Japan
On February 6, 1963, Hiroshima’s main newspaper, the Chūgoku Shinbun, published an account under the somber title, “Exchanging Mementos of Death,” detailing an exchange of A-bomb and Holocaust relics between a Hiroshima peace delegation and an Auschwitz survivors’ organization. The exchange, which took place on the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, also included actual ashes and bones of Auschwitz victims, given to the Japanese by their Polish hosts. This symbolic encounter, in which the dead were literally conscripted in the service of the politics of the living, serves as the focal point of ...
Please join the Council on East Asian Studies and the MacMillan Center in celebrating the inauguration of President Peter Salovey! The MacMillan Center will host an International Buffet in the Common Room. Enjoy a sampling of dishes from around the world! Room 202 will have on-going demonstrations (11:30am - 1:30pm) that are fun for all ages, such as batik, henna, and origami. Room 203 will have the various performances, including a Vietnamese fan dance, a Red Mask dance (Java), Linnunrata (a Nordic Folk Music Band), and at 11:45am, special dance demonstrations by the Phoenix Dance Troupe...
In association with the newly-installed exhibit “Recent Publications by Yale’s East Asia Faculty, 2012-2013” in the East Asian Reading Room, the East Asia Library is going to organize a series of informal talks on new monographs written by Yale’s East Asia faculty. Professor Fabian Drixler (History Department) gives a talk on his recent book, “Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660-1950.” Desserts and drinks will be provided. We hope you will enjoy the exhibit in the East Asian Reading Room, and look forward to seeing many of you at the upcoming book talks.
Magino Story: Raising Silkworms (1977) 112 minutes, Color, 16mm, English Subtitles After realizing that he still could not understand the farmers, Ogawa and his staff moved to Magino in Yamagata to begin farming themselves. From this experience emerged a series of films, beginning with Raising Silkworms, that interweave local folktales with meticulous records of farm activities, to evoke rural life from within. Another Village: The Radical Documentaries of Ogawa Shinsuke Ogawa Shinsuke was one of the pillars of postwar Japanese documentary, whose influence has spread throughout Asia. Pursuing...
Please join us for a special lecture and performance demonstration of Noh. Originally founded in 2002, Izumi Ashizawa Performance explores the physical story-telling with unconventional puppetry and object animation. The company values the interdisciplinary collaboration process with dancers, actors, composers, musicians, sculptors. Based on Japanese physical performance techniques, Ashizawa’s movement techniques are taught around the world, including the U.S.A., Japan, Norway, Austria, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Romania, Poland, Turkey, Iran, Australia, the Cayman Islands, and Peru. The...
Heta Village (1973) 146 minutes, B&W, 16mm, English Subtitles After years of following the Narita struggle, Ogawa turned his camera from the action towards the way of life of the farmers and what they were trying to defend. Arguably his masterpiece, Heta Village is less a document than an attempt to embody different modes of time and space. The third film in a series of four. Another Village: The Radical Documentaries of Ogawa Shinsuke Ogawa Shinsuke was one of the pillars of postwar Japanese documentary, whose influence has spread throughout Asia. Pursuing committed, independent...
Many had never heard of Tōhoku before March 11, 2011. But in Japan, the Northeast has never been far from public consciousness. Tōhoku has been everything from a vexing internal social-political problematic to the nation’s rice basket, and from a savage and alterior outland to the spiritual home of the Japanese people. Focusing on postwar visions of Tōhoku, I will unravel the multivalence and polysemy of Tōhoku in public discourse, and what this means for regionalisms and nationalisms both in Japan and worldwide. Nathan Hopson received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012....
*Talk will be in Japanese* Professor Kiyoshi Jinno, who is currently visiting Yale for a few weeks from Musashino Gakuin Daigaku in Japan, has kindly agreed (at the last minute) to give an informal presentation in Japanese this coming Friday, 9/20, on his research into “Concepts of Public and Private in Medieval Japan—What we can learn from Ashikaga Takuji’s Donations to Religious Institutions” (公と私の概念－足利尊氏の寄進を素材として).
All are welcome to come and hear the fascinating story of the “Harimaze” folding screens. Housed for much of the last century in the Beinecke as part of the Yale Association of Japan (YAJ) collection, the “Harimaze” includes 27 documents, ranging in date from the early 12th to the mid-18th centuries, which were pasted together on two standing screens. Although at the time this seemed a good idea for transportation and exhibition purposes, the preservation of the documents has remained a concern while attached to the screens. As a result, the screens have been the focus of a major two-year...
Framed as a book talk and an introduction to new research on medieval women, this lecture will consider what we know about Japanese noblewomen of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as further avenues for research. Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women: Politics, Personality, and Literary Production in the Life of Nun Abutsu (Hawai‘i, 2013) argues that Kamakura-period (1185-1336) court women continued to produce memoirs, tales, poetry, poetic commentary, courtly advice, and epistolary literature and shows how these activities were impacted by shifts in the literary and...
Sea of Youth (1966) 56 minutes, B&W, 16mm, English subtitles Ogawa’s directorial debut records student opposition to government changes in the correspondence school system. Their youth resonates with Ogawa’s independent spirit to produce a passionate portrait of people rethinking education, work, and life. Another Village: The Radical Documentaries of Ogawa Shinsuke Ogawa Shinsuke was one of the pillars of postwar Japanese documentary, whose influence has spread throughout Asia. Pursuing committed, independent documentary, he soon realized that it wasn’t enough to stand...
This special lecture is the keynote presentation for Treasures from Japan: An International Conference on Pre-Modern Books and Manuscripts in the Yale University Library that will take place from March 5-6, 2015. For centuries woodblock printing was the only alternative to manuscripts in Japan, but at the end of the sixteenth century, the technology of printing with movable type was introduced to Japan more or less simultaneously from two very different sources; the European tradition in the form of the Jesuits, who brought a printing press to Japan from Macao and used it in Kyushu, and the...
Was Japan isolated in the eighteenth century? For decades historians have struggled to make sense of early modern Japanese foreign policy: did the Tokugawa shoguns cut-off Japan from the outside world, or was this a more nuanced policy of limiting select foreign contacts? This talk examines the case of Russia’s 1792 attempt to open trade with Japan. It reveals that the attempt foundered more problems of translation and political culture than on a Tokugawa aversion to trade with the West. Mark Ravina (Ph.D. Stanford, 1991) is professor of history at Emory University. He has been a visiting...
The Police Affairs Bureau of the Home Ministry (Naimusho Keihokyoku) carried out centralized, national film censorship from 1925 to 1940. Every single print of all sorts of films – domestic or foreign, dramatic or documentary, feature-length or short – had to undergo this process and receive the censor’s seal of approval in order to be screened for a public in the Japanese Empire. Despite its vital role, the Home Ministry’s censorship, especially its effects on individual films’ textual details, has not attracted sufficient scholarly attention. This presentation fills this gap by focusing on...
PANELISTS: Osawa Jō (National Film Center, Japan) Philip Kaffen (Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of East Asian Studies, Comparative Literature, New York University) Inuhiko Yomota (Visiting Researcher, Kyoto University of Art and Design) MODERATOR: Aaron Gerow (Professor of Film Studies & East Asian Languages & Literatures, Yale University) Still courtesy of Toho, Ltd.
A world premier with English subtitles of a silent masterpiece by renowned director, Ingaki Hiroshi: Outlaw yakuza, Chūtarō, splits with his gang to look for the mother who abandoned him when he was a child in the sprawling metropolis, Edo (now Tokyo). There, modernity clashes with such traditional values as loyalty, and perhaps even with the bond between mother and her child. The screening will be accompanied with live music performed by the trio, Limbergino. Lone Wolves and...
Jirō is the second brother of the Kuroki family. He has just been released from jail and is already scheming a new heist. For this mission he hopes to recruit his younger brother, who is referred to as Sabu by his friends. This is a difficult task, as Sabu resents his brother for his lack of concern toward their mother who has just died. Sabu is nevertheless lured to take part in his brother’s plot when Jirō offers him what seems to be a large sum of money. However, this is not going to be a happy family operation. First, the target of the plan is a powerful yakuza gang, led by a ruthless...
On September 22, 1947, a typhoon is approaching the northern island of Hokkaido when a fire breaks out in a pawnshop in the town of Iwanai. Just before that, two men had fled the shop and joined another before heading off to Hakodate, a city that was in pandemonium trying to rescue survivors of the shipwrecked Aomori-Hakodate ferry. One of those helping is Detective Yumisaka from Iwanai. When he returns home, he finds out that the fire, apparently set to cover up a murder-robbery, has burned down much of the town. The warden of the Abashiri Prison visits and suggests that two recently...
A detective in civilian clothes arrives in a rural town to investigate crimes involving two local yakuza families, Ōoka and Kozuka. These two organized crime groups violently compete over territory, and over prostitution, drugs and gambling markets in the area. It is soon revealed that the local mournful bartender used to be a yakuza member as well, but after his wife died, allegedly in an accident, he has taken an oath to quit in order to become a katagi, the yakuza term for a law abiding citizen. The relationship between him and the detective becomes warmer after the detective raises...
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