Historian at @CUHKofficial | Author of *The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere* (@CornellPress, 2019) | Interwar/wartime Japan | Retweets ≠ endorsements
Apr 23, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I am just finishing up a graduate seminar on the Japanese Empire where we read a book a week for 15 weeks, and have noticed some trends in Anglophone/English-language writing on Japan's empire.
First, there is a general tendency among authors to engage only with Anglophone scholarship. Granted, many do make an effort to use Japanese scholarship to highlight important points. But there is less of an attempt to engage in dialogue with our Japanese counterparts. 2/
Dec 13, 2019 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Many historians of Japan discuss the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 as the triumph of Japan's modernisation while glossing over the actual military history.
I have been guilty of this myself... but a closer look shows just how precarious Japan's victories were. 1/
The attack on Pyongyang in Sep. 1894 simply should not have worked. The Japanese attacked from the north, which meant that they had to cross the Taedong River.
But the Chinese did not attack the Japanese army as it was crossing the river; they waited in their fortifications. 2/
