned residents by dumping mercury into the sea from 1932 to 1968, Andrew Levitas’ film shows Minamata through the eyes of the great photojournalist W. Eugene Smith and Aileen Smith, who move […]
The Hamako Ito Chaplin Memorial Award Committee is pleased to announce that Dr. Jeff Peterson (Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese, Brigham Young University) is the recipient of the 2022 Hamako Ito Chaplin Memorial Award for Excellence in Japanese Language Teaching. Dr. Peterson has a background in Japanese language pedagogy and linguistics. He has taught Japanese […]
Tom Le is Assistant Professor of Politics at Pomona College and has been a member of the AAS since 2015. A political scientist, Le’s work covers Japan and East Asia more broadly. Why did you join AAS and why would you recommend AAS to your colleagues? I joined AAS to engage with scholars outside of […]
By Paula R. Curtis Since at least the 2008 economic collapse, scholars of all academic disciplines have been anxious about what the future holds for their fields of study. Even before the global pandemic of 2020-2021 exacerbated those concerns, large organizations like the American Historical Association showcased alarming data on the precipitous decline in academic […]
By Vivian Li In 2019, I was generously awarded a Japan Research Travel Grant from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. The purpose of this funding was to conduct final research in preparation for the exhibition Kimono Couture: The Beauty of Chiso, scheduled to open […]
AAS Member Dennis Frost is Wen Chao Chen Associate Professor of East Asian Social Sciences in Kalamazoo College’s Department of History and East Asian Studies. Frost is also author of More Than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press, 2021). In this book, Frost narrates the development […]
Tatiana Linkhoeva is assistant professor in the Department of History at New York University and has been a member of AAS since 2013. Follow her on Twitter @linkhoeva. What is your discipline and country (or countries) of interest? I received my PhD in History, although my MA and BA were in Philosophy. As a historian […]
By Paula R. Curtis Is Japanese Studies facing a crisis? There have been energetic discussions about the current status and future of Japanese Studies, amplified in no small part by the roundtable “The Death of Japan Studies” at the 2019 Association for Asian Studies conference in Denver. Speakers considered various influences on the field, from […]
Maren Ehlers is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan, published by Harvard University Asia Center and winner of an Honorable Mention for the 2020 AAS John Whitney Hall Book Prize. To begin with, […]
Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci is Assistant Professor at Koç University and author of Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan, published by Stanford University Press and winner of the 2020 AAS John Whitney Hall Book Prize. To begin with, please tell us what your book is about. My book follows the […]
Jeremy A. Yellen is an assistant professor in the Department of Japanese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and author of The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War, published by Cornell University Press in 2019. Yellen’s work is a thorough investigation of Japan’s vision for the Greater East […]
Baseball tickets as a research expense? Nice try. It’s no surprise that a funding agency expressed skepticism when anthropologist William W. Kelly included a $900 “purchase of baseball game tickets” line item on his proposed grant budget. Kelly, however, had a legitimate reason for requesting the support: he was conducting an ethnographic study of Osaka’s […]
This is Number 2 in the “JAS Author Interviews” series at #AsiaNow. Click here to see all posts in the series. Konrad Kalicki is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Japanese Studies and Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He is author of “Japan’s Liberal-Democratic Paradox of Refugee Admission,” which […]
AAS Publications is pleased to announce the release of A Friend in Deed: Lu Xun, Uchiyama Kanzō, and the Intellectual World of Shanghai on the Eve of War, by Joshua A. Fogel. In this volume from our Asia Shorts series, Fogel, a professor of history at York University (Toronto) and specialist in Sino-Japanese relations, examines […]
Bryan D. Lowe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University and author of Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan, published by University of Hawai’i Press and the Kuroda Institute for the Study of Buddhism and winner of the 2019 AAS John Whitney Hall Book Prize. […]
By David R. Ambaras and Kate McDonald What Bodies and Structures Is Bodies and Structures is a platform for researching and teaching spatial histories of East Asia and the larger worlds of which they were a part. The site combines individually-authored, media-rich content modules with conceptual maps and visualizations. The modules analyze primary sources with significant […]
