John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies
The Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to present the 24th Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. A reception will follow from 6:00pm to 7:00pm in the Luce Common Room (2nd Floor). In the 1960s, Adachi Masao was ubiquitous on the Japanese film scene. He made stunningly surreal experimental films. He exploited the soft-core pink film to political ends. He wrote scripts for the likes of Oshima Nagisa and Wakamatsu Koji, and played bit parts in their films. He also wrote important essays on political cinema. In the 1970s, Adachi made a documentary with the Popular Front for the...
The Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to present the 23rd Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. Lecture will take place from 4:30pm to 6:00pm, followed by a reception from 6pm to 7pm at the Provost House (35 Hillhouse) across from Luce Hall It has become clear to Japanese leaders and to the Japanese public that the balance of power in Northeast Asia has shifted dramatically now that China has risen, and North Korea has become a nuclear weapons state. These developments, combined with the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine—...
The Council is pleased to present the 22nd Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. Lecture will take place from 4:15PM to 5:45PM in Henry R. Luce Hall Auditorium, followed by a reception in Luce Common Room from 5:45PM to 6:45PM. Discourse on the Postwar (sengoron) in Japan has predominantly consisted of debates among male commentators concerning responsibility for the war. Absent from these debates are questions of how women experienced the postwar era, and of how women have attempted to overcome their experiences of the war and trauma. This absence can be attributed in part to...
The Council is pleased to present the 21st Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. Lecture will take place from 4:30 PM to 5:30PM in the Amphitheater Room 101 at Henry R. Luce Hall, followed by a reception in Luce Common Room from 5:30PM to 6:15 PM. The Summer Olympic Games is the most watched sports mega-event in the world. It is also the costliest, the most politically precarious, and the most strangely constructed sports mega-event on the planet. What we will see at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games are not just elite bodies in motion, in agonistic contests and aesthetic displays of...
The Council is pleased to present the 20th Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. This lecture will be followed by a dinner reception at the New Haven Lawn Club (193 Whitney Ave). This talk proposes to situate Japanese animation of the 1930s and early 1940s at the intersection of three lines of historical transformation. First, there was the emergence of new technologies of animation and new ways of organizing animation production, which spurred dreams of producing feature-length animated films whose liveliness promised to rival that of cinema, and to push beyond the boundaries of...
The Council is pleased to present the Nineteenth Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. How did it become “normal” to bomb cities and civilians? Focusing on the aerial bombardment of Britain, Germany, and Japan in 1940-45, Garon spotlights the role of transnational learning in the construction of the “home front” among all the belligerents. World War II was a global experience, yet histories of the home front remain confined to individual nations. In reality, not only did the warring states study each other’s strategies to destroy the enemy’s home front and “civilian morale,”...
The Council is pleased to present the Eighteenth Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. Its regular teaching in Japanese high schools insures Kokoro’s place in the canon. But what high school students read is not the entire novel by Natsume Sōseki, but an extract consisting of 1/12th to 1/8th of the work, a situation that one major critic has called “a kind of sickness.” What does it mean that a large number of readers encounter only a portion of a prominent literary work? What kinds of readings are enabled or disabled in the process of abridgement and anthologization? This talk...
The Council is pleased to present the Seventeenth Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. From the early 1950s until the early 1990s Japan’s political economy was distinguished by its reinforcing combination of conservative political dominance and superior economic growth. The two operated in tandem: economic growth boosted the political appeal of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) while long term conservative dominance facilitated hyper- growth. A close economic and security relationship between Japan and the United States furthered this winning package of ‘developmentalism...
The Council is pleased to present the 15th Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. Recent visits to Yasukuni Shrine by the Japanese prime minister and other politicians, and new proposals to revise the content of Japanese history textbooks, have once again focused attention on conflicts between Japan and its neighbours over problems of historical memory and the commemoration of war. Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, ongoing “history wars” between the countries of Northeast Asia were accompanied by a range of governmental and non-governmental...
The Council is pleased to present the Sixteenth Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. In 1611, the English East India Company, founded in 1600, dispatched its first ship destined for Japan, which duly arrived in summer 1613. The Company had prepared an elaborate letter from the King to the Japanese ruler, as well as an appropriate gift. Ieyasu was presented with a silver gilt ‘prospective glasse’. It was the first telescope to leave Europe, and the first to be built as a presentation object. The talk will consider the meaning of such a object - what the English meant by it, and why...
The Council is pleased to present the 14th Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. Notions of the eastward spread of Buddhism through “three countries” gave pre-modern Japanese Buddhists a framework in which to orient themselves with respect to the time and place of their tradition’s origins and to compare Japan—favorably or otherwise—with the great realms of the continent, India and China. During the medieval period, Japan’s status among the three countries was continually refigured and invoked to bolster a range of arguments for what constituted normative Buddhist thought and...
The Council is pleased to present the 13th Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. Dining utensils not only mirror what the diner feels about him or herself, but also can reveal the image that he or she wishes to project to the community at large. These utensils leave tantalizing traces in archaeological, documentary, art historical and trade records. Recently in Japan unprecedented amounts of Chinese porcelain has been excavated in numerous medieval and early modern sites allowing for a reappraisal of the meaning and role of Chinese porcelain. In the first half of the 17th century,...
The Council is pleased to present the Twelfth Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. The demographic and socio-economic environment for young people in Japan has changed significantly in the past two decades. The dominant images in public talk and academic discourse highlight a dramatic shift from a stable, prosperous, and homogeneous middle-class society to a society suffering from a loss of job security, anxiety over future employment, increased gaps between “winners” and “losers,” and the erosion of hope and dreams among the disadvantaged. It is, however, an open question...
The Council is pleased to present the Eleventh Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. In one widely held perspective, “wartime modernity” is an oxymoron. In one widely held perspective, “wartime modernity” is an oxymoron. Japan’s road of the 1930s into World War II veered sharply from the liberalizing trends of the 1920s, an era both cosmopolitan and internationalist, and thus modern, into a “dark valley” of militarism and anti-Western, anti-modern thought and behavior. This change included a “break in the Japanese evolution toward Western dress” through the militaristic top down...
The Council is pleased to present the Tenth Annual John W. Hall Lecture on Japanese Studies. The subtext of the lecture is how an understanding of the institutional history of medieval Japan helps to explain the primacy of private law and civil adjudication in the Western (now Global) Legal Tradition.
The Council is pleased to present the Ninth Annual John W. Hall Lecture on Japanese Studies. In spite of ever-expanding financial markets and ever-advancing communication networks, there still remains a wide difference in corporate structures and corporate governance among advanced capitalistic economies, especially between America and Japan. American corporations tend to view the returns to shareholders as their sole objective, while Japanese corporations place more emphasis on the survival and growth of their organization as a going concern. The first purpose of this talk is to show how...
The Council is pleased to present the Eighth Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies.
The Council is pleased to present the Seventh Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. The Japanese religious world stands to be directly affected by revisions proposed for the constitution of Japan that are now being pursued by the Liberal Democratic Party. Long-standing formulations of the separation of religion from state are to be changed, and imperial ritual will acquire a public character. At the same time, some religious organizations have become directly involved as actors in the process, sometimes seeking to restrain the LDP, sometimes supporting its policies. Constitutional...
The Council is pleased to present the Sixth Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. A reception will follow in the 2nd Floor Common Room, Henry R. Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue.
