Apologies for the lack of updates these last two months. Not only have I returned to teaching from my sabbatical, I’ve also become department chair. Life is busy, in other words–but it keeps me off the streets.<\/p>\n
This has come up rather suddenly, but I’ll be giving a talk at UCLA next week (Friday, November 16) on “Tokyo Boogie Woogie in California: The 1950 Sacramento Recordings in Japanese and Japanese-American Cultural History” (details available here<\/a>). In the presentation, I’ll introduce the collection of 1950 concert recordings of Japanese musicians (Misora Hibari, Kawada Haruhisa, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Watanabe Hamako, Kasagi Shizuko, among others) that I helped authenticate and that were in the news in Japan this past summer (see, for example, here<\/a> and here<\/a>). The man who discovered the recordings has now donated the entire collection to the UCLA library. While in Los Angeles, I’ll also be filming an interview for a television special about the recordings that will air later this year. I’ll post details about broadcast times when they become available.<\/p>\n I was also recently a guest on the NPR radio program “To the Best of our Knowledge,” talking about my book, Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop<\/a><\/em>. You can listen to or download my segment here<\/a>. And don’t forget about the online companion for the book<\/a> that I’ve put together: I’ve heard from a few people who are teaching the book this all that the webpage was very useful.<\/p>\n The Japanese translation of the book <\/a>continues to do very well, with nice reviews coming out in many magazines and newspapers?(for example, here<\/a> and here<\/a>).<\/p>\n In the meanwhile, I am moving on to other scholarly projects: co-editing a two-volume series of new scholarly essays and translations related to early postwar Japanese literary criticism, finishing up a translation of Karatani Kojin’s magnum opus The Structure of World History<\/em> (Sekaishi no kozo<\/em>), and returning to a longstanding project that involves rethinking Natsume Soseki in relation to the problems of modern property regimes and world literature. <\/p>\n I’ll try to blog here a little more regularly in the coming months, too. It keeps me off the streets–the wild, wild streets.<\/p>\n