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!
Over the last two decades, jury systems have been introduced for criminal trials in several democracies including Japan, South Korea, Spain, and, on a provisional basis, Taiwan. Why might democratic states whose criminal trials had long been dominated by professional judges decide to invite greater public input into those proceedings? And what factors might account for the differences in the configuration of the new jury institutions across different countries? Drawing on detailed study of the reform efforts of Japan, South Korea, Spain, and Taiwan, this study argues that partisan dynamics...
This talk introduces what I term the “transwar generation” of Japanese human scientists: students of human diversity as captured by the constructs of “race” and “culture” or Self and Other. Born in roughly the first two decades of the twentieth century, the transwar generation was intellectually active before 1945 and responsible for rebuilding an academic tradition after Japan’s defeat in World War II. What bound these scholars together was a shared, lifelong commitment to a putatively “objective” research methodology defined above all by fieldwork. In the 1930s and 1940s, Japanese human...
A symposium held in celebration of the completion of the translation of Dogen’s Shobo genzo, a multi-year project of Stanley Weinstein of Yale University, Will Bodiford of UCLA, T. Griffith Foulk of Sarah Lawrence College, Carl Bielefeldt of Stanford University and the late John McRae. Presenters and Talk Titles: Morning Session: China Tim Barrett Re-reading the Four Great Rulers of the World Daniel Getz Organizing the Pure Land: Wang Rixiu’s Recension of the Wuliangshou Fo Jing Eric Greene Meditation texts carved during the Kaiyuan era at the ‘Grove of the Reclining Buddha’ (...
Yale University is proud to welcome Ambassador Ryozo Kato and Mr. Naoyuki Agawa to campus on September 21 for a special event, “The Arc of Post-World War II Japanese Diplomacy: A Conversation.” Professors Paul Kennedy, J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History and Director, International Security Studies, and Koichi Hamada, Tuntex Emeritus Professor of Economics, will join Ambassador Kato and Mr. Agawa for a discussion of the global context of Japanese diplomacy during the last 70 years. The event will be held in the auditorium of Henry R. Luce Hall (34 Hillhouse Avenue) at 4:00 p.m., and...
What effect did Christianity have on modern Chinese literature, and what sort of Christianity emerges from Chinese Christian literature? Is Endō Shusakū the only Japanese Christian writer (and does Martin Scorsese’s film do justice to Endō’s novel Silence)? This course tackles such questions by tracing the development of a Christian literature in China and Japan from late Imperial times to the beginning of the twenty-first century, with particular focus on the heyday (in China) of the 1920s and ’30s, and on the Japanese side, on Endō’s postwar novels. Using texts available in...
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.
The development of Japanese cinema after the breakdown of the studio system, through the revival of the late 1990s, to the present.
The martial arts film has not only been a central genre for many East Asian cinemas, it has been the cinematic form that has most defined those cinemas for others. Domestically, martial arts films have served to promote the nation, while on the international arena, they have been one of the primary conduits of transnational cinematic interaction, as kung-fu or samurai films have influenced films inside and outside East Asia, from The Matrix to Kill Bill. Martial arts cinema has become a crucial means for thinking through such issues as nation, ethnicity, history, East vs. West, the body,...
The development of Japanese cinema after the breakdown of the studio system, through the revival of the late 1990s, and to the present.
Of the many classes throughout human history, few capture the mind’s fascination as much as the military nobility of medieval and early-modern Japan—the samurai. The artistry of their materials, the technology behind their blades, and the details of their tradition represent a rich tapestry that today still maintains a presence in Japanese and pop culture. Featuring more than 150 spectacular artifacts from the Peabody Museum—along with objects from the Yale University Art Gallery, the...
Mr. Naoyuki Agawa currently teaches American constitutional law and history as well as the history of Japan-U.S. relations as professor of the Faculty of Policy Management at the Shonan Fujisawa campus of Keio University in Japan. He served as Vice President, International, of Keio University between 2009 and 2013 and, prior thereto, Dean of the Faculty of Policy Management between 2007 and 2009. He joined Keio University as professor in 1999. Mr. Agawa served as Minister for Public Affairs at the Embassy of Japan in Washington, D.C. between 2002 and 2005 on leave of absence from Keio...
Exploration of Yale’s rich historical connections to Japan. Focus on use of the University’s museum and library collections to learn about various aspects of the Japanese past, from ancient times to the post-World War II era.
Historical and contemporary movements of people, goods, and cultural meanings that have defined Asia as a region. Reexamination of state-centered conceptualizations of Asia and of established boundaries in regional studies. The intersections of transregional institutions and local societies and their effects on trading empires, religious traditions, colonial encounters, and cultural fusion. Finance flows that connect East Asia and the Indian Ocean to the Middle East and Africa. The cultures of capital and market in the neoliberal and postsocialist world.
*RESCHEDULED from Feb. 11 due to Winter Storm!* Come celebrate the Year of the Snake with CEAS!
The Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University will host the next “Waka Workshop” (seventh in the series started at the University of British Columbia and continued at Columbia, UCLA, Stanford, and Yale in previous years) on March 1 and 2, 2013. Readings and discussions at the 2013 workshop will focus on Shakkyōka (釈教歌) of the Heian and Kamakura periods as found in the Imperial anthologies (chokusenshū 勅撰集) and elsewhere—in independent devotional series, in personal anthologies, etc. We will consider the problem of how best to...
This TWO DAY workshop is an interdisciplinary meeting that considers the notion of Himalayan Studies writ large, foregrounding connections between academic disciplines, local geographies, and trajectories of study over time. The keynote panel, from 5:30-7pm on Saturday March 9th in the Luce Hall Auditorium, will bring together in conversation Professor Charles Ramble (Ecole pratique des hautes Etudes, Sorbonne) and Professor James Scott (Yale University) on the theme of High Asian Connections. The workshop is being organized in conjunction with the Everyday Religion and Sustainable...
The Council is pleased to present the 14th Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. Notions of the eastward spread of Buddhism through “three countries” gave pre-modern Japanese Buddhists a framework in which to orient themselves with respect to the time and place of their tradition’s origins and to compare Japan—favorably or otherwise—with the great realms of the continent, India and China. During the medieval period, Japan’s status among the three countries was continually refigured and invoked to bolster a range of arguments for what constituted normative Buddhist thought and...
In the wake of the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, some of Japan’s environmental heroes were transformed almost instantly into its villains. The 3/11 earthquake and tsunami seriously damaged northeastern Japan’s fishing ports, and the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant polluted the coastal waters and ensured that fish caught anywhere nearby would be undesirable on the market. In responding to the multifold disaster, the Japanese government announced coastal modernization as the pillar of its master plan for reconstructing the devastated fishing communities. The proposal calls...
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