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Speaker: James L. Huffman, author of A Yankee in Meiji Japan A life-long student of Japan’s early press, James L. Huffman has written three books on the role journalists played in shaping national policy. Huffman's first book on journalism, Politics of the Meiji Press: The Life of Fukichi Gen'ichiro (University of Hawaii Press, 1980) tells the story of a man whose career embodied the response of Meiji Japan to the Western challenge of modernization. Huffman's Creating a Public: People and Press in Meiji Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 1997) examines how Meiji newspapers brought commoners into the public life, turning them from unengaged city and village residents into activists and voters who marched in the streets and discussed politics over dinner. His most recent book on journalism, A Yankee in Meiji Japan: The Crusading Journalist Edward H. House (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) narrates the love affair of one of America's first Japan correspondents with his adopted homeland. House had stood on the execution scaffold with John Brown, provoked Mark Twain to write a 50-page screed calling him a "scoundrel," and used Okuma Shigenobu’s wheelchair to gain access to grouchy old male officials and their impressionable young female assistants. More recently, Huffman has edited Modern Japan: A History in Documents (Oxford University Press, 2004) and has just completed the manuscript for Japan in World History. The latter examines Japan’s past from the perspective of its relationship with the rest of the world and will be part of a new Oxford University Press series on global history. A former journalist at the Minneapolis Tribune with a passion for teaching, Huffman retired a year ago from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, where he had taught East Asian history for 30 years. Prior to Wittenberg, he had taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Indiana Wesleyan University. Huffman now "walks on the wild side," residing in a historic Chicago building that once housed Al Capone's favorite brothel. Most recently, Huffman has changed directions in his research. He continues to work on the Meiji period but now is looking at materials on the daily lives of commoners: rickshaw pullers, miners, entertainers, bathhouse workers, prostitutes, small shopkeepers, and farmers. His aim is to tell the stories of their daily lives–what they ate, where they lived, how much money they had, how they quarreled, what illnesses they suffered, how they celebrated–in a way that highlights not just the hardships but the dignity, joy, and agency of their daily experiences. Your ticket for admission to James Huffman's BookNotes presentation will be a copy of A Yankee in Meiji Japan, purchased from Good Day Books. Paperback copies of A Yankee in Meiji Japan are available from Good Day Books for ¥4,720 each, tax included. |
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