I'll be giving a talk at The Japan Society in London next month on “Japan, Britain, and the Globalisation of the Samurai," which will also tie into some of themes of the upcoming British Museum special exhibition. www.japansociety.org.uk/event?event=...

From 3 February 2026, the special exhibition "Samurai" will be at the British Museum. I've had a lot of fun working on this together with the brilliant Rosina Buckland. If you happen to be in London, and feel that you need more samurai in your life, do drop by! www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/...

Finally out now 🥳🎉 -- and in OA! 🙏 Katja Triplett / Yoshimi Orii / Pia Jolliffe (eds.) (2025): Japan in the Early Modern World: Religion, Translation, and Transnational Relations @ doi.org/10.1007/978-... Includes two contributions by yours truly on Jesuit prints from Japan. 1/

Fascinating footage.

As people have their heads in syllabi and classes, I’d like to highlight how ‘In the Land of the Lacandón: A Graphic History of Adventure and Imperialism’ (MQUP 2025) can be used in teaching. (Please repost and push this thread along.)

Unpacking. It’s finally here. Best of all: you can share the excitement for free, as the book is open access. Follow the link in the post below to download a PDF or EPUB version. Happy reading and happy strolling through Japanese garden history!

Having spent a bit of time trying to pin down what "medieval" means in Indian historiography, I sympathise with the guy who just put "(though no one agrees)" after his proposed date range

🧵 of my favourite sixteenth-century bronze statues flanking the empty tomb of Maximilian I in the Innsbruck Hofkirche

Hurrah!! Brilliant new book from my wonderful department colleague!

Inventing the Way of the Samurai by @olegb.bsky.social explores the concept of “Bushido” from genesis in 19th C Japan as an “invented tradition” in response to European concepts to its postwar rehabilitation.

This is wonderful 👇

Teachers/Profs, etc. who use video games as part of your course materials: how do you do it? You can't require everyone to own a gaming system, and lord knows your school isn't providing them to students. I see lots written about how to integrate game content, but not much on the logistics.

For anyone interested in castles, emperors, and theme parks, Ran Zwigenberg and my article on the modern history of Fushimi Momoyama Castle in Kyoto has just come out from Japan Review. www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/japa...

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we thought we'd answer a question that's often asked, "If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?" Allow our scaled diagram to explain...

This looks great!

Listening now to @olegb.bsky.social's interview with Matt Lewis of Echoes of History about Azuchi Castle, and unsurprisingly it's great! Give it a listen on your podcast platform of choice!

As a lifelong comics fan, I'm excited that our discussion of "Graphic Narratives and History in the Americas" has just appeared Open Access in the latest issue of the American Historical Review from @historians.org. It's been a lot of fun with some incredible people! academic.oup.com/ahr/article/...

This table has the January 2025 foreign population breakdown by Tokyo wards. There's data for the 10 largest national groups, then all other nationalities are lumped together. Those ten groups are much changed from 25 years ago. www.toukei.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/gaikoku/2025...

East Asian Studies at Sheffield is also home to historians who contribute to joint programmes and teach for colleagues in the History department. Sheffield's is one of the largest interdisciplinary groupings of East Asia specialists in the UK and one of the most important globally.

I just came across this samurai armour that seems to have been produced in the 19th century by modifying and decorating a recent French armour. The cuirass seems to be the same type as in the colour image. The armour is held by the Royal Armouries in Leeds. royalarmouries.org/collection/o...

East Asian Studies at Sheffield University is an amazing school. We held our 2023 Martial Arts Studies Conference there - for precisely that reason. Please add your voice to fight for East Asian Studies at Sheffield Uni. The UK needs MORE schools like this! www.megaphone.org.uk/petitions/sh...

I'm thrilled about this!

A new entry alert!! Dr. Ruselle Meade has kindly contributed this translation of a Japanese scientist describing indigenous people and life in Nan'yo. I can think of many ways of using this resource in class already! japaneseempire.info/the-scientis...

I'll be back in Vancouver for the first time in far too long on Jan 30 give a talk on how samurai became a global icon and how societies around the world also searched their own supposedly medieval pasts to find similar symbols and ideals (livestream also available) asia.ubc.ca/events/event...

A Baker's Dozen of Books Wot I Liked in 2024. Honourable mentions: the Slow Horses books, Butter by Asako Yuzuki, Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, Seichi Matsumoto's various crime fictions, Alasdair Gray's Poor Things, Times Echo, A History of the World in 47 Borders, Kim Wagner's book on Bud Daro.

This data work is a labor of love! If you want to support it you can do so starting at $2 a month on Patreon. They also recently created "gift subscription" options, in case you have students you think may want some weekly insights into the data in progress! ✌️ www.patreon.com/prcurtis

31 new job ads in East Asian Studies for 2024-2025! See the details of this week's postings below or visit the filter database to search by category/keyword. 🌏📊 Now 694 entries. prcurtis.com/projects/job...

A Christmas thread featuring Shanghai, Communists, Christmas trees, and Ded Moroz: -- I was surprised to see this heavily decorated Christmas tree in this collection of New Year posters from 1950s socialist Shanghai: chineseposters.net/posters/d85-...

“Japanese women are among those with the highest-pitched voices globally. A typical adult woman who is 160 centimeters tall should have a natural pitch of around 220-260 Hertz, but many Japanese women speak at 300-350 Hertz or even higher...essentially falsetto”. www.asahi.com/ajw/articles...

Please consider supporting the APJJF - it's a fantastic resource for research, teaching, and staying on top of developments in East Asia and beyond.

Here’s a fun episode of The Martial Arts Studies Podcast: Samurai, Scouts and Suffragettes, by @olegb.bsky.social open.spotify.com/episode/7qiH...

I've scanned some more wartime Japanese propaganda pamphlets and posted to Internet Archive. Because they are in English, they can be useful to for students. What Is Japan Fighting For archive.org/details/what... How The North China Affair Arose archive.org/details/how-...

The online exhibition War, Revolution, and the Heart of China, 1937–1948: The Herman Collection of Modern Chinese Woodcuts from Colgate University’s University Museum contains 213 interesting digitised woodcuts in total. emuseum.colgate.edu/groups/herma...

A blast from the past - the video that first (and last?) brought together Bushido and Fukushima and Covid-19. youtu.be/5QfLoeEkZAU?...

Meanings of the word for ‘turkey’ in other languages... 8. Western chicken (Vietnamese) 7. Indian chicken (Catalan) 6. Dutch chicken (Malay) 5. Ethiopian rooster (Syrian Arabic) 4. Bird from France (Greek) 3. Bird from Peru (Portuguese) 2. Seven-faced bird (Japanese) 1. Snot hen (Luxembourgish)

Why is Tokyo so fashionable? Some theories. 🧵

Here's the unlikely century-long story of how a non-gendered pronoun became gendered, and then got itself re-de-gendered. This one's got everything! Poetry! Grammar! Love songs! Queer communities! Unicode! and ... Y.R. Chao! What more could you want? #langsky 🀄️📚 1/

A martial arts studies starter pack go.bsky.app/VpctyoL

Working on a project and rediscovered this wonderful photo of a group of samurai posing on and around the Sphinx in 1864 as part of their tour around the world. Image from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_...

#China With all the futile distraction that absorbed us for the past 18 months, you perhaps missed @scottgregory.bsky.social's new book on the 水滸 and its reinventions/marketing by editors/publishers. Do take a look. It's available free from Cornell UP! www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book//978150...

My new book is now published thanks to the wonderful team at @archumanities.bsky.social Religion, violence, food, syphilis and more during a period of dramatic change in Japanese history!

If I can finish proofreading and make the index in time, my new book will come out in January. 📖 I've been working on it for five years so I'm pretty excited that it will soon be a reality. I'd like to tell you a bit about it. 1/16

I went to the William Morris exhibition at York Art Gallery, and was especially interested in the influence of Japonisme on Morris and other designers. The mix of medievalism and Orientalism that was prominent at the time is evident in many of the works. www.yorkartgallery.org.uk/exhibition/t...

As promised, a starter pack of historians of sport, and/or folk whose historical research interlinks heavily with sport. Please feel free to let me know who else is here (& who else is arriving) that I need to add on. #skystorians

I've had a go at putting together a Medievalism starter pack - if you'd like to be added (or removed!), please do let me know :)

This looks like a wonderful exhibition by Shisamu Iwase. The line in the image is taken from the 17th-century samurai text Hagakure, adapted to read "The way of business is found in death." Now on at Alter Space in London: thealter.space/exhibitions/

Fascinating to watch today. Random thoughts: - The words manga and anime are conspicuously absent. Given that this was produced by the Japan Foundation and today's branding of manga/anime as uniquely Japanese, today it would be more likely not to feature the words cartoons and comics at all instead

Just out: In the Middle of What? On Periodization and the Global #Medieval. This is a forum with 6 essays by Chinese historians and literature scholars on the uses and meanings of the global medieval, with an introduction by the organiser and editor Tian Xiaofei. www.tandfonline.com/toc/yemc20/2...

Here's also a starter pack for East Asian History: go.bsky.app/AYW9PfA