1/ This summer, I've been reading about the air raid experiences of Japanese women, who increasingly shouldered the burdens of air defense as men were sent to war/factories

I did so to the soundtrack of a teething baby, so my interests gravitated toward pregnancy.

3 takeaways: 2/ #1: Breastfeeding.

One of the most prevalent concerns of new moms (at least in 1944-45) was how the stress of air raids (or even just alarms, sirens, alerts) could impede or stop breast milk production.

Some great footage of the surveying for and construction of the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, from a 1964 documentary about Japan's first bullet train. Scenes from it's maiden voyage:

📢New Resource Alert for Educators about Asia 📢

Grassroots Operations of the Japanese Empire: Primary Sources in English Translation

japaneseempire.info

A few words about the project, spearheaded by Prof. Sayaka Chatani (of NUS) 2/ Those teaching about modern Japan have access to a fairly robust set of primary sources in English translation

Not so for its empire, presenting a variety of hurdles in the classroom.

Recognizing this, Prof. Chatani and her students have launched a digital sourcebook

1/ I hereby petition for a return to the sartorial standards of firefighters in Edo period Japan.

A compilation of the coats worn by Edo firefighting brigades, each rich with its own symbolism. 2/ Typically, firefighters would soak these cotton jackets in water before attending to their duties. This offered some measure of bodily protection, though I'm guessing not much.

Here's a spider hovering over a go board, from the story of the warrior-hero Minamoto no Yorimitsu

1/ It's well establish that the COVID pandemic has
exacerbated longstanding racial inequities in access to and quality of healthcare. 

A new mapping project enables you to visualize just how deeply entrenched these disparities are in US cities. 

dsl.richmond.edu/socialvulnerab… 2/ The underlying cause? Redlining, the systematic denial of services, mainly credit lines and mortgages, based on race. 

The heyday of redlining was the 1930s, when the US govt, led by the HOLC, carried out surveys of major cities, carving them into blocks based on "hazard."

One of the most striking features of the visual archive of Fortune Magazine is the focus on flight.

Aircraft, airlanes, and, of course, aerial warfare permeate its pages.

Here's a sampling of some of the more arresting representations of flight:

1) Air Traffic Control (1943) 2) World Airways (1941)

1/  A short 🇯🇵🏞️🧵

What constitutes "rural" Japan today? 

Too often, we use rural as a sort of catch-all, throw-away term—shorthand for everything beyond Japan's urban areas. 

Which is why this map, by Japanese geographer Tabayashi Akira 田林明, caught my eye. 2/ The problem, according to Tabayashi, is not simply that "rural Japan" is a concept so vague as to be meaningless.

It's that this geographical abstraction has obscured shifts in the spatial composition of the countryside -- what he calls the "commoditization of rural space."

1/ Herewith a short Fabian Drixler appreciation thread: 

There's no need to here recycle praise for Mabiki. It's a great book that everyone should read. 

Instead, I want to showcase the incredible work he's doing to map early modern Japan. I mean, just look at these things. 2/ At some point in our teaching, many of us prob. use some version of the below map, demarcating fudai/tozama/ shinpan/fudai holdings.

Though functional in conveying the distribution of power, these maps can obfuscate the compound nature of Tokugawa territoriality.

A short 🧵

Tucked away in Sunjoo Kim's eye-opening overview of the state of pre-modern Korean studies are some stats of potential interest to fellow Asianists.

Here, e.g., is a breakdown of the articles published in the Journal of Asian Studies, the flagship, by region: I'm obviously biased, but there's no denying the paucity of Korea content. To quote Prof. Kim:

"For the time period of 1995–2018, 61 articles on Korea were published in JAS out of a total of 676 articles—or less than 8% of the total."

Here's the same data in graph form.

"Climb Mt. Niitaka!" (Niitaka yama nobore) is best known as the Japanese code signal for the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

Years earlier, though, it was also the rallying cry of the Waseda U. Alpine Club, which in 1937 sent a party to Taiwan to ascend "the empire's tallest peak." 1/ For mountain enthusiasts, Japan's annexation of Taiwan in 1895 posed an awkward problem: Mt. Fuji, the iconic alpine feature of Japan, was no longer the tallest in the empire. 

That title now belonged to Yu Shan, which, surveys revealed, was 176 m taller than Fuji. 2/

A short follow up thread on Japanese depictions of Lincoln's assassination.

Since sharing the thread on Grant below, I've found two additional Japanese illustrations of the events in Ford's Theatre.

https://twitter.com/dfedman/status/1266048553509511169

One comes from an 1896 biography of Lincoln.

Whereas the 1873 drawing portrays a Caeser-like stabbing, this one focuses on a lone gun-wielding assassin.

dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid…

A native of Oklahoma, Stephen Douglas was drafted in 1942 into the 864th Eng. Aviation Battalion and dispatched to the Pacific.

When not maintaining air fields, he created some stunning visual artifacts of the war: painted envelopes he mailed home.

Here are some highlights Much of the collection focuses on life in the Philippines, where (after hopping from Australia to Papua New Guinea) his unit spent the closing year of the war. 2/

Herewith a thread of images from a wonderfully eclectic Meiji-era compilation of "Profiles of Heroes of the World" (1874?)

The book begins, well, at the beginning, with a less-than-exposed Adam and Eve, placed just above Noah and his ark. 1/ From there it jumps across time and space to profile an assorted lot of generals, polymaths, and pioneers -- some real, some the stuff of legend.

Here's George Washington, sitting atop the iron throne. 2/

Now that grades are in, I can resume my quest to find the best facial hair ever sported by Japanese Diet members.

The front-runner is as clear as his handlebar is wide: Nagaoka Gaishi (長岡外史, Yamaguchi Prefecture, 1924-1928). 1/ Another strong contender is Itagaki Taisuke 板垣退助, leading figure in the People's Freedom and Right's Movement and head of the Liberal Party, who had a regal mane to boot. So much so it was enshrined on the 100 yen banknote 2/

In 1879, author Kanagaki Robun & illustrator Kobayashi Eitaku published a paean to...Ulysses S. Grant. They did so following Grant's stop in Japan as part of a post-presidency world tour. If you're curious how the Japanese depicted the US Civil War, do I have a thread for you 1/ While the material focuses principally on the Civil War, it also offers something of a coming of age story of Grant himself. Here he is as a youngster in Ohio, his father, Jesse, by his side. 2/