- My essay, Tokyo: city of fires and flowers (an academic paper delivered at a conference Rethinking City and Identity 反思城市与身份认同 at Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai, 16-18 May 2012) was published in the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
Now, it is being published in a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. It was peer-reviewed, where I received the following surprisingly generous comments. The papers were translated into Chinese and published in China. Then in 2025, six of the papers (including mine on Tokyo) was published by Routledge, in a volume, edited by Daniel Bell and Avner de Shalit called, Cities and Identities.
This essay is brilliant. It teaches. It deserves praise for its rigorousness, grounded in a rich historical and philosophical situatedness. It helps newcomers to Tokyo make sense of the city. I would recommend publication after attending to the following suggestions.
This line (page 14?): “And, so because the city never seems to generate anything beyond the sum of its parts, people are both embedded in– as well as defined by—the neighborhoods.” is troubling because it has an (analytic) metaphysical trap door that will lead to criticism. I’d delete it.
It could use an edit for punctuation and hyphenation (when fitting). The author might want to trim a bit because the paper is too long (only a suggestion that can be dismissed entirely).
- My essay Christopher Hitchens and the Korean Teabowl was published in Stanford Archaeologist Patrick Hunt’s Electrum Magazine.