Author: jamesorr

As a historian of Japan I can’t help but associate news items with events from modern Japanese history. The latest in these associations came this morning as I was reading a CNN article reporting on captured Russian soldiers expressing remorse for their actions against Ukrainian civilians, ordered by their nation’s leadership on false pretenses. The…

Cleaning up my computer files I found this narrative from May 2009, written while in quarantine at Narita Airport. Japanese bureaucracy takes its responsibilities seriously, as you will see. “Did you see the article on the swine flu in Japan?” Margaret asked excitedly. I was planning a trip to Japan to participate in a conference…

Would you stop for a pedestrian about to enter a crosswalk? Or one who had just stepped into the crosswalk in your own view as you approached it in your vehicle? Of course you would. Ask yourself why. At a minimum most people would answer, because it’s the law. This morning as I was jogging…

I just received an urgent email plea for a contribution to Sen. Bob Casey’s office, ostensibly because the Senator needs to raise $10,000 by midnight. There was no real explanation as to why it had to be done by midnight, and it looks to me like an indefensibly duplicitous method of fundraising. I regard this…

I am thankful that we have constitutional protection to allows dissent against autocratic and mercurial government leadership, and that we have a large enough community in our country that supports the rule of law. That’s what I said I was thankful for at a family Thanksgiving meal hosted by a staunchly Republican brother-in-law who voted…

I wrote the following on Veteran’s Day morning soon after Mr. Trump’s electoral victory. There had been a suggestion that Veteran’s Day was not a suitable day for students to protest Mr. Trump’s electoral victory, that somehow this might dishonor veterans. I felt it important to express my view that it was more than suitable.…

Ok, so I’ve got a bunch of work-related things I’m doing, but when I noticed my Senator hadn’t spoken up about Trump’s travel ban, I sent his office the following note. Just go to your Representative or Senator’s official website, and there should be a simple way to voice your input to your elected official:…

On August 1st this year, my father’s ashes were interred at Punchbowl cemetery in Honolulu, Hawaii. He was a survivor of the Pearl Harbor attack, and spent the first two years of the war on a destroyer in the Western Pacific before the Navy sent him to college in their V-12 officer training program. After…

I had occasion recently to view Shinkai Makoto’s 5 Centimeters per Second, an animated film put out by the man widely lauded as the next Miyazaki Hayao.  In my history of contemporary Japan course we discuss Hayazaki’s films as representative texts from the 1980s and 1990s in their nostalgic visions of a cleaner, simpler past. Shinkai’s animated…

I was having lunch in the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan today and my host thought I might be interested in a press conference held there later that afternoon by the City of Minamikyushu about their application for the inclusion of the Chiran archive in UNESCO’s “Memory of the World” Registry. The Chiran Repository of…