Japan

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...

Mr. Naoyuki Agawa currently teaches American constitutional law and history as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. He joined Doshisha on April 1, 2016 upon leaving Keio University in Tokyo. At Keio, he served as Professor of the Faculty of Policy Management (1999 – 2016), Vice President, International (2009 – 2013) and Dean of the Faculty of Policy Management (2007 – 2009).  Mr. Agawa served as Minister for Public Affairs in charge of public diplomacy and press relations at the Embassy of Japan in Washington, D.C. on leave of absence from Keio...

Yakushiji temple in Nara houses a 2.5-meter bronze sculpture of the Master of Medicine Buddha with two attendant bodhisattvas; the triad was completed ca. 718. A temple of the same name was vowed by Emperor Tenmu (r. 672–686) in 680 for an earlier capital, Fujiwara, when his chief consort, later Empress Jitō (r. 686–697), became ill. Visually and metaphorically, the 1.5-meter bronze pedestal beneath the Master of Medicine icon supports the Buddha’s promise to quell forces that sicken people and foster chaos. The elegant and powerful blend of Indic foreign figures, Chinese cosmology, grape...

Professor Jacobowitz will discuss his recent publication, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture. The book boldly rethinks the origins of modern Japanese language, literature, and visual culture from the perspective of media history. Drawing upon methodological insights by Friedrich Kittler and extensive archival research, it investigates a range of epistemic transformations in the Meiji era (1868-1912) from the rise of communication networks such as telegraph...

Unlike early Buddhism, which seems on the whole unconcerned with the question of evil, much of medieval Japanese Buddhism has to do with exorcizing demons. In other words, premodern Japanese Buddhism was above all a demonology. But who were these demons, and why have they been neglected for so long by Buddhist scholarship? The Western distinction between gods and demons, with its moral connotations, is misleading. Most medieval deities were “demonic” (in the Greek sense of daimon) rather than “demoniac” (in the Chritian sense). A paradigmatic case is that of of an elusive deity called Kōjin:...

From the debut of the Buddha Śākyamuni in early historical Japan through the fifteenth century, the Indian sage often cut a remote and un-affecting figure. Only late in Japan’s tumultuous sixteenth century did new stories of his life, filled with original poetry, drama, and derring-do, begin to circulate as commercial books. In turn, these print commodities were adapted for the puppet theater from the middle of the seventeenth century, and for the kabuki stage from the mid-nineteenth. Largely overlooked by scholars of Japanese Buddhism and the Japanese theater, these new staging’s of the life...

For several decades now, IT developers in Japan have battled with their colleagues in other parts of the world for a chance to shape the ubiquitous computing protocols of the future. But as with the internet before it, attempts to establish global standards for ubiquitous computing continually bump up against the disparate needs and practices of specific populations. This talk explores debates over how to build a ubiquitous computing network with Japan in mind, from specific aspects of Japanese communication and urban design to the particular challenges of an aging and shrinking population....

Of all the war atrocities committed by the Japanese military in China, perhaps the most notorious and curious case was that of the Hundred Man Killing Contest. As Japanese military units raced to capture the Chinese capital of Nanjing in late 1937, Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun reporters breathlessly covered the story of two officers competing to be the first to kill one hundred Chinese soldiers. Although the event is remembered today as an example of the cruelties of Japanese militarism, thinking about the Killing Contest as media spectacle can provide new insights on how total war transforms...

Representative democracy necessitates the aggregation of multiple policy issues by parties into competing bundles of policies, or “manifestos,” which are then evaluated holistically by voters in elections. This aggregation process complicates our understanding of the multidimensional policy preferences underlying a voter’s single choice of a party or candidate. We address this problem with a novel conjoint experiment based on actual party manifestos. By juxtaposing sets of issue positions as hypothetical manifestos and asking respondents to choose one, our study identifies the effects...