Examining the Life of Oyabe Zen’ichirō: The New Formation of Modern Japanese Identity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Examining the Life of Oyabe Zen’ichirō: The New Formation of Modern Japanese Identity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Kazumi Hasegawa - CEAS Postdoctoral Associate & Lecturer in History

Tuesday, October 28, 2014 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Room 218, East Asia Library, SML See map
120 High Street
New Haven, CT 06511

Oyabe Zen’ichirō (1867-1941) studied in educational institutions in the United States between 1889 and 1898, such as the Hampton Institute, Howard University, and Yale University, which together formed the epicenter of American racial discourse in the late nineteenth century. After he returned to Japan, he educated the Ainu, by establishing an Ainu school in Hokkaido in 1905. In the 1920s, he became one of the strongest advocates for the legendary myth that Genghis Khan, a Mongolian hero of the twelfth century, was identical to Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a Japanese warrior. He also published several books about the origins of the Japanese people as a lost tribe of Israel. The key question for the formation of Japanese identity was how to fit the Japanese people into late nineteenth-century racial discourse. Put simply, were the Japanese “white” or “not quite”? Hasegawa’s talk connects Oyabe and his various enterprises to these questions of the production of Japanese ethnic identity within the broader, transnational racial discourse of civilization at the turn of the twentieth century. 

Kazumi Hasegawa received her Ph.D. in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts (ILA) at Emory University in 2013.  Her dissertation, entitled “Examining the Life of Oyabe Zen’ichirō: The New Formation of Modern Japanese Identity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” reconstructs the life history of Oyabe Zen’ichirō (1867-1941) and examines the formation of his Japanese identity within international racial discourse of the time. The dissertation also analyzes how Oyabe encountered the crucial intellectual discourses of “civilization” at the turn of the twentieth century. As a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, she will be preparing her dissertation for publication. In the Spring of 2015, she will be teaching a course entitled “Civilization in Meiji Japan.”

Please RSVP to eastasian.studies@yale.edu by 10/21

Light lunch will be provided.

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Japan