iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Map of conflagrations in 1942 causing more than a quarter-million-dollar's worth of damage, compiled by the NFPA (whose members, mostly fire prevention-professionals, were instrumental in weaponizing fire and delivering it across the Pacific)

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

and while I'm at it, I'll share an excellent new (open access) article by Dylan Plung on the US Strategic Bomb Survey in Japan & the many interpretive perils that lurk beneath the surface of its scientific polish Ive wanted someone to write this for a long time! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Hi friends, happy to share a labor of love: an essay in the latest issue of Environmental History on Tokyo's war-damaged trees (戦災樹木), the more than 200 hundreds trees scattered across the city that carry scars of wartime bombing in their morphology www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/eh/0/0

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Something feels off about this June 1943 roundtable on "Pregnancy and Delivery During Air Raids." I just can't put my finger on it...

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Much has been written about the 1942 incendiary tests on model Japanese and German villages at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Lesser known is the inverse scene just four months later in Osaka, where officials conducted firefighting trials using American incendiaries captured on the China front:

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

A clever cartographic contrivance by Charles Owens, map-illustrator for the LA Times, to convey the vast distances of the Pacific War to American audiences Detail from "Japanese retreat before Allies drive to Philippines." (May 29, 1944)

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

this Yomiuri headline, "No Changes Needed in Air Defense System," jumps to stratospheric heights of delusion when you consider its date: August 10, 1945

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Some pretty spectacular geographic marginalization of the US in this 2016 world map by a Chinese scholar, who invites the viewer to "See the World From Another Perspective"

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

how'd these lines from my father's day card this year end up in an essay by Isaiah Berlin?

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

TIL London's WWII air raid sirens rang out in B-flat

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

How Haywood Hansell learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor:

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Would anyone happen to have any ideas on how to digitally track down the political cartoon described in this newspaper article from Sept. 24, 1937? I'd love to see it, as it ties in with something I'm writing, but I've totally struck out so far. Any leads would be appreciated.

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

A remarkable history lecture from Joseph Grew, US Ambassador to Japan, to Foreign Minister Hirata Koki, as recorded in his diary on Sept 20, 1937, shortly after Japan announced plans to launch additional strikes on Nanking "Inflammable" is a striking choice of words

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Was poking around a digital archive and happened upon footage of the actual rescue of then Navy pilot George H.W. Bush, downed near Chijijima in Sept 1944

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

"A glossary for reactionaries." From July 1945, but quite useful 81 years later

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Darkly poetic that my first encounter with 大東京写真案内 (Greater Tokyo Photo-Guide) -- a photo-compilation issued in 1933 to celebrate Tokyo's reconstruction from the devastation of the 1923 Kanto earthquake -- was in a target folder compiled by the Army Air Force to assess where to drop incendiaries

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

can't think of a time i've smashed the order button harder www.sup.org/books/asian-...

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

A gut punch to discover, a few pages later in the archive, another poem by the same mother expressing her grief for the loss of her son, Leonard Bryant

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

"War," a poem handwritten in 1944 by Mabel Bryant, the mother of a United States Navy sailor deployed in WWII

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

adding this to my growing folder of material for an essay on gardening in the ashes of Japan's burnt-out cities (defeat gardens?)

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Quite enjoyed and learned a lot from Asada's Mahan to Pearl Harbor. It left me wondering: is there a comparably concise overview of the Imperial Japanese Army from Meiji to Pearl Harbor? I can think of a lot of work in English on the IJN (Peattie, et al) but less on IJA. Am I missing something?

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

it's been a huge pain in the ass, but one benefit of cowriting is that you have to share your sources. My coauthor and I have made an effort to link every citation to scans of the original source material. If anyone wants to see our archive, it's embedded in the footnotes. Fuck this guy.

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Tokyo's punsters, meanwhile, joked following the Doolittle raid that rather than downing 九機 (nine planes), as the military claimed, anti-aircraft guns had only actually shot up 空気 (empty air)

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

L: the entwined camphor of Azuma Shrine, as featured in Hiroshige's 1856 One Hundred Famous Views of Edo R: what remains of the entwined camphor today, which serves as a local memorial to the March 10 firebombing that decimated the area

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

tired: books on the manhattan project wired: a biography of Peter Brenner, the vaudeville huckster who tried to scam the US military into buying bogus munitions during WWII

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

if you happen to be 1) interested in Korea; 2) interested in the environmental humanities; and 3) in SoCal in early June, please consider coming to a conference I've organized with my dear colleagues Eleana Kim, Albert Park, and Juwon Lee. Details 👇

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

wish I had read this excellent article on Du Bois, pan-Asianism, and the "paradox of racial liberation" a long time ago. Had no idea about his affinities for imperial Japan, or even that he visited Manchukuo in 1936. One quote that jumped out: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

an embarrassment of riches in the latest issue of Environmental History www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/eh/current

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

A rather awesome aircraft design sketch by army officer Ninomiya Chūhachi, from his *1894* "Petition Regarding the Design of a Military Flying Machine" Due to the ongoing First Sino-Japanese War, his proposal was rejected by the higher command

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

in some ways this route map of requisitioned Navy transport planes is the most interesting to me:

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

日本航空史 includes a few of these. Perhaps you've seen this one?

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

this looks terrifically interesting: www.sup.org/books/asian-...

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

The scheduled air routes of the Japan Air Transport Co. (Oct. 1938 – Mar. 1939), which doubles as a fascinating diagram of the civil aviation infrastructure then collapsing the distance of the Japanese empire

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

On flowering of Anglophone scholarship on Asia Pacific War and how it shaped Blood and Ruins:

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

On the evolution of his thinking on arguments in War and Economy in the Third Reich:

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Lots of great insight in this New Left Review interview with Richard Overy about a lifetime of thought and scholarship on WWII newleftreview.org/issues/ii158... A few highlights:

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Fun find from the Lindbergh Papers at Yale: A letter from Takeishi Kōji, one of many youth to write him during his 1931 stopover in Japan, adorned w Wendy and the Boys Flying to Neverland “I am one of the Japanese boys who truly, from the bottom of his heart, raises both hands to welcome you!"

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

the status of air forces in 1924, starting with Japan at the top followed by US, UK, France, Italy

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

L: operational range of bombers against Japan (as of 1924) R: a range-ring projection showing how far bombers based in Japan could operate (as of 1924). From "Aviation Overview,” December 1924, Army Ministry Aviation Section

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Such an important and criminally under-studied dimension of the Asia-Pacific War: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Art Smith, during his 1917 barnstorming tour of Japan Among those attending was Honda Seichiro, a young bicycle mechanic, who, on witnessing Smith’s agility in the skies over Hamamatsu, threw himself into the study of motor vehicles, paving the way for the automobile co. that would bear his name

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Lots to unpack in this 1940 quote from Fujiwara Yasuaki, then Director-General of Japan's Aviation Bureau, who viewed saw the empire's expanding aerial network as a modern counterpart to the road system that had formed the foundation of Roman power

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

One of the first aerial photographic composites of the aftermath of the 1923 great kanto earthquake, this one taken on Sept 3 over Yokohama by the Army Aviation School

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

The incidence and intensity of seizures of Japanese fishing boats, 1945-1951—a proxy for the emergence of postwar territorial disputes (From Thomas French's essay on this topic)

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David Fedman @dfeds.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

Kharg Island, for anyone curous about the lay of the land

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