This is a strange time in one’s academic career I suppose. With the PhD just handed in, pending final approval by my university’s committee, I am beginning to think seriously about where and what to publish. Below some initial thoughts that will hopefully guide me in my next steps. Continue reading
I am a Tokyo-based author and aspiring economic historian. Below find scribbles from my inchoate explorations in space and time.
Hiatus
Fatherhood and the final stretches of my PhD have taken a toll on my posting performance here. Hard to believe it’s been more than half a year since the last blog post. Long gone seem the days when my aim was to have two entries up each week. I do intend to continue writing here, especially to get some structure into my post-PhD thinking as well as reflect on my teaching. A few updates and ideas after the jump.
Metropolitan Tokyo: context
Several classes at the beginning of the Metropolitan Tokyo course I teach at TUJ are dedicated to establishing a context for analyzing the Japanese capital. I comment on these lectures after the jump.

Metropolitan Tokyo: intro lecture
This is the first post in a series of summaries of and notes on my lectures for “Metropolitan Tokyo”, a class that I teach at Temple University Japan. I have written more about it here.

Metropolitan Tokyo
I have been teaching at Temple University’s Japan campus for more than a year now and still haven’t written anything on this blog here to reflect on this amazing experience. This shall now change with some thoughts on the most recent course I teach called “Metropolitan Tokyo”.
TUJ’s Azabu Campus
January update
This blog has been silent for over a month (for a variety of very good reasons), and before substantial posting resumes very shortly, herewith just a few notes for my records.

Shinjuku 24 December 2017
City size and inequality
Comparisons across cities are notoriously hard. For one, data availability is a huge problem given our methodological bias on the nation state. But there is also the problem on how we delineate municipalities. Nonetheless, I found this graph on city size and inequality very interesting.

Click here for original
Income inequality Tokyo 2013
I wanted to share and briefly discuss a great graph on income inequalities in Tokyo and Osaka that I found. It has been compiled by the NLI Research Institute and shows interesting variations across the 23 wards.
Click for original Continue reading
Reviving a book project
One of the first ideas to come out of writing this blog was to edit a book about Tokyo’s postwar architecture. It’s been several years since and I am wondering how I would go about a book on this or a similar topic now, almost five years later.



