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…
Cultural Politics… Karl Haushofer and Japan (1): Geographers and Intellectual Links into the Fascist Period 6 Mar 20186 Mar 2018 This is the first in a multi-post project on German geographers and intellectuals and their interaction with Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, with a nominal focus on Manchuria and…
history and memory… Napalm and Invasion: North Korean War Memory and British Sources 1 Jun 201716 Jul 2018 In a recent post on his black-and-white personal blog, the North Korea scholar B.R. Myers criticizes a recent ream of journalistic think pieces about the function of Korean War memory in the…
American Foreign Policy… Recent Histories of (Local) Violence in the Korean War 17 Oct 201617 Oct 2016 Today I received a stunning new text: Su-kyoung Hwang's monograph Korea's Grievous War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). A link to the publisher's description of the book is here. Dr.…
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…
Kim Jong-un… North Korea, Opposition Politics, and British Nuclear Deterrence 26 Jul 201626 Jul 2016 I wrote the following piece for The Guardian, the stalwart newspaper for whose North Korea Network I have done a handful of essays and events over the past couple of…
German… The WIDF and the Debate over Korean War Crimes 1 Sep 201515 Feb 2021 In a recent essay for Japan Focus, Rutgers University historian Suzy Kim includes a retrospective on the Women's International Democratic Federation's 1951 report from North Korea and that delegation's function…
Korean War… The Bombs Kept Falling in the Wake of Hiroshima 8 Aug 20158 Aug 2015 In a Saturday essay for the Yorkshire Post, a very fine newspaper based in Leeds, I argue that there is more continuity than rupture in the historical legacy of the US…
Korean War… Occupying North Korea, Witnessing Massacre? Military Sources and the Question of US/UK Forces in Sinchon 19 Jul 201519 Jul 2015 The North Korean state claims that US troops arrived in Sinchon, Hwanghae province, on 17 October 1950 and promptly began butchering civilians, culminating in over 35,000 dead by the time…
American Foreign Policy… Full Comment on Women Across the DMZ March 23 May 2015 As observers of current events on the Korean peninsula will be aware, a group of peace activists is presently in North Korea and will be crossing the DMZ tomorrow, from…
Adam Cathcart 