21 Days – Old Map of Japan

Just like the old World Book encyclopedias, I could spend hours looking at old maps on wikipedia. There is so much information about Japan, the Dutch, and cross cultural interactions in the above map from 1890. How will people view the maps we have today in 2190?

32 Days – The Sea of Fertility by Yukio Mishima

Teaching the history of East Asia this year has given me the opportunity to conceptualize different ways to teach history – through academic works, literature, and manga. The tetralogy of Yukio Mishima is a series of four novels written by the Japanese author Yukio Mishima, published between 1965 and 1970. The four novels, which are …

33 Days – TUGSA Strike

The Temple University Graduate Student Association is on strike. They have been striking since January 31 in order to get fairer wages for the considerable amount of work they do as graduate students and instructors. In response, on February 8, Temple University ended their tuition-remission, sent the strikers a bill for the semester, cancelled their …

37 Days – Paths of the Soul

This documentary shows eleven pilgrims as they travel for several months from their hometown to Lhasa. It was released in 2017 and shown in settings ranging from MoMa in NYC to theatres in Beijing. Here is a twelve minute cut of a much longer film:

38 Days – China’s Residential Schools

After years of reports on the Uyghur concentration camps China has in Xinjiang, people are starting to look back at Tibet. There, the government of China is separating families and currently has over a million students prisoner in state-run boarding schools. You can read more here. The official UN report is here. Residential schools shouldn’t …

43 Days – 47 Ronin

A famous story that has been remade into several movies, this version wasreleased days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 1, 1941. A piece of imperial propaganda, that survived the disasterous war.