http://prisonnotebooks.com Sat, 04 Sep 2010 02:24:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This is not interesting or new information for those who've been doing dissertation research in Japan. But there is an incredible amount of previous studies on almost any issue on East Asian history here. While I was in the US, I wished I had had more access to Japanese journals ... http://prisonnotebooks.com/?p=298 It has been almost ten years since I left Japan for graduate schools and I never really lived in this country since then. This summer I am restarting my life in Japan almost from scratch because I had no working bank account, no Japanese credit card, and no cell phone. ... http://prisonnotebooks.com/?p=295 I defended my prospectus last December and passed my oral exams in March. I forgot what I have been doing since then but time flies really fast, and here I am. Back in Japan. I am starting my real, not "preliminary," research for my dissertation. I am starting from the ... http://prisonnotebooks.com/?p=293 I spent hours and hours to write an application to get Institutional Review Board approval for my coming dissertation research since the interviews I might (not even "will") have could fall under "human subjects research." Last week my application was returned since a lot of information was missing. That means ... http://prisonnotebooks.com/?p=288 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 ... http://prisonnotebooks.com/?p=285 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 ... http://prisonnotebooks.com/?p=281 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 ... http://prisonnotebooks.com/?p=273 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 ... http://prisonnotebooks.com/?p=269 I have been watching episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU deals with sex crimes and child abuses) since this summer. I started to watch them because they are available online at Netflix, and these episodes are usually really well made. Since I am reading books on childhood ... http://prisonnotebooks.com/?p=267 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!" ... http://prisonnotebooks.com/?p=264