Some things about Filipino author Marga Ortigas are clear after reading her recent novel God’s Ashes. She can write. She has a fertile imagination. She knows a great deal about a wide variety of things from politics to culture and technology. She knows how to craft a complicated, detailed, intricate plot.
In December 1948, a panel of 12 judges sentenced 23 Japanese officials for war crimes. Seven, including former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, were sentenced to death. The sentencing ended the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, an over-two-year-long trial over Imperial Japan’s atrocities in China and its decision to attack the US.
The term “Shanghailander”, coined over a hundred years ago, referred to foreigners who lived in Shanghai’s French Concession or International Settlement. In her debut novel, Shanghailanders, Juli Min has reclaimed this term for contemporary use to include a wider spectrum of expatriates and to indicate, somewhat contrary to current narratives, that Shanghai remains—and will remain…
In its eclectic choice of subjects, Filipino writer Lio Mangubat’s collection of historical essays Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves betrays its origins as a podcast. It resembles, not least due to Mangubat’s skill at spinning a good yarn, a collection of short stories rather than non-fiction pieces; and what the book lacks in an easily recognizable…
Railways are major public infrastructural projects; one would therefore think it should therefore be easy to find out which rail lines exist and at what times trains are running. Not in Myanmar. Aside from the well-known main lines, Clare Hammond a myriad of smaller branch lines in remote parts of the country, with little information…
“What happens when a US cultural institution is imported to China, the purported chief rival of the United States in the twenty-first century?” asks Jin Feng in The Transpacific Flow, a short 100-page study of MFA programs in China.
There are over sixty million “left-behind children” in China at present. These children have been “left behind” by parents who moved for work, or sometimes school. Most left-behind children grow up in rural villages, while their parents sojourn in China’s megalopolises. The phenomenon has touched the lives of Chinese families across generations, but especially since…
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa’s 1987 novel Takaoka’s Travels opens like a straightforward volume of history: “On the twenty-seventh day of the first month in the sixth year of the Xiantong era, Prince Takaoka set sail from Guangzhou on a ship bound for Hindustan.” Takaoka was a real historical figure, son of the Japanese Emperor Heizei (ruled 806-809…
Harry Franck died in 1962. This latest edition of his work consists of a few excerpts from his original Roving Through Southern China published in 1925. The original much larger book described two years of roving that took Franck as far as Yunnan, but these excerpts focus on the few months he and his family…
Although it is the Silk Road that captures most of the contemporary attention and discussion, it was in fact spices, not silk, that drove Western Europeans to seek routes to Asia. “Lightweight and durable, spices” writes Roger Crowley in his new history (appropriately entitled Spice), “were the first truly global commodity … they could be…
Canadian lawyer Patrick Brode has written an interesting and fast-moving account of the little-known Allied war crimes and treason trials of Canadian-born Kanao Inouye, known as the Kamloops Kid by the Canadian soldiers who suffered beatings and torture by Inouye and his Japanese confederates in Hong Kong during World War II. It is a tale…
The centrality of Central Asian nomads to world history has, after decades of neglect, more recently become something of a truism. If you’re not up on your Scythians, Saka, kurgans, Xiongnu, deer stones, Pazyryks and the like, there are better places to start than Petya Andreeva’s Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea, an analysis of…
After much of the western world let go of its colonies in the years following World War II, the United States did the opposite in Guam: it not only re-occupied the island, but established a (massive) military base there. The culture in Guam is a melange of the legacy of Spanish colonialism (particularly seen in…
Over the course of thirty-seven fragments, an elderly man coming to an understanding of his world tells the “story” of his village: chronicles of a village serves as an indictment of History for what it leaves out. The narrator often offers a curiously romantic view of a pastoral world that is being overtaken by the…
One winter day, Reiko asks her friend Rika to pick up some butter on her way over for dinner. But due to a product shortage, this simple favor turns into a trip to several grocery stores and results only in the purchase of a tub of margarine, setting the stage for a story where just…