Whether citizens, sojourners, or immigrants, most employed residents of Japan will be unable or unwilling to retire. The natural desire to choose the terms of transitions, however, runs into customary age limits, around 65 for full-time and 70 to 75 for part-time employment in the case of higher education. Combined with stereotypical…[Read more]

Fun quiz with a presentation and worksheet for students to answer the questions while the teacher projects the presentation. It upends preconceptions of most Japanese university students and provides a lesson on phenomena such as international marriage, language shift, and the levels of bilingualism formulated by the author.

A previous Deep in Japan podcast explored how ancient Japanese viewed their environment and sacred sites, culminating in the author’s discovery of a mountain range that was formerly viewed as a mandala that practitioners could traverse. This 2022 podcast is more autobiographical, describing encounters with Reischauer, Keene, Alan Watts, and…[Read more]

This work presents an accuracy study of the open source OCR engine, Kraken, on the leading Arabic scholarly journal, al-Abhath. In contrast with other commercially available OCR engines, Kraken is shown to be capable of producing highly accurate Arabic-script OCR. The study also assesses the relative accuracy of typeface-specific and generalized…[Read more]

Two sections of a book comparing creation myths from ancient Greece and Rome with their Japanese counterparts from the early 8th Century Kojiki (古事記, “Records of Ancient Matters”). These fusion essays are summations of previous book sections by Greek and Japanese authors on the elements of fire and air, respectively, and, drawing from Plato and J…[Read more]

This article probes the history of education and current pedagogical practices among Malayali physician-teachers, vaidya-gurus, of Ayurveda in central Kerala. Considering the sources vaidya-gurus cite as the bases of their teaching styles, especially a three-part method known as mukhāmukhaṃ (‘face-to-face’ instruction), I discuss the place, produc…[Read more]

To encourage classroom dialectic I often turn to the “quitting” structure of “The Canterbury Tales,” within which pilgrims offer requitals of previous tales that range from exuberant acclamations to
raucous attacks. Within these extremes lie productive forms of correction that emerge as subtle critiques, opposing arguments, and timely (or…[Read more]

In this article, I hitch the ever-present awareness of disease in my personal life and our shared world today to a pointed and academic reflection on the ways we consume and re-present information about disease from premodern South Asia that’s contained in texts.

As neural language models begin to change aspects of everyday life, they understandably attract criticism. This position paper was commissioned for a roundtable at Princeton University, dedicated to one of the most influential critiques: “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru,…[Read more]

The third volume of the DH Benelux Journal. This volume includes six full-length, peer-reviewed articles that are based on accepted contributions to the 2020 virtual DH Benelux conference. Contents: 1. Editor’s Preface (Wout Dillen, Marijn Koolen, Marieke van Erp); 2. Introduction: Digital Humanities Online (Antske Fokkens, Christian Gosvig…[Read more]

The author solved what seemed to be an international murder mystery, finally clarifying what the real danger in Japan is. This article combines investigative journalism, Japanology, creative writing, photos of Kyoto, and environmentalism.

This article presents biblical exegesis and parallel synthetic thematic analysis comparing the transformative journeys of Saint Paul and doctoral researchers concluding the religious conversion of Saint Paul of Tarsus and the identity-transforming journey a student undergoes from burgeoning researcher to doctoral scholar represent parallel…[Read more]

This paper renders the ancient folktale ‘Ama’ (Woman Diver) into English, investigates its origins, and interprets its timeless significance. From a prehistoric oral tradition, it evolved into a temple chronicle and a Noh play. The paper includes a summary in Japanese, and all the references are in Japanese. With a moving story and vivid…[Read more]

Fall 2021, fully online, asynchronous course: Critical making is a practice of making as scholarship, grounded in the humanities, that interweaves design, function, and theory towards born-digital scholarly practice. Engaging in scholarly communication through digital platforms demands attention to code, software, and hardware. This course…[Read more]

The Abbey of St. Gallen was the foremost centre for the study of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville in the Carolingian period. Not only can more than twenty early medieval manuscripts transmitting material from the Etymologiaebe associated with Carolingian St. Gallen, but its scriptorium also produced two scholarly redactions of Isidore’s e…[Read more]