Japan
We look forward to seeing many of you at Kinema Club XVIII at Yale from February 22 to February 24, 2019 at the Whitney Humanities Center. This conference and film fesitval features films from across the years of Japanese cinema. You can get other updates on the conference Facebook page. Schedule Feb 22nd, Friday: 6:00 pm Reception 7:00 pm Fukujusō (Kawate Jirō, 1935) With benshi and live piano accompaniment Panelists: Sarah Frederick, Marta Figlerowicz, Brian Meacham Feb 23rd, Saturday: 8:00...
Please join the Council on East Asian Studies in celebrating the Lunar New Year. Please RSVP to eastasian.studies@yale.edu by February 13, 2019.
Do generational cohort effects on participation differ between women and men of developed democracies? Scholars concur that generational cohort effects are typically shaped by “formative experiences.” Robert Putnam and others have pointed to the experience of mobilization during World War II as the “formative experience” that led the “greatest generation” to participate at especially high rates throughout the course of their lives, while others such as M. Kent Jennings have stressed the 1960s protests as propelling the particularly high levels of participation among the baby-boomer...
Japan’s security policy is undergoing a significant change from its traditional postwar “pacifist” defense posture. At the heart of the recent changes is the 2015 legislation, which allows for exercising the right of collective self-defense and hence expanding the permissible roles for the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. In his lecture, Professor Kurizaki examines the Japanese government’s claim that these changes are vital to support allied deterrence of threats against Japan, and necessary to enhance Japan’s security in a region of shifting power. Specifically, he extends game-...
This presentation is mainly conducted in Japanese. 19世紀において、村と家を基盤とする社会秩序が大きく動揺していたことはつとに指摘されている。地域の支配層は繰り返し村掟を作成し、家や五人組を単位として攪乱要素の統制をはかった。その中でも、若者や奉公人の素行は重要な問題であった。博奕・諸勝負のほか、祭礼時の騒動や、集会や酒宴を催す懸念があると見做され、警戒されたのが、地域の若者たちや他所からやってきた奉公人であった。 本報告では、池田下村（現大阪府和泉市池田下町）の村役人や絞油屋の家に残った史料を使い、主に若い男女間の内縁関係を契機とした妊娠と、流産を装った堕胎の問題を取り上げる。丙午という年に実施された流産への取締りに地域社会がいかに対応したのかについて事例紹介を行い、今後の研究を進めていく上での足がかりとしたい。 During the nineteenth century, the social order in rural areas, composed of villages and ie households, was shaken strongly. Local ruling classes, such as village officials and local landowners, made in-...
Professor Williams will discuss his new book “American Sutra” about Buddhism and the WWII Japanese American internment. The fact that the vast majority of Japanese Americans were Buddhist was responsible for why nearly 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-third of whom were American citizens, were targeted for forcible removal from the Pacific coast states and incarcerated in remote interior camps surrounded by barbed wire. Ironically, their Buddhist faith also was also what helped the Japanese American community endure and persist at a time of dislocation, loss, and uncertainty. Based...
Professor Zohar’s talk will be preceded at 4 pm by a screening of Morimura Yasumasa’s Gift of the Sea, (Japan, 2010) 23 min.
Haiku poetry is an essential aspect of Japanese culture and language and has gained popularity outside Japan as well. Do you recognize this famous haiku by Matsuo Basho? Old pond Frog jumps in Sound of water In these workshops, Japanese haiku poet Ms. Sho Otaka will teach how to write haiku using one to three lines of 17 or fewer syllables, as well as explaining how kigo - words or phrases that symbolize the season of the poem, have a role in haiku poetry and Japanese language. (It would be great if you can think of a word, image, etc. related to fall/winter that you want to use to create...
Yamashiro Chikako’s video installation Woman in the Butcher Shop considers the position of Okinawa’s Otherness within the context of Japan’s politics, especially in relation to the atrocities during the Battle of Okinawa, and the continuous US military presence on the Island. In her three-channel video projection, Yamashiro further develops the narrative of occupation and subjugation, through her use of female protagonists and meat as double metaphors to the complex triangular relationship between Okinawa, Japan, and the USA. In this presentation, Dr. Zohar will look into the meat image in...
Debates over constitutional revision have picked up steam since 2012, when the Liberal Democratic Party returned to power. PM Shinzo Abe has declared constitutional amendment–particularly of Article 9–to be one of his top priorities, but it is not clear whether the public shares his commitment. Newspaper surveys tend to produce inconsistent results, suggesting the need for a more rigorous analysis of public opinion. Dr. McElwain will discuss the results of two online survey experiments conducted in 2017 and 2018. In one survey, we test the effects of changing the “proposer” of...
Japan and Germany are well-known for their post-1945 American-imposed “peace constitutions” that forbade either country from having armed forces, armaments or engaging in war. Both have strong anti-militarist (but not “pacifist”) sub-cultures. Yet despite this today both are key U.S. allies, have substantial military forces (Japan is 7th in global firepower and has the second strongest nation in the Pacific after the U.S.; Germany is one of the key countries in NATO and 9th in global firepower), and after the Cold War have supported U.S. military operations abroad either in combat (Germany)...
The friendship between Lu Xun, China’s most famous writer of the 20th century, and Uchiyama Kanzō, the Japanese bookshop owner who lived in Shanghai for nearly 30 years, is legendary, especially in East Asia. The nature of that friendship, though, has never been fleshed out. This talk addresses how and why these two men came to Shanghai, for what turned out to be the last years of Lu Xun’s life, and how their friendship was manifest in daily life. Joshua Fogel was born in Brooklyn, raised in Berkeley, studied in Chicago, New York, and Kyoto, and has taught at Harvard, the Univ...
This conference will bring together scholars of South, Southeast, and East Asia for a discussion framed by the concept of a “wood age.” We will consider both the centrality of wood to material life in the premodern world and the changes brought by the industrialization of the forest. Using perspectives from social and cultural history; archeology and paleoecology; and the histories of art, architecture, science, and medicine, this conference will address the wide range of ways that people interacted with woodlands. These dialogues will help move forest history beyond the early focus on...
In the 1910s at the same time that the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky used large-scale orchestras to compose ballet music, he also wrote short songs of extremely minute organization. Among these songs were “Three Japanese Lyrics” (1913), a collection of temporally brief songs based on the text of Japanese waka that represented an experiment of one kind of modernist technique in miniature form. In these songs the modernist methods and modalities from the dawn of the twentieth century come together as Japonisme. Yet these tendencies did not belong to Stravinsky alone. As this paper will show...
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...
In 1873, the Hokkaido Colonial Agency built an orchard on the grounds of its new capitol building, located in the center of Sapporo. This orchard facilitated the transfer of fruit trees and other plants throughout Hokkaido, Japan, and the wider world, and helped turn Hokkaido’s forests and marshes into an agricultural landscape that resembled New England or Wisconsin. This conscious remaking of Hokkaido’s environment to facilitate Japanese expansion resembled the processes of settler-colonialism around the world, but also drew on long-standing efforts by the Japanese state to settle the...
Interested in East Asian Studies courses? Come explore course offerings for the 2018-2019 academic year and meet the CEAS faculty, post-docs, and visiting scholars teaching exciting new courses this year. Both undergraduate and graduate students are welcome to attend this event. Snacks will be provided. Please RSVP to eastasian.stu...
A critical examination of atheism and religions (Buddhism), with a focus on intellectual, religious, philosophical, and scientific debates about God, the origin of the universe, morality, evolution, neuroscience, happiness, enlightenment, the afterlife, and karma. Readings selected from philosophical, scientific, and religious writings. Authors include some of the following: Charles Darwin, Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchins, Richard Dawkins, Deepak Chopra, Sam Harris, Owen Flanagan, Stephen Batchelor, and the Dalai Lama.
This course offers a visual history of the art objects and other material goods that people set in motion, physically and imaginatively, across the Silk Roads regions of Eurasia from antiquity through the beginnings of the medieval era. It ranges across a variety of cultural productions and sites encompassing the agrarian and nomadic zones of Eurasia from the Bronze Age through the 7th-century rise of the first Caliphates in the west and the efflorescence of the Sui-Tang cosmopolis in the east.
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