Japan
At the end of the First World War, one French newspaper called saltwater pearls an “international currency.” Not long thereafter, the arrival of round pearls cultivated along the shores of Japan threw the relationship between a pearl’s appearance, provenance, and exchange value into disarray. What was a “cultured” pearl, and what was its opposite? This presentation addresses this surprisingly complex question by first tracking the formation and transformation of export pearl cultivation estates along imperial Japanese coastlines. Pearl cultivation arose amid legal changes to fisheries...
The Rocking Horsemen – “Seishun dendekedekedeke” (Japan, 1992) 135 min. Obayashi ventures to the mid-1960s when Japanese youth discovered the electric guitar and rock and roll. Four high school students in a small coastal town hear “Pipeline” on the radio and decide to form their own band. The film features the problems usually found in a teen film, but Obayashi enthusiastically joins the band with his camera, giving a bravura performance with his instrument. A Movie: The Cinema of Nobuhiko Obayashi One of the last major Japanese directors’ active since the 1960s, Obayashi Nobukio is doing...
I Are You, You Am Me [a.k.a. Exchange Student] – “Tenkōsei” (Japan, 1982) 112 min. Two classmates, the girl Kazumi and the boy Kazuo, tumble down a flight of stairs and find they’ve switched bodies. Obayashi colors the resulting gender confusion with a tinge of autobiographical nostalgia, not only filming in his hometown of Onomichi, but also framing the story through B&W 8mm film. A major hit that he remade in 2007. Complexe (Japan, 1964) 14 min. One of the monuments of Japanese experimental film, Complexe shares much with Obayashi’s later commercial work: a delightful play with film...
Ewha Womans University Attendees: Eunice Kim special adviser to Ewha President and Professor of Ewha Law School Ki-Jeong Song, Professor, Department of French Studies, Director of Ewha Institute for the Humanities Pilwha Chang, Korean Women’s Institute, “Surviving to Reconstruct; 40 years of Women’s Studies and Social Change in Korea” Eunshil Kim, Korean Women’s Institute, “The Politics of Unspeakability and the Subject of Defilement” Kyungmi Kim, Ewha Institute for the Humanities, “Sense of Justice in Women’s Petitions of Joseon Dynasty” Ae-Ryung Kim, Ewha Institute...
With Prime Minister Abe’s hawkish reputation and the recent legislation of the collective self-defense law, Japan has seemingly been tilting toward the right over the last few years. Yet, does the government’s shift reflect Japanese people’s opinions? Are Japanese people hawkish? If so, what factors might have a pacifying effect on the hawkish attitude? Through a series of public opinion surveys related to the case of the ongoing territorial disputes between Japan and China, this study examines conditions under which the lay public becomes dovish.
Other delegates include: Keizo Iijima, (Utsunomiya, Tochigi) Akiko Takahashi, (Setagaya-Ku, Tokyo) Mai Iida, student, (Osaka) Haruko Yuda, (Yokosuka-Shi, Kanagawa)
The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, and the rebels who died in it, have been romanticized in the Japanese imagination almost from the moment of the first battle. On this side of the Pacific, the conflict was freely reimagined on the big screen in The Last Samurai, with Tom Cruise portraying a fictional American veteran who throws in his lot with the cause. But fighting alongside rebel leader Saigō Takamori was a real-life commander fresh from the United States whose forgotten story is every bit as remarkable as the one dreamed up by Hollywood—all the more so for being true. Relying on previously...
In conjunction with the current exhibit “Samurai and The Culture of Japan’s Great Peace”, the Yale Peabody Museum is co-sponsoring The Samurai Film Series. The Series includes three films that highlight the code of samurai from different perspectives, both positive and critical. The selected films have also been influential in Western...
In conjunction with the current exhibit Samurai and The Culture of Japan’s Great Peace, the Yale Peabody Museum is co-sponsoring The Samurai Film Series. The series includes three films that highlight the code of samurai from different perspectives, both positive and critical. The selected films have also been influential in Western culture and cinema,...
In conjunction with the current exhibit “Samurai and The Culture of Japan’s Great Peace”, the Yale Peabody Museum is co-sponsoring The Samurai Film Series. The Series includes three films that highlight the code of samurai from different perspectives, both positive and critical. The selected films have also been influential in Western culture and cinema, and these connections will be highlighted during the screening. The Hidden Fortress is a 1958 film directed by Akira Kurosawa, one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, and stars Toshiro Mifune as General Makabe Rokurōta and Misa Uehara as...
A few years ago, Professor of History Daniel Botsman stumbled across a set of old Japanese documents in Yale’s East Asia Library. On closer examination, they turned out to be records kept by the official executioner for the great city of Edo (now Tokyo) during the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate. Taking these records as a starting point, this talk will introduce the career of this remarkable individual and consider its significance for our understanding of various aspects of samurai culture–swords, violence, the penal system, and even medical care.
Like the cowboy in the modern American imagination, the samurai has remained a potent image in Japan long after actual warriors disappeared. Throughout 20th and 21st century Japan, notions of the samurai have been used to exhort everyone from soldiers to students, from corporate workers to athletes. Join Professor William Kelly to discover who these samurai of modern Japan are and how we can connect them to the historical samurai depcted in the Peabody’s Samurai and the Culture of Japan’s Great Peace exhibition.
A puzzling turnaround in attention to national security among the conservative politicians governing Japan occurred in 1997, which preceded a dramatic transformation in Japanese security policy. Curiously, this turnaround is not explained by other variables believed to influence Japanese security policy, such as concerns about the strength of the U.S. commitment or the security threat posed by China. Using 7,497 candidate election manifestos, 126,275 voter petitions, public opinion polls, a case study of politicians’ treatment of the North Korean threat, insights from years spent...
ISE Cultural Foundation NY Lecture Series ISE Cultural Foundation NY and the Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to present a special lecture “The Appreciation of Tea Utensils in Japan” by Professor Jun’ichi Takeuchi, Director of the Eisei Bunko Museum, Tokyo. This lecture will be in Japanese with English interpretation, by Professor Takeshi Watanabe, Connecticut College.
The proliferation of power centers in Japan’s thirteenth and fourteenth centuries brought a corresponding boom in cultural activity, which has left an outsized footprint in the extant manuscript corpus. One of the most important centers for the collection and reproduction of books at this time was the Kanazawa Library, established near the shogunate headquarters in Kamakura. This library was unique in the success and scale of its acquisitions, but in fact shows significant continuities with larger patterns of book circulation among the military households of eastern Japan. Why did shogunate...
The intensified interconnections between media after the 1960s entailed numerous shifts that still shape media culture in Japan today. This talk will explore several historical tipping points that negotiate a new economy of mediated life in the transforming media ecology. From the vivisection of giant monsters in the 1960s to the funeral ceremony for a post-apocalyptic warlord in 2007, a pattern of zombification emerges that is tailored to the rhythms of late-capitalist media culture.
Since 2003, a small group of Japanese sanitation workers has traveled annually from Tokyo to Chennai, India to meet with a group they understand as comrades - the Dalit. Every year, over the course of a week, the Japanese visitors tour Dalit places of work, their homes, and share with them stories of pain and discrimination – the difficulties of marginalization alongside the triumphs of resistance. Using this type of solidarity trip as an ethnographic crucible, my talk examines the internationalization of Japanese grassroots politics. I explore how boundaries – national, ethnic, linguistic,...
What connects the 16th-century samurai practices of collecting and displaying art at social gatherings to counting and examining heads after battle? How do the rituals of gift-giving among warlords relate to the politics of falconry? This talk will link the extreme violence of this age of civil and international war to the increasing significance of samurai social rituals and cultural practices. It will argue that warlords accrued power and reinforced hierarchy both in tea houses and on the battlefield, having a profound effect on the creation and character of Japan’s early modern polity.
Nuclear reactors entail massive non-transferrable site-specific investments. The resulting appropriable quasi-rents offer the mob the ideal target. In exchange for large fees, it can either promise to “protect” the utility (and silence the reactor’s local opponents) or “extort” from it (and desist from inciting local opponents). Using municipality-level (1742 cities, towns, and villages) and prefecture-level (47) Japanese panel data covering the years from 1980 to 2010, I find exactly this phenomenon: when a utility announces plans to build a reactor, the level of extortion climbs. ...
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