Japan
Come enjoy the festivities as the Council on East Asian Studies kicks off the fall term and please join us in welcoming our new students, postdocs, and visiting scholars! RSVP to eastasian.studies@yale.edu by 09/04/17
By arrangement with faculty and with approval of the DGS.
Directed reading and research on a topic approved by the DGS and advised by a faculty member (by arrangement) with expertise or specialized competence in the chosen field. Readings and research are done in preparation for the required master’s thesis.
This course is an introduction to Japanese literature written in the last fifty years, with a focus on women writers. We read poetry and prose featuring mothers, daughters, and lovers, novels that follow convenience and thrift store workers, and poetry about factory girls. Our reading takes us from the daily grind of contemporary Tokyo to dystopian futures, from 1970s suburbia to surreal dreamscapes. We attend carefully to the ways in which different writers craft their works and, in particular, to their representation of feelings and affects. Whether the dull ache of loneliness, the...
Join us for an informal discussion about the state of Japanese film and pop culture and Schilling’s career as a critic and journalist. Lunch will be provided. Mark Schilling has a long and distinguished career as a film critic, journalist, and scholar of Japanese cinema and popular culture. He regularly writes reviews for The Japan Times and reports on the film industry for Variety. His books as author and editor include The Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture (Weatherhill, 1997), Contemporary Japanese Film (Weatherhill, 1999), The Yakuza Movie Book – A Guide to Japanese Gangster...
Directed by Itō Daisuke (Nikkatsu, 1931, 61 min. DVD) One of the unique pleasures of Japanese film culture is that all silent films were shown with a benshi, a figure who stood next to the screen explaining the film and essentially dubbing the dialogue. The benshi Kataoka Ichirō preserves this rare verbal art by traveling the world and narrating the masterpieces of Japanese film. Kataoka will perform for Yale audiences Jirōkichi the Rat, one of the few surviving silent films of the pioneer master of the Japanese samurai movie, Itō Daisuke. This features the great Ōkōchi Denjirō playing...
In “dream vision” (mugen) Noh, a ghost appears to a traveling priest in a dream and reenacts the memory that keeps it attached to this world; it does so in order to obtain assistance in achieving enlightenment and release from that attachment. Dream vision plays, especially those composed by Kanze Zeami and Konparu Zenchiku, are generally considered to be the finest embodiment of the aesthetic of yūgen (ineffable beauty) and as such resistant to allegorical and/or historical analysis. This paper will examine examples of Noh plays that incorporate stories from Heian period court culture such...
The Japanese art dealer Yamanaka Sadajirō and art collector Nezu Ka’ichirō acquired numerous fragments of sculpture looted from Chinese Buddhist sites, notably caves at Tianlongshan. Levine considers the fragmentation and circulation of Tianlongshan’s sculpture—especially the heads of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas—into private collections and museums in relation to Tianlongshan’s modern “discovery,” Japanese colonial archaeology, and the twentieth-century, transnational art market for Chinese sculpture. A historian of the art and architecture of Japan and Buddhist visual...
Lunch will be provided. Focused on a group of Okinawan construction workers in Tokyo, this talk tracks the transformation of working day time into the narcotic of gambling, such that the worker - turned gambler - stakes his social existence on a negativity that repulses the normative gaze of general Japanese society. Klaus Yamamoto-Hammering’s writing so far has focused on the violence of state recognition in contemporary Japan, and specifically, on the intersection of this violence with certain social differences which statist discourse would eliminate. As an anthropologist, Yamamoto-...
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...
In my lecture, I will examine the connections between Japonisme and the emergence of cinema. Japonisme, the influence of the Japanese art, culture and aesthetics on European and American art, roughly between the 1860s and 1910s, also had a significant impact on early cinema. In particular, I discuss the relationship between Japonisme and the films of Lumière brothers. Finding inspirations from paintings and applying their compositions to their films, the Lumière films presented accuracy, immediacy, and temporality, three goals of Impressionist painters. In order to challenge the liner...
Lunch will be provided. Tokyo has recently decided to utilize foreign aid more strategically so as to make ‘Proactive Contributions to Peace and Security’ and align aid with what is identified as Japanese national interests: to protect an international order governed by rules and based on democracy, human rights and rule of law. Some scholars have even started to talk about Japan as a ‘Normative Power’—an actor with the ability to set what is considered ‘normal’ in international affairs. In this talk I make the case that Japan could be identified as a normative power with regards to framing...
It is the presence and placement of kanji or “Chinese characters” within the German and Japanese texts (both written by Tawada) that is a striking feature of Borudō no gikei/ Schwager in Bordeaux. Published first in 2008, the German language text written by Tawada contains 276 characters as headings or “titles” for component sections of varying lengths. In Tawada’s 2009 Japanese text, published in the following year, contains a similar layout, but the kanji that appears at the heading of each section is printed as a mirror image of itself. Can we take at face value, and as a kind of “key” to...
Lunch will be provided. In the early 1970s, second-generation “Zainichi” Koreans in Japan—many of whom, in contrast to their parents, had little or no Korean language ability—were starting to outnumber the first generation. At this time, Zainichi authors debated the ethical and psychological implications of writing in Japanese. At stake was the question of whether these authors could maintain a specifically Korean identity if that identity could be expressed only in the Japanese language. Kim Sŏkpŏm (1925- ) was a particularly active participant in this debate, writing numerous essays on the...
The East Asia Library is delighted to announce that a second workshop series of “Know before You Go: Researching East Asia in U.S.” will be held at the Sterling Memorial Library (SML) this Spring. Librarians and directors from major East Asian collections in the U.S. will be invited to introduce and show off their rare and unique resources, recent acquisitions, digitization projects, travel grants, access policies, etc. at the workshops. You will have the rare opportunity to meet and connect with them before visiting their libraries to conduct your own research during the summer or in the...
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