I published an article with @academic.oup.com and wanted it to be open access. They charged $4400 (!), which I paid. But surprise! My article came out - and it is not open access. I’ve been trying to get it fixed for weeks. No progress. And now they’ve stopped replying to emails. 😭

Approximately five years ago, I weighed in on an academic controversy. Chaos ensued. At the height of the insanity, very angry people kept on sending me a US military document from 1944. I wrote an article about the infamous document, its context, and its afterlife. academic.oup.com/ahr/article-...

This book is *amazing* - highly recommended.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki has posted this essay from 2021 on SSRN. The preface, which is about why it was originally written and why it is being posted four years later, is also interesting.

Looking through citations like . . .

Congratulations to my Nobel Prize-winning colleague Joel Mokyr, who shows up to serve cake to undergraduates and looks good doing it (pictured here with Yohanan Peteovsky-Stern). We ❤️ you Joel!!!!

Coming soon - finally!

A scholar accused me of hacking his email and offered me legal immunity if I’d give up my accomplices. Around the same time, I was offered a trip to Japan via superyacht. Sadly, these two things were not connected.

Big Asia is here! With thanks to the original AHA panel - Nile Green, Sakura Christmas, Jeff Wasserstrom, Melissa Macauley - and the other contributors who helped us go even bigger!!! academic.oup.com/ahr/issue/13...

I’m the Director of the Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern and also a gender historian. If I thought for a minute that our administration had cancelled this conference for political reasons I would be complaining, loudly. But this is not an accurate representation of what happened.

New book alert!!!

Congratulations to the other Chicago-area historian named Amy Stanley!

I just submitted the article that is going to ruin my life!

Extra points for the student who wrote in her exam that Tokugawa Nariaki was “NOT THE SHOGUN but the daimyo of Mito.”

Academic mood swing, from the euphoric high of realizing the dedicated ILL staff managed to get me something hard-to-find on microfiche to the miserable low of actually having to read it on microfiche.

Been working on a fictionalized graphic novel based on my research on the student movement in postwar Japan with artist Helene Aldeguer. Will come out in French next autumn…

I’m glad they’re adding Kimutaku dramas to Netflix. Now they just need to add the ones that are actually good. (Good Luck is a long, boring advertisement for ANA - no one is murdered, no one dramatically eats or throws apples, there is no incest, and no one is jilted at the altar)

It’s really too much for my poor students that Tokugawa Ienari and Tokugawa Nariaki come up in the same lecture, and one is a shogun and the other isn’t.

Panel tonight at U Chicago! events.uchicago.edu/event/241370...

I’ve gotten out of the habit of posting but it’s nice to see people here sharing stuff about Japanese history again!

I thought nothing much was going on but it turns out the most extraordinary things happen here.

It’s always a bad sign when I go to the office and want to sit *under* the desk rather than at it. But the good thing about being on leave is that when I get the “under the desk” feeling I just go home, where I do not have a desk at all.

Husband showed up at my office window while I was doing Burmese class. He texted, “surely you can say ‘wait husband window.’” I can’t, but I can say “government, independence, bomb, darkness, fear, corpse, imperialism.”

Among the strange topics I have enough information to address in this new book: 1) the experience of buying and selling various kinds of shoes in Rangoon, 1942-45 2) the wartime role of small Chinese restaurants in Southeast Asia