The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog

The setting for Pedicab Driver was newly within reach for Hong Kong residents.

If written ten years later, this might have become an isekai story with a lame title like I Drowned in Ancient Rome and Woke Up in Japan Where I Learned About Marketing.

The child of a millionaire Chinese smuggler-admiral and a samurai woman from Japan, Coxinga is raised in luxury and symbolically adopted by a fugitive Ming pretender.

In 1924, the redoubtable travel-writer Mrs Alec-Tweedie dropped in on the Forbidden City and had tea with the Last Emperor.

“Go west, young man.

In the tense lead-up to the final law exams, student Martta (Helena Kara) takes private lessons from her secret fiancé Juho (Unto Salminen), who happens to be the son of the examiner, Professor Karsta (Uuno Laakso).

Over at the Subject to Change podcast, Russell Hogg interviews me about the prelude to the life of Coxinga, hero of the fallen Ming dynasty.

For decades, the samurai carved out new lands and fortunes for themselves on Japan’s northern frontier, fighting under a “commander in chief to suppress the barbarians” (Sei-i Tai Shōgun).

To my great surprise, the manga creator Junji Ito has shown up on YouTube shilling for the book I wrote about his anime series, The Art of Junji Ito Collection, which is coming out this week.

In the twenty years since I wrote the first edition, the imagery of Chairman Mao has gained new currency in modern China, sometimes literally.

The journalist Sarah Harris asked Dame Barbara Cartland if relations between the classes had changed during her lifetime.

“The set outside looks unfamiliar.

For a long time, it was believed that a folk tradition among Hokkaido’s indigenous Ainu people was some race-memory of a forgotten genocide.

Ever since I first visited Hakodate, gathering materials on its ill-fated Republic of Ezo, I have loved the city.

“The Iria animation was both popular and obscure.

Prohibition may have been lifted in Finland, but the old smuggling routes are still in place, and there are still profits to be made by evading the local alcohol tax.

“Some scholars have argued that far from clinging to the past until they were overwhelmed, the Qing dynasty created modern China in 1644, by establishing a previously unseen level of centralized control, and by wiping out the northern border problem.

Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I update my entry on China with details of the relatively new sub-genre of stories in which time-travelling boffins try to make China great again.

“Officially, the film was shot entirely in Iran during the last years of the Shah, presenting a priceless time-capsule of everyday life before the 1979 revolution propelled the Ayatollah into power.

Confirmed child-free housewife Ireene Helasuo (Salli Karuna) is aghast to discover that her husband Kustaa (Joel Rinne) has agreed to care for his niece after his sister has died in childbirth.

My voice sneaks onto the Lost Rivers documentary by my old Route Awakening cohorts in Singapore.