I just went to a talk by a guest historian about historians’ obligation to engage in politics. The talk was straightforward. The speaker’s point was the following and she just gave a bunch of examples.
Historians should engage in political debates because, if we don’t, others do and misuse histories. Politicians make all sorts of historical [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 blame the path dependency in our citation rules, especially on foreign sources. Why do we need to romanize Japanese, Chinese and Korean titles? If you cannot read these languages, romanized titles are not useful at all, anyways. We provide rough translations of the titles. Why don’t they let us just type in foreign languages. [...]
I have finished my first draft on this topic, and I think the bibliography might be useful to others as well.
Official Documents
I used the Japanese government’s (the Government General in Korea and Chosengun) documents mostly as primary sources.
Chōsengun, Chōsenjin Shiganhei Seido ni Kansuru Iken (The Opinions Concerning the Korean Volunteer System), June 1937, available at: [...]
I have posted some of the findings on school strikes during Kominka at Frog in a Well -Korea (here). This is actually a part of one of my papers. I could not spend too much time on this one, but it always feels like the richness of the historical documents can somehow compensate my lack [...]
Did anyone read Morris-Suzuki’s “Exodus to North Korea” yet? I read it in a seminar on modern Korean history. She discovers from Red Cross archives in Geneva the well-calculated scheme (mostly by Japanese leaders) behind the repatriation of Koreans (including Japanese women married Koreans and lost nationality) to North Korea in the late 1950s. The [...]
I study modern history and I rarely read books on premodern periods. One exception I recently made is Amino Yoshihiko (網野善彦)’s works since I wanted to write a biographical writing assignment on him in my historiography class. I chose him because I own a few books by him, and I remembered that I enjoyed some [...]