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…