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…
Chinese nationalism… 15 Questions re: Jeff Kingston’s Japan Focus Essay (2008) Regarding the Nanking Massacre 30 Oct 2012 Dr. Jeff Kingston is a historian of contemporary Japan who occupies a number of important positions at Temple University's Japan campus. In 2008, he published the following essay on the…
Art… “Hitler’s Stomach” in Beijing: A Review 28 Jun 201114 Feb 2014 Today in Berlin, I was cruising through the Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, the businessman's preferred paper, for German response to the Wen Jiabao visit when I ran across an article so completely…
China… Contested Era, Blossoming Memory: Reconsidering the Early 1950s in the Present PRC 1 Nov 201014 Feb 2014 In walking around Chinese book markets, perusing Chinese newspapers, talking to Chinese scholars and intellectuals, and just plain thinking here in the PRC, the remarkable fact emerges of the enormous…
Cultural Politics… On Potsdam’s “Hiroshima Plaza” 7 Aug 20107 Aug 2010 In describing German responses to the Hiroshima commemoration yesterday, I made reference to an editorial which appeared in a major Berlin daily paper last June 30: ...probably the most interesting…
Huanqiu Shibao A Little Huanqiu Nationalism 16 Jun 2010 If the above link to a gallery of Chinese volunteers in Vietnam [浴血南疆对越自卫反击战 ] fails to satisfy, be sure not to miss some obligatory Xinhua praise of the Boxer Movement…
Sino-Japanese Relations Nanjing Commemoration Controversies 15 Jan 2010 University students in China are buzzing over this simple banner at a university in Wuhan, Hubei province: In analyzing the banner, even People's Daily online is now questioning China's official…
Chinese nationalism… December 7 in Chongqing 7 Dec 20097 Dec 2009 This morning I gave one of those lectures I enjoy delivering because it wakes people up and reconnects me with my Sino-Japanese research: a survey of aerial bombing of civilian…
Cultural Politics… Oe Kenzaburo on War Memory 20 Aug 2009 The following excerpt from a dialog about the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War contains one particularly interesting idea tendered by Oe: the Tenno system, or…
Adam Cathcart 