CEAS Colloquium Series
“Should we lose Saipan,” Emperor Hirohito warned Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki shortly after U.S. Marines landed on the island in June 1944, “Tokyo will face relentless air raids. We must hold the island at all costs.” Instead of holding the island, the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces suffered catastrophic defeats in the Pacific Ocean theater. By the following month, Saipan and the other Mariana Islands were in U.S. hands. This presentation explores the Japanese government’s strategies for civil air defense after the majority of Japan’s cities came within range of America’s...
In the mid-1900s, American missionaries employed the industrial vision of the Black intellectual Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) to instill in Koreans the ideas of “civilization and enlightenment” and economic development. Notably, American mission workers juxtaposed the situations of dispossessed African Americans with those of Koreans. This equation created the conditions through which a rhetoric of “uplift” could be articulated through their similar status on an imagined scale of race and progress. The Korean leader Yun Ch’i-ho (1865-1945), while occasionally criticizing the hypocrisy of...
This talk explores the tangled histories of green imperialism and green capitalism in Asia through the lens of a Japanese corporation: the Ōji Paper Company, historically one of the largest corporate consumers of Asia’s forests. For well over a century, Ōji has stood at the forefront of Japan’s control of woodlands across the Pacific Rim, whether as part of the colonial empire before 1945 or in the tropical forests of Southeast Asia thereafter. In the process, the conglomerate has supplied Japan, a country long celebrated for its vibrant print culture, with the bulk of its pulp...
Who was a “Refugee”?: Returnees, Northerners, and Relief Societies in Liberated South Korea, 1945-50
At the end of the Pacific War in 1945, about 15 percent of Korea’s population was located outside Korea, having been scattered throughout the Japanese empire due to long-term migration and war mobilization. With Japan’s surrender to Allied powers, movement suddenly reversed. Millions entered South Korea, now occupied by the U.S. military, and strained the resources of the newly divided country. This talk discusses who these “refugees” were, the participation of grassroots organizations, U.S. occupation forces, and the public in creating them, and, finally, their significance in the history...
This talk examines some of the cultural and legal ways North Korean refugees are now being groomed to become an assimilable population to the United States, with a focus on North Korean defector Yeonmi Park’s memoir, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girls’ Journey to Freedom (2015). I argue that the North Korean people are increasingly being recognized and imagined as a potential next wave of immigrant Americans, even though there is a simultaneous political and societal refusal to practically actualize this possibility. My analysis demonstrates that contemporary representations of North...
Rakugo is a performative storytelling, born in Japan around the 1600s. It is performed by a single actor kneeling at the center of the stage. As a product of the social class of artisans and merchants, rakugo has a crucial role in engaging its audience with Tokyo’s past, and helps crafting a memory regarding the lifestyle and human interactions in preindustrial Tokyo. That said, the unfolding events after the March 11 nuclear disaster (in 2011) revealed that the narratives of rakugo stories, and the attitude of the protagonists tend to demonstrate characteristics, which reflect on Japanese...
Over the past several decades, Tokyo’s most infamous nightlife district experienced a striking renaissance. Driven by metro government “clean up” efforts, changing demographics, and the breathless rush to the ill-fated 2020 Olympic games, the vibrant but seedy neighborhood of Kabukicho garnered global attention. Yet all was not bright: redevelopment efforts faced friction in this independent-minded corner of the capitol. This talk reflects on Kabukicho’s post-WWII history of diversity, its fitful rebranding as a “Cool Japan” tourist mecca, and more recently, ways the neighborhood contended...
No scholar of modern Chinese literary studies in its globalizing mode will miss the recent spotlight on Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature. Previously untapped, works from or about the Southeast Asian country are now read for bracing ideas on language, ethnicity, and diaspora. In Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature, Chan shows how the minor literary formation’s grasp of its own marginality in the world-Chinese literary space constitutes the threshold—instead of a hurdle—to creating signature aesthetic imprints that foster global outlooks. In...
China’s rural-urban divide and local-non-local distinctions sustained by the hukou (household registration) system continue to shape the life trajectories of millions of internal migrants, a large number of who are being channeled to return to their registered hometowns and villages. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in both rural and urban ends, this talk examines how migrants prepare for a presumed but indeterminate rural-bound return by showcasing some of the “material symbols of return” - objects in rural households, including the physical house itself - enabled or brought in by migrants....
This is a two-part talk. First, I propose that the popularity of K-Pop in the west has transformative possibilities for the lived experiences of Asian Americans. I will introduce K-Pop and BTS in particular. Second, I will present a working paper (co-authored with Wonseok Lee, School of Music, Ohio State University) titled, “Are Friends Electric? The Influence of 1980s British New Wave on 2020s K-Pop.” Given the centrality of the music video to the development of both K-pop and the British New Wave, we argue that there is a shared musical and visual aesthetic between these two genres. Our...
Myung-chul Yoon is professor emeritus of history at Dongguk University and professor of archeology at Samarkand State University of Uzbekistan. His research focuses on the history of Goguryeo as well as East Asian maritime history. He has published over 60 books and numerous journal articles. He is also a poet and explorer and has published 14 poetry books. Supported by The Kim Hongnam Korean Studies Fund
Shamanism is the oldest human religious phenomenon and practice. Korean shamanism, called Muism, goes back to prehistoric times, and archeological evidence suggests that it was part of Bronze age culture. During the Three Kingdoms period, the role of the shaman was integrated into the position of kings and other political officials. Korean shamanism evolved from a male-centered practice where the role was heavily politicized to primarily being performed by women in much more informal settings during modern times. There has been a systematic suppression and persecution of shamans, called...
In the war of Japan’s invasion of Chosŏn Korea (1592-1598) in which Ming China was involved, the three countries were all vigorously engaged in diplomacy while fighting on and off. In fact, diplomacy occupied a far longer period than what military confrontation did in this seven-year war. However, historians in the field by and large ignore Chosŏn Korea’s diplomatic agency. In particular, when it comes to a discussion of the diplomatic attempt from mid-1593 to 1596 for truce, Chosŏn Korea is missing. The discussion is almost invariably focused on the negotiations between Japan and Ming China...
This presentation tells a story of Nanjido – how an island that served as a landfill for Seoul from 1978 to 1993 was transformed into an ecological park called World Cup Park in preparation for the 2002 FIFA World Cup. It discusses how this mega-event instigated an urban planning focusing on ecological restoration and urban regeneration and how the history of Nanjido was subsequently framed as the undoing of the industrial past of the city, most notably seen in its waste management. The story of this contested space is told through a close reading of two documentary sources: The Millennium...
Jidaigeki (Japanese period films set prior to 1868) presented a unique challenge for envisioning postwar modernity and democracy in Japan. US Occupation censors and progressive Japanese critics alike regarded jidaigeki with suspicion, calling into question its relationship to the past as a potential threat to the (re)construction process of postwar Japan. Reflecting on the aftermath of WWII in the emerging Cold War context of Japan’s compromised sovereignty, postwar Japanese intellectual Tsurumi Shunsuke, however, defended jidaigeki as political thought based in the lived experience of “the...
This talk is being held in tandem with a screening of Suzuki Seijun’s Satan’s Town on February 12. Suzuki Seijun was fired by Nikkatsu Studios in 1968, which became a watershed moment in the collapse of Japan’s studio system. As a result of this, Suzuki has typically been understood in opposition to Nikkatsu and the studio system, in spite of the fact that he made 40 feature films there, including his earliest formative films and many of the films for which he is most famous. This presentation...
Jipbap is the term that Koreans use for meals cooked at home. People often think home meals are ordinary, mundane and unnecessary to analyze. However, in recent decades a discourse on jipbap has emerged in print and visual media. In this presentation I approach jipbap as a historical concept that is varied, contested, and shifting. It intersects with aspects of gender, class, place, and age, among other factors; therefore, jipbap offers an expedient lens for investigating the changing gender dynamics and the interplay between the public and the private. I specifically ask: why has jipbap ...
The high mobility required by government service meant that Tang elites were no stranger to long-distance travel. Because most Tang officials would bring their immediate family to their new post, it was inevitable that they or family members might die while traveling or sojourning abroad. As familial joint-burial was the norm and an indicator of social respectability, whether a family returned a loved one’s remains to the family graveyard for burial was closely scrutinized. Families therefore increasingly turned to entombed epitaph inscriptions (muzhiming) to explain delays or...
The ancient site of Khādalik, near the oasis of Khotan in the Central Asian Silk Road, was visited by early explorers of the area such as Ellsworth Huntington (1876–1947) and Aurel Stein (1862–1943). They found a shrine surrounded by an elaborate and exquisitely frescoed maze that pilgrims would have had to traverse in order to reach the inner sanctum. This sacred path was scattered with fragments of sacred Buddhist books probably left as offerings: The books were written in Sanskrit, Chinese, and the now extinct Iranian language of the kingdom at the time, Khotanese. Stein alone brought...
Please register for this talk via Zoom https://yale.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_MU4qt_orRM23JvmzN8y71w I argue that the Chinese government has implemented human-based social grid management and automated surveillance camera system nationwide, which allows the government to detect mobilization attempts and prevent them from becoming collective action. Using large-scale street view image and text data and machine learning, I developed innovative measurements for the density and implementations of surveillance systems...
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