Here’s some thoughts on youth in history from my oral reading notes:
Stories of twentieth-century urban youth.
When compared to the scholarship on the history of childhood, it is striking that most of the writings on the history of youth deal exclusively with the twentieth century (with an important exception of John Gillis). As Hobsbawm calls it [...]
I am reading for my oral exams right now, and for my Modern Japan field, I was advised to think about lecture outlines, themes, questions etc, rather than remembering who said what. This is actually a lot of fun. I started synthesizing many themes into an academic year-long narrative. In my dream course, I’d like [...]
I knew I had this issue for a long time but I am feeling it real this time. My parents are Japanese; I was born and grew up in Japan; My only mother tongue is Japanese; my nationality is Japanese too. I cannot avoid people defining me as Japanese. I cannot even have a fancy [...]
One of my oral examination fields is “the history of childhood and youth.” It is very fortunate that there are a couple of professors working in this field in my university. I have just started my readings this month (finally!) but I have already encountered a number of “ah hah!” moments. I’d like to share [...]
I had a very busy month (or two) since I was one of the organizers of Columbia’s graduate student conference on East Asia, which happened on February 6th and 7th. We had more than 100 presenters and a number of faculty members serving as discussants. We usually have a unique party in the library, too. [...]
The Japanese librarian of my university sometimes asks me to take a look at the catalogues that she receives from Japanese publishers, and to pick the stuff I need for my research. She does this because she knows that I am working on colonialism and youth mobilization. I cannot exaggerate how much I love this [...]
I am taking Kim Brandt’s seminar on consumerism in (mostly) prewar Japan this semester. In this seminar, students organize 4 sessions by ourselves. Another student and I decided to assign readings on ‘the rural’ since both of us work on rural Japan, and ‘the rural’ seems to be treated as a separate subfield while ‘the [...]
The main ‘research’ part of my paper looked at 12 issues of the journal 台湾教育 (Taiwan Kyōiku), published in 1940. The year 1940 was chosen out of a mere technical problem of accessibility to the materials – the Library of Congress only holds thirteen issues; one from 1928 and twelve from 1940. I wanted to [...]
Colonial education is one of the most popular research topics especially in Taiwanese academia, and I am afraid that I am very ignorant of the major literature in Taiwan. I will post a part of my term paper on colonial education in two parts here shamelessly even though this is not one of my proudest [...]
I posted an article about the movie “Homeless Angels” at Frog in a Well Korea recently, and forgot to announce it here.