Written by Dr Thomas McAuley, Lecturer in Japanese Studies, university of Sheffield At about 11:40 a.m. (Japan time) yesterday morning – 1st April 2019 – Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga revealed what has been, perhaps, the most closely guarded secret in Japan over the past several months: the new era name (gengō 元号) under which…
By Dorothy Finan and Chris Schimkowsky PhD students at the University of Sheffield The complexity of urban environments forces researchers to make use of more practical, experiential techniques. How, then, can we, as researchers apply such techniques to better explore urban spaces in contemporary East Asia? A recent workshop by the East Asian Text and…
By Dr Nicolas Tranter, Lecturer in Japanese Studies As the UK struggles through interminable Brexit woes, Donald Trump’s America threatens global concord on fighting climate change, and authoritarianism is on the rise around the world, spare a thought for Japan. It has not been the best of years there, marked by various natural disasters. So,…
Nicolas Tranter, University of Sheffield Every December, Japan chooses a “Chinese character of the year” to summarise the dominant stories of the last 12 months. This year’s winner, chosen from the thousands of characters that make up the core of the Japanese writing system, is 北, or “north”. North Korea’s nuclear machinations, it seems, are…
The year 2018 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of modern circus in England, and will feature a variety of projects and events throughout the UK; including exhibitions, talks, and film screenings. In honour of this anniversary, the National Fairground and Circus Archive and the School of East Asian Studies at the University of…
1 June 2017 saw the publication of Unicode v.10.0. This now annual updating of the Unicode standard is publicly best known for the encoding of new emojis, allowing them to be reproduced in different platforms and on different computers correctly, and making them useable in email, in databases, and across the internet. Of course, the…
By Dr Markus Bell, Lecturer in Korean and Japanese Studies, SEAS Source: Mrs. B., A North Korean Woman (France/South Korea, 2016) North Korean forced migration has become a hot topic in the Western media. Largely driven by the publication of memoirs by several high-profile North Korean ‘defectors’, the plight of the North Korean citizenry and the…
By Dr Kate Taylor-Jones, Senior Lecturer in East Asian Studies, SEAS Earlier this year, Dr Fiona Handside and myself published a collection of essays entitled International Cinema and the Girl (London: Palgrave Mcmillan). Inside this collected edition we bought together a group of scholars to explore how the girl has been visualized in global cinema. Our…