history and memory… Reading the Absences in Ramseyer’s “Comfort Women” Provocation 19 Feb 202120 Feb 2021 A new publication on Japan’s wartime system of military prostitution (‘Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,' International Review of Law and Economics [December 2020]) has generated a whirlwind of…
China… Turning Anti-Japanese in China 4 Jul 201723 Dec 2015 Peering up from the various forms of wreckage spawned by the United States -- be it the lamentable state of transportation infrastructure, the gory aftermath of multiple-front wars in southwest…
China… Wartime History and Beijing’s Response to the New Defence Minister in Tokyo 5 Aug 20165 Aug 2016 In the wake of the Upper House elections in Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has completed a reshuffling of his cabinet. As described by Japan hand Michael Cucek, it was…
China… Writing the Early Postwar: White and Jacoby’s _Thunder Out of China_ 2 Aug 20163 Aug 2016 Foreign correspondents are crucial conduits for insights into contemporary East Asia. As I've learned from my conversations with various bureau chiefs, stringers, and greybeards in the region, there are few…
China… Report on Opium in China from the German Embassy in Tokyo, 1944 2 Mar 2016 On June 8, 1944, the German Embassy in Tokyo sent a report back to the Auswärtiges Amt, or Foreign Ministry. Unlike so many other files dealing with foreign affairs, at…
China… On the ‘Cairo Declaration’ Fiasco 18 Aug 2015 While the tendency of the CCP to insert itself at the main junctures of Chinese history in the 20th century is anything but new, there has been an increasing alignment…
history and memory… Comment on the Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan 7 May 2015 Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo Bureau Chief for The Times (London), kindly alerted me to an open letter recently published by a large number of academics nicely timed to follow on the heels…
China… Chinese Journalists and the U.S. Occupation of Japan 5 Apr 20156 Apr 2015 At the conclusion of eight years of Japanese occupation of nearly every major city in the Republic of China, Chinese journalists were prepared not just to celebrate victory but to…
China… Old Chapters, New Chapters: The Memory Wars in East Asia 17 Mar 201517 Mar 2015 From the very beginning of the so-called ‘post war,’ the territorial and temporal parameters of the memory wars between China and Japan were never drawn particularly cleanly. The war ended…
EU-East Asia relations… Angela Merkel and Japan’s Wartime Past 11 Mar 201511 Mar 2015 The German Chancellor was in Tokyo for a couple of eventful days. Although Merkel sees Abe Shinzo regularly, she noted before leaving that she has not been to Japan, the country that…
