This afternoon I gave a joint research/teaching presentation with Tomaz Jardim of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.:
The presentation, which was well attended by a group full of ideas, made me want to read more articles, or create more articles, comparing the postwar trials in Tokyo and Nanking to those in Nuremberg and France.
Certainly some good work has been done on this subject already, but sometimes you have to write the book or article for which you are constantly searching but can never find. We will see to what extent I am able to live up to this wishful forward projection of my own capabilities.
Perhaps some headway will be made next week in Philadelphia, where I’ll be routing out a furrow at the Association for Asian Studies meeting with a presentation on postwar Chinese attitudes toward Japanese war crimes and war criminals.
Fortunately, while all this is boiling away, I get some short-term upwards feedback at Pacific Lutheran University via another cello recital. Via the Powell & Heller 2010 Holocaust Conference, I’ll be performing in the University’s Scandanavian Center from noon-1 p.m. with pianist Robert Jorgenson. The program is made up of music by Ernest Bloch, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Nadia Boulanger. Does playing music from the Holocaust and interacting with top-notch German historians make any qualitative difference in my own work on Japanese war crimes? The jury is still out.
Adam Cathcart 
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