Japan

The narrative consists of a complicated structure involving a number of flashbacks. The film centers on a notorious killer named Shiozawa, who is feared by yakuza clans but disguises his identity by managing a small Japanese restaurant. One day, Shiozawa meets Keiko, who starts to hang around him once she finds out he has money. Keiko begins working at his restaurant while making vain attempts to seduce Shiozawa. Meanwhile, Shiozawa contracts with the Kimura-gumi yakuza clan to murder Ōwada, the boss of rival clan, for 20 million yen. When Shiozawa succeeds in killing Ōwada by his trained...

The story centers on a police detective, Murakami, whose pistol is stolen from him while he rides a trolley through Tokyo, a city still struggling to recover from the devastation of World War II. Murakami is overcome with guilt at the loss of his weapon, particularly when reports roll in that it is being used in a series of holdups, one ending fatally. Murakami devotes himself to tracking down the man who has his gun, going undercover to penetrate the seedy postwar black market and hunting down every possible lead. When Murakami finally encounters the criminal, he discovers that they share...

The Jomon period is a complex of cultures throughout Japan that existed for at least 15,000 years, ending in Hokkaido only 1300 or 1400 years ago. These cultures defy standard anthropological definitions of hunter-gatherers and farmers, being neither or both. In China, cultures transformed from hunter-gatherers to farmers, then to centralized states, in contrast to Japan where the Jomon changed modestly over its lifespan. Unlike the evolving cultures of their neighbors in China, the Jomon found a path of resilience rooted in a human ecology that forces us to question the very definition of...

The early seventeenth century saw an unprecedented surge in connections between Japan and states across Southeast Asia. Japanese merchants, mercenaries and migrants started to appear in large numbers in ports across the region while the first Tokugawa shogun exchanged regular correspondence with a diverse array of rulers and officials. This began to change, however, in the 1620s as the Tokugawa regime severed these connections by rejecting a string of incoming diplomatic letters and embassies. This paper explores this process of diplomatic retreat but argues that it was accompanied by a...

As part of the post-World War II democratization and modernization policies under US military occupation, the Japanese court system adopted the Anglo-American legal principle of direct trial and the adversarial system.  This innovation left behind the earlier inquisitorial system and foregrounded oral-based trials and cross-examination, and thus introduced live speech at the core of judicial processes.  This transformation was marked by the the adoption of the Japanese stenographic typewriter (sokutaipu) in 1950 as an official recording method to produce trial records. Drawing on interviews...

Between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, a field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the discipline of medicine, produced nature knowledge that questioned the traditional religious and philosophical understandings of the world, developed into a system (called honzōgaku) that rivaled Western science in complexity, and then seemingly disappeared. Its practitioners established protocols of observation and description able to convey authoritative knowledge about plants and animals. Faithful and accurate pictorial representations played a fundamental role in...

Oyabe Zen’ichirō (1867-1941) studied in educational institutions in the United States between 1889 and 1898, such as the Hampton Institute, Howard University, and Yale University, which together formed the epicenter of American racial discourse in the late nineteenth century. After he returned to Japan, he educated the Ainu, by establishing an Ainu school in Hokkaido in 1905. In the 1920s, he became one of the strongest advocates for the legendary myth that Genghis Khan, a Mongolian hero of the twelfth century, was identical to Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a Japanese warrior. He also published...

Take a wrong turn and show up late to an appointment in Japan and it is quite likely that someone will label you “hōkō onchi” (directionally tone-deaf). The term was coined in the late 1960s, and now hundreds of thousands of Japanese identify themselves as “hōkō onchi.” The term is much more widely used than any equivalent in English, and there is reason to believe that people accept the label who do not necessarily have more difficulty in way-finding than someone who rejects it. What, then, does the label mean? What explains its initial emergence and its current transformations? Roth suggest...

Join us for a special dialogue on the history of alternate modernities by two expert scholars in the field. Bush will be discussing chapter one of his current book project, The Floating World: Japoniste Aesthetics and Glboal Modernity, and Williams will be sharing a chapter from his recently published book, The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West (Yale University Press, 2014). For copies of the papers in advance, please contact Jessica Chin at...