Michael Röllinghoff

@roellinghoff

Assistant professor of Japanese Studies at HKU. I write about settler colonialism, empire, and Indigenous sovereignty in Hokkaido and the transpacific. PhD from UToronto, Postdoc at UTokyo. Views mine, like/repost ≠ endorsement.

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Bluesky

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir roellinghoff.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· 26d

Admittedly...

"Old Man Yells at Cloud" still from The Simpsons.

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· 27d

Also stuff like this!

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· 27d

First is, as racist as this characterization is, it's derivative and boring.

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· 27d

I just watched the trailer for the post-apocalyptic film The Dog Stars. The leads are all white, but the "good" survivors are dressed like 19th century pioneers and the "bad" survivors are on horseback and have facepaint and tomahawks.

A screenshot of a “bad survivor” from The Dog Stars.

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· 27d

I really want to go to “Canada World Park” when I head to Hokkaido this w/e. It‘s a bafflingly authentic recreation of an Atlantic Canadian town, complete with an abandoned church.

A photograph of an abandoned church surrounded by overgrown grass.

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· 28d

Why hello there, tropical house gecko…

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· 29d

Also reminds me of Jon Ronson‘s The Psychopath Test:

The first obviously strange thing about Al Dunlap's grand Florida mansion and lavish, manicured lawns-he lives a ten-hour drive from Shubuta-was the unusually large number of ferocious sculptures there were of predatory animals.
They were everywhere: stone lions and panthers with teeth bared, eagles soaring downward, hawks with fish in their talons, and on and on, across the grounds.

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Jul 4

I thought *this* was evidence that climate change has been common sens e back way longer than Al Gore.

Penguin in Batman Returns saying, “ Stop global warming. Start global cooling. Make the world an icebox.”

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Jun 16

Just arrived in rainy Hong Kong! @arsavium.bsky.social

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Apr 18

The t-shirt, on the other hand…

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Mar 28

Four volumes of “selected writings” kind of beats the point of it all.

Four volumes of “selected writings” of Hannah Arendt.

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Mar 5

🤔

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Mar 3

Tomorrow at HKU! All are welcome. A talk by Chris Tsui Shuen Lau: "From Ainu Cosmologies to Imperial Symbols: The Colonial Narratives of Mt. Asahidake in Hokkaido, 1900s-1930s" Date: March 4, 2026 (Wed) Time: 17:00-19:00 Venue: CRT-5.41, 5/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

A poster with the text: "This talk examines how Japanese settlers reimagined and branded Mt. Asahidake, Hokkado's highest peak, to advance colonial goals. For the Ainu, it was a sacred and distant realm, but after Hokkado's annexation in 1869, settlers replaced Ainu cosmologies with new narratives. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Hokkaido government, educators, journalists, and alpine clubs sought to bring the mountain closer everyday life by promoting its sublime beauty and accessibility, while the Imperial Japanese Army elevated it as a symbol of Japanese spirit. These redefinitions transformed Mt. Asahidake into a symbol of Japanese imperial identity, illustrating how mountains served as tools of dominance and regional assertion within the empire.

Chris Tsui Shuen Lau is a historian of modern Japan and a postdoc at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her research focuses on cultural, social, colonial, and global history. Her current project explores modern mountaineering in the Japanese empire, using Mt. Asahidake in Hokkaido and Yushan in Taiwan as case studies to investigate how mountains were reimagined and repurposed for colonial objectives."

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Jan 15

“Second Nazi: Have you noticed that our caps actually have little pictures of skulls on them? Hans: I don't... er- Second Nazi: Hans... are we the baddies?”

An ICE officer pictured wearing a cap with a little skull on it.

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Jan 3

Me trying to read this:

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Dec 30

Exactly. People forget Britons left by the millions in the past. Like— these are the statistics for self-declared or single entry “English” descendants, not counting people who report being ethnic “Canadians“, etc.

From Wikipedia:
English people
Regions with significant populations
England 37.2 million (2011) [1[21
Significant English diaspora in
United States
46.6 million |31 (2020)
Australia
8.4 million 41(2021)
Canada
6.3 million[5] (2021)
New Zealand
2 million 6] (2018)
South Africa
1.6 million!?! (2011)

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Nov 28

I literally made a career out of it.

A meme portraying a man standing alone at a part with the caption “They don't know I'm about to ruin the vibes by talking about colonialism” The OP comments, “I'm guilty of this” with a skull emoji.

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Nov 2

Oh, hi there.

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Sep 16

I was listening the Maron this morning on the train. Jamie Lee Curtis was literally in tears(!) over someone who very likely would’ve been happy to see her interviewer machine-gunned in a ditch. Bizarre stuff.

Screenshot of a podcast transcript reading:

Kirk, not yet Charlie.
I'm sorry. Kirk. Kirk, I just call him Crist, I think, because of Christ, because of his deep, deep belief.
I mean, I disagreed with him on almost every point I ever heard him say.
Yeah.
But I believe he was a man of faith, and I hope in that moment when he died that he felt connected to his faith, even though I find what his ideas were abhorrent to me.
Yeah.

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Sep 11

Seriously.

A screenshot of a Bluesky moderation feature where I am “muting” posts mentioning someone named Charlie Kirk.

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Sep 9

It’s incredibly expensive and I’m sure terrible but I secretly covet ‘80s Dune manga.

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Aug 31

If nazis are “among” your politicians and “protesters” then guess what, jack?? You’re at a neo-nazi rally.

Guardian headline that reads: “Australian immigration and asylum Neo-Nazis and politicians among protesters at anti-immigration March for Australia rallies“

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Aug 25

I thought I’d stumbled upon a long lost Derridean critique of settler colonialism in Hokkaido for a second there…

Book cover page for コタンの痕跡; “Traces of the Kotan”

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Aug 6

Thanks, @theguardian.com! The very first thing I think when I hear there’s a major disaster in my country is “how will this inconvenience the Americans.”

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Aug 1

Russ' claims about First Nations slavery come from the Aristotle Foundation: a far-right thinktank known for Residential School denialism. As a matter of fact, as part of their curriculum, residential schools forced many Indigenous children to engage in unpaid labour on farms. What do you call this?

The testimony of Norman Lickers, a former Mohawk Institute, who says

"When we got up in the morning we did chores, we had breakfast, and after that we went out and did what ever else we were told to do. There was no actual instruction about it, I mean as to why certain things were planted; or as to the necessity of rotation of crops, or anything like that. We just went out and did what we were told. And then, as to the cattle that were there, we were never given any instruction as to the finer points of cattle raising or breeding. And the same with other branches of farming, we were not given any instruction whatsoever. The same applies to fruits, to chickens, to hogs to everything about the farm. That was my experience in connection with these schools. We were given just enough instruction in school to know that we were dissatisfied when we went back to the reserve, and yet we never got enough instruction with which we could go on."

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Aug 1

Ugh this makes me so mad. John A. MacDonald, our first PM -- a genocidal Orangeman -- was quite literally married into the Jamaican slavocracy. Much of Canada's founding wealth comes from investments in chattel slavery in the Caribbean. This is well documented.

Blurb from the National Post reporter Geoff Russ stating: Geoff Russ: Sorry, progressives, Canada wasn't 'built on slavery' like the U.S.
The deeply uncomfortable truth is that much of the slavery that took place in Canada was done by First Nations

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Jul 20

CFP: "Rethinking Settler Colonialism in the Japanese Empire" for #aas2026 (description in image below). Please send abstracts or questions to roellimr➰gmail.com.

This panel re-examines the application of the settler colonial studies framework to the Japanese Empire, Manchukuo, and post-imperial Japan. Prompted by growing public debates over settler colonialism in North America, as well as recent scholarly engagement with this framework in Japan, we seek theoretically engaged papers that interrogate the applicability (or inapplicability) of this framework to the Japanese colonial empire. We are particularly interested in papers that centre Indigenous peoples or examine heterogeneous settler formations. The goal of this panel is to encourage a historically grounded, theoretically innovative reassessment of settler colonialism in Japanese history and cultural studies.

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Jul 9

This is literally the final boss of Wolfenstein 3D

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Jun 30

Re: the Edward Colston statue: “Almost 14,000 people responded with 74% of all respondents saying that the statue should be housed in a Bristol museum.” Exactly. www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/02/04/n...

Image of toppled, scribbled-upon statue of Edward Colston. Caption: 022
A new report says the Edward Colston statue should remain in it's current vandalised state and placed in a museum. Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images

Michael Röllinghoff@roellinghoff· Jun 30

Unpopular opinion: Egerton Ryerson‘s bashed-in, spray-painted head is an incredibly beautiful modern art piece.