history and memory… Pu Yi as Witness 12 Apr 201512 Apr 2015 In his 1946 testimony at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the Tokyo Trials), Pu Yi, the former Emperor of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, proved to be…
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…
Cultural Politics… Viewing Japan and China, circa 1937-38, via Nazi Archives 7 Apr 20117 Apr 2011 Among other things, I've spent a couple of days back in the Bundesarchiv here in Berlin, and found a new trove of materials in the R55 section, which is the…
Chinese nationalism… Anti-Japanese Action on the Chinese Internet 15 Oct 200916 Oct 2009 Some of us had hopes for a broader improvement in Sino-Japanese relations with the arrival of the Hatoyama government and the recession of the LDP into minority status. After all,…
French… Le Figaro calls terrorists “Kamikaze,” also notes on German rehabilitation of traitors/Kriegsverräter/汉奸 9 Sep 20099 Sep 2009 Le Bundestag réhabilite les « traîtres de guerre » du IIIe Reich Le Figaro 09 Sep 2009 De notre correspondant à Berlin IL LEUR AURA fallu attendre soixante-quatre ans après…
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…
Cultural Politics… Kamikaze Mozart 29 May 200929 May 2009 Daniel de Roulet, a highly productive writer in Paris, not long ago produced a novel entitled Kamikaze Mozart (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2007), the story of Fumika, a Japanese pianist a grand interpreter of Mozart…
Cultural Politics… Sartre / Cultures of Defeat 17 May 200917 May 2009 One of the issues with which I am grappling as a scholar concerns the idea of a defeated country in war, and the tenacity of psychologies of resistance and defeat…
