http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDzq7aMl1TE

Attended the Yanshui Fireworks Festival (Yan Shui Feng Pao) Festival in Tainan County last night.  Just another one of those boring cultural festivals.  Well, except for the part where giant trucks of fireworks and bottle rockets are ignited in the middle of entranced crowds in motorcycle helmets jumping up and down as if they’re in [...]

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Pink Tentacle has a post featuring Urban legends from Meiji-period Japan. My favorite is the belief that electric power lines were insulated with the blood of virgins.
Keep in mind, that during the Meji period (1868-1912) electricity was only starting to play a large role in the modernization of Japan, this following centuries of isolation. The [...]

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Kind of interesting to think that there were people who played these games and probably viewed and felt the results in the same way that people that play Major League Baseball 2K10 (or in my case OOTP) do. I bet people used to play these games all day and keep track of a homemade league [...]

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“In ancient China, the standard for unification included standardized wheel width for carts and a standardized script. Today, Ma is promoting simplified Chinese without receiving any goodwill from Beijing. This is not far from unification as seen by ancient Chinese — how can we not be worried?” – Li Kuen-long, Taipei Times
President Ma Ying-jeou [...]

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Last November I did a piece on Ben Sakoguchi’s “Unauthorized History of Baseball in 100 Odd Paintings“. The California-born Sakoguchi–who spent his early days in an internment camp in Arizona before establishing himself as an artist in Los Angeles–has continued his prolific work and released 85 new paintings in 2008, including a series [...]

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I wouldn’t say I dislike flying, but I recently switched almost exclusively taking trains when I travel around Korea. I think it has less to do with a fear of flying and more to do with just plain enjoying train rides. Even though plane rides within Korea rarely exceed 1 hour, there’s a lot of [...]

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Aaron Twittered this one today, but any blog post as chock full of comically off-base attempts at cultural anthropology as this Thursday’s post from the Marmot’s Hole blog deserves some front and center treatment as far as I’m concerned.
The piece–presumably written by one of those ‘gone native’ white guy types– –labels Taiwanese netizens “colonial toadies [...]

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Written by Mac
From the murky depths of the Dotonbori River emerged a symbol of the Hanshin Tigers’ prolonged championship drought: a plastic statue of Colonel Sanders.
The Colonel was thrown over (ed note: as in “over the railing of”) the Ebisu Bridge and into the river during a wild celebration following Hanshin’s only Japan Championship in [...]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cOvz3Jx7oo

My buddy Jason out in the bay area sent this my way–a website called Home Run Derby with the tagline advertising itself as “not nearly as yuppie as other baseball sites” has gathered a nice collection of anti-drug public service announcements from the Nancy Reagan era.
Check out Mike Schmidt, a really intense Reggie Jackson, Gary [...]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b91t7pEu4yk

Fascinating short clip about baseball in Japanese internment camps (or “relocation camps”) during World War II found on PRI’s “The World”, that also includes footage of Asian-Americans that fought in American units during World War II. From the site:

In the 1920s and 1930s, Japanese immigrant communities across America formed semi-pro baseball leagues. They [...]

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The CBL’s English website has a brief but interesting timeline of the history of baseball in mainland China from 1863 to the present.  Most notably, the cruel twist of fate in the mid 1950’s–where Mao banned baseball, forcing a painful half century of watching that game where they take dives and roll on the ground [...]

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Not quite sure why, but started researching Babe Ruth’s historic 1934 visit to Japan, in which over 100,000 people lined the streets of Ginza to catch a glimpse of the Bambino. In the process, discovered via Google some fantastic works by artist Ben Sakoguchi. From his website:
Sakoguchi was born in 1938 in San [...]

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I read an amazing story this morning, about a woman from the former East Germany, Renate Hong, separated from her North Korean husband Hong Ok-geun some 40 years ago, was granted permission by North Korea to travel to the country with their two sons and visit their husband/father. The children had never met the man, [...]

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The radio program The World has a couple of must hear, fanscinating links about semi-pro baseball leagues, set up throughout the American west and southwest by both Japanese and Japanese-Americans being held in internment camps during WWII.
The leagues and tournaments were already in existance, but flourished as the American government interred Japanese people following the [...]

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Don’t take this as a full-blooded recommendation of the radio show Coast to Coast A.M., which I think is a kind of a  radio version of The National Enquirer, but occasionally the show gives time to someone who just wouldn’t ordinarily get on the air. I mean that in  a good way.  
Such is the [...]

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A Russian magazine has released photos of a Korean airliner, which on April 20, 1978, while flying from Paris to Seoul, strayed into Soviet airspace has shot by a Russian missile. The plane had to make an emergency landing on a frozen lake. Two died and 14 were injured as a result. Reportedly the magazine [...]

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Terrific, must watch video courtesy of Shanghai List, about the Song Qing Ling Memorial, a little known cemetery in western Shanghai. The cemetery plays host to Song, who is amongst China’s most significant political figures of the early 20th century, but also scores of other Chinese historical figures.
As the documentary (which was produced by Daedalum [...]

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I’ve been reading The Gulag Archipelago  and my tolerance for Stalinist states is at an all-time low. I don’t consider North Korea to exclusively be a Stalinist state, but I suppose it’s close enough.
I have to admit, after reading an article or two concerning the freedom of Charles Robert Jenkins, I stopped paying attention. But [...]

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I’m a day late with this if you live in the east, but the China Beat has a good post  largely concerning an article published by the New York Times on January 25, 1938, about the ongoing occupation of the Guomindang capital, better known as Nanjing, by Japanese troops.
From the NYT article:
“Stripping away all the [...]

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Andy Young, who runs the  well-known  Siberian Light blog, wrote and tipped me off to an article he recently wrote about the battle of Khalkhin-Gol, which in Japan is known as the Nomonhan Incident.
I’d heard of Nomonhan, but only in reference to Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle  which, you might notice bears a [...]

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