Japan
It was said that more than 60,000 Japanese people remained in Manchuria when the last repatriation ship returned to Japan from China. Many remaining Japanese people in Manchuria engaged in the Chinese communist revolution at the request by the Communist Party of China. Some radical communists groups organized the cultural movements at factories, hospitals and coal mines. Dr. Tsuboi’s paper will consider their movements within the context of refugee (displaced person) problematics and discuss what /who was the refugee in the northeast Asia in 1950th. Dr. Hideto Tsuboi is a Japanese...
Please join the Council on East Asian Studies in celebrating the Lunar New Year. Please RSVP to eastasian.studies@yale.edu by February 1, 2018.
The world seems to be going through many fundamental changes. Some of them deeply worry us or scare us. While they require careful examination and response, they often produce frustration, uneasiness, and uncertainty among peoples and countries of the world. They may also lead to excessive and emotional reactions and irrational denials. North Korea presents a prime example of these worrisome changes. Trying desperately to survive, Mr. Kim seems to be succeeding in transforming this oppressive and dysfunctional regime into a country capable of launching an ICBM targeted at Washington. An...
Since the global financial crisis, many countries have experienced worryingly low inflation or deflation. Some central banks have taken aggressive unorthodox measures such as large scale quantitative easing, while others have taken a more cautious approach. What determines the extent to which central banks have tackled the problem of low inflation? Particularly interesting is the case of the Bank of Japan (BOJ), which for 15 years since its de jure independence of 1998 resisted adaptation of such unorthodox measures. Examining the case of Japan, this project makes the case that the policy...
Japanese visual culture is characterized by multifarious and highly complex relationships between text and image, to such an extent that they would interfere with Ernest Fenollosa’s attempt to define the so-called idealistic art of Japan in the late 19th century. It is Professor Brisset’s aim in the present paper to discuss some of those intersemiotic devices, with an emphasis on the cryptographic tradition. A unique phenomenon in the Far East, it displays writing characters deliberately hidden in paintings or lacquerwares so as to allude to a text (a poem, be it Chinese or Japanese, or...
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,”...
Professor William Hedberg’s presentation focuses on the reception and continued popularity of Chinese vernacular fiction in Meiji- and Taishō-period Japan, with special focus on the novel The Water Margin (Ch. Shuihu zhuan, Jp. Suikoden). The story of 108 outlaw gallants who band together in the marshes of northeastern China, The Water Margin reached new heights of popularity in the modern era, when authors as disparate as Mori Ōgai, Tokutomi Sohō, Masaoka Shiki, and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke presented the novel as an uncannily proto-modern example of literary realism, as well as a key point...
On the thirteenth day of the second month of Jishō 3 (1179), the notorious Rokuhara Novice and Former Chancellor, Taira no Kiyomori, presented a partial copy of the Chinese text Imperial Readings of the Taiping Era to the Japanese court. Nakayama Tadachika, the courtier who recorded the event in his diary, grudgingly observed that the text had “never before come to our sovereignty.” The performative appeal of such a gift is clear, for mastery of things Chinese reflected cultural capital like little else in late-twelfth and thirteenth-century Japan: Kiyomori’s gesture encapsulates the ideal of...
In the first half of the twentieth century a number of Japanese companies began investing in offshore guano mining. Beginning in the North Pacific, in the interwar period guano prospectors fanned out across the South China Sea, surveying and claiming uninhabited islands that they hoped would prove commercially valuable. To defend their claims they cultivated close connections with the Imperial Japanese Navy and took care to couch their activities in terms of the national strategic interest. As a result the Japanese government increasingly found itself drawn into island sovereignty disputes...
In this presentation, Dr. Ambaras examines the histories of people who moved, the relationships they created, and the anxieties they provoked, in the spatial and social borderlands between Japan and China from the 1860s to the 1940s. Japan’s imbrication in new geopolitical structures and spatial flows engendered forms of intimacy that were seen as problematic, or even horrific, because they transgressed notions of territory marked by stable, defensible borders and notions of place marked by distinct identities and social roles. Yet rather than see those borders and roles as already...
Come learn about participating in the 2018 Japan-America & Korea-America Student Conferences. Alumni from both programs will present on their experiences and answer your questions! Students of all academic disciplines and levels are encouraged to attend. For more information: Poster
The advent of sports broadcasting in Japan in the 1920s necessitated the creation of new forms of oral narrative performance. The sporting events themselves offered the narrative frame, and the task before the radio broadcaster was to present that bare sequence of events with enough structure and art to hold the audience’s attention to a spectacle that they couldn’t actually see. The contemporary discourses around these broadcasts traded on the rhetoric of an immediacy that was undeniable while also being, in many ways, a consensual fiction. The first half of the presentation outlines the...
This paper identifies voter-based mechanisms underlying why economic policies across countries do not converge to a single, successful model. We demonstrate that exposure to news about foreign government policies can change policy preferences of citizens through peer emulation and backlash against it. These heterogeneous responses arise due to citizens’ divergent predispositions about a foreign country being their “peer.” We test this argument with two coordinated survey experiments in Japan and Taiwan in 2015, which randomly assigned news reporting on the South Korea-China trade agreement...
Lunch will be served. The traditional oral literature of the Ainu in Northern Japan has been developed almost exclusively around the background of the traditional living environment of the Ainu people. Cultural and religious elements in the stories, as well as the space in which the protagonists are acting, are based on an idealized everyday reality of the Ainu. The establishment and extension of the literary space has a high relevance in the narrations, and is represented by many linguistic structures and rhetorical figures. Many Ainu stories take place only inside those culturally and...
Registration by October 1st is required AGENDA 9:00 - 10:00 Registration 10:00 - 10:10 Welcome Remarks Welcome remarks by Ambassador Rosemary A. DiCarlo, President of National Committee on American Foreign Policy and Senior Fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. 10:10 - 10:50 Keynote Speech and Q&A: U.S. Role In East Asia Keynote Speech by Ambassador Daniel R. Russel, Senior Fellow and Diplomat in Residence at Asia Society Policy Institute. He served until March 2017 as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State...
Join us to discuss what values and skills we want to nurture in the next generation of children in Asia with two World Fellows from China and Japan who are working in the education field. DU Yang is the co-founder and chief analyst of China Philanthropist Magazine and CiMedia Group, and he has been involved in the process of launching an educational platform of China’s top philanthropists and an east-west cultural program. Lin Kobayashi is a founder and board chair of UWC ISAK, Japan’s first international boarding high school which aims to empower their students to become transformational...
Japan has failed to see significant economic development in contrast to its East Asian neighbors for over a quarter century since its economic bubble burst. Even China surpassed Japan in its gross national product and Korea challenged Japanese technological leadership in the consumer goods industry with Samsung beating Sony in the cell phone market worldwide. In the international imagination Japan is now no longer associated with reliable cars, ubiquitous TV displays, or computer hardware but with manga, anime and video games. To its dismay or delight Japan has been transformed from a country...
In low-information elections, voters may rely on gender stereotypes when evaluating female candidates relative to male candidates, and this may hinder women’s electoral success. In this study, we evaluate the impact of information on voter support for female candidates with a survey experiment conducted during the 2016 election for Japan’s House of Councillors, which includes a nationwide open-list proportional representation contest. We also consider the effect of compulsory preference voting, which may counteract gender-based inequalities in participation, as well as incentivize voters to...
Critical Reflections on the 150th Anniversary of Japan’s Meiji Restoration Part of a multiyear project to facilitate international discussion of the Sesquicentennial of the Meiji Restoration in 2018, organized in collaboration with colleagues from Wake Forest University and Heidelberg University. Conference schedule is available for download here. Conference papers are available for download here.
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