Sunday, July 16, 2006

Podcasting; Asian Studies in Australia

Here are some podcasts for people interested in learning more about current events in Japan:

NHK News in English (via Radio Japan)

Yomiuri News in Japanese

The Yomiuri one gets updated a day after the fact. It's interesting to compare these two broadcasts; Yomiuri is a bit more straightforward and detailed; NHK is a bit more sanitized but has better international news.

Weblog Yahantei was visiting Australia for the past few weeks. I gave a paper at the conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia. It was a really nice event; a lot more user-friendly than the AAS, maybe because it was on a smaller scale. I heard some very interesting papers and met lots of nice people. I've had good experiences with Japanese literature scholars in Australia--maybe it's because Australia's closer to Japan geographically than the US is. Well, in fact it's not that much closer--it's still a very long flight between Japan and Australia. So maybe it's because of being on the Pacific side of the world. It is not unusual for young people to study Japanese in high school.

The ASAA conference is bi-annual; next year is the turn of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia to have their conference.