Japan
Nuclear NationDirected by Atsushi Funahashi, 2012 (96 minutes, BluRay)Nuclear Nation is a documentary about the exile of Futaba’s residents, the region housing the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Since the 1960s, Futaba had been promised prosperity with tax breaks and major subsidies to compensate for the presence of the power plant. The town’s people have now lost their homeland. Through their agonies and frustrations, the film questions the real cost of capitalism and nuclear energy.Following Fukushima: Three Works Documenting Disaster and Its AftermathThe world was stunned...
No Man’s Zone Directed by Toshi Fujiwara, 2011 (Run time: 103 minutes) In No Man’s Zone, a man wanders through the 20-kilometer exclusion zone around the stricken nuclear reactors at Fukushima. The cherry trees are in bloom and the radiation is invisible, yet a gaping emptiness looms where the tsunami engulfed streets and houses. The man is wearing normal clothing, just like the people still toughing it out there, and he occasionally encounters white “ghosts” in protective clothing. As in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, No Man’s Zone is both a place and a mental state. A voice...
The 12th Kinema Club Workshop on Japanese film and moving image media will be an intimate event with only 6 pre-distributed papers. The following papers will be discussed at Kinema Club XII (in alphabetical order): Michael ARNOLD: “The Pornography of Remediation in Pink Film” Oliver DEW: “Making Ethnicity Legible in the Yakuza Film” Jack LICHTEN: “Japan’s Vietnam War: 1960s Politics, Korea, and the United States in the Films of Ôshima Nagisa” Christine L. Marran: “Seeing Double: Slow Violence in Documentary Film” MISONO Ryoko: “Fallen Women on the Edge of the Empire: Shimizu Hiroshi’s Films...
Memories Of A Lost LandscapeDirected by Yojyu Matsubayashi, 2011 (Run time: 109 minutes, BluRay)In this film, the young director (Yojyu Matsubayashi) begins living with an evacuated family from Minami Soma to produce a very personal portrait of their joys and sorrows.Following Fukushima: Three Works Documenting Disaster and Its AftermathThe world was stunned by images of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident in the Tohoku region of Japan on March 11, 2011. But news cameras rarely ventured into the forbidden zones or relayed the lives of the countless people affected by the disasters....
Since the late twentieth century, assisted reproductive technologies have brought new challenges to our understanding of the family and gender relations. There are ever-widening gaps between medical practice, legal regulation and everyday understandings and practices. Some recent popular cultural texts in Japan have explored the issues raised by non-commercial surrogate motherhood. The background to these texts is a series of controversies concerning surrogacy and the use of assisted reproductive technologies and wider societal anxieties about family, reproduction and population management....
During the Keichō period (1596-1615) in Japan appeared new and nuanced approaches for the inscription of waka poetry on the screen format. This talk will look at screens inscribed with verse from noted poetry anthologies such as the Kokinshū« (ca. 905) and Wakan rōeishū (ca. 1013) and examine the dialogues between text and image, past and present, and object and setting in these “visual” anthologies.
For More Information http://www.bu.edu/anthrop/people/faculty/m-white/
8:30 BREAKFAST, WELCOME 9:00-11:00 Thinking about Transcendence and Materiality Chair: Stanley Insler Robert Sharf, University of California, Berkeley “The Gap Between Buddhist Scholastic Philosophy and Material Culture” Phyllis Granoff, Yale University The Perfect Body of the Jina and his Imperfect Image Gérard Colas, CNRS Paris “The world and other bodies of Brahman-Viṣṇu: Rāmānuja on transcendence and matter” Usha Colas-Chauhan, Independent scholar ” Degrees of transcendence and materiality in Dualist Åšaivism” 11:00-11:15 BREAK 11:15- 12:45 Thinking about Transcendence and...
The Visualizing Cultures project at M.I.T. and the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University are pleased to announce an academic conference focused on the relationship between visual imagery and social change in modern Asia entitled, “Visualizing Asia in the Modern World.” This will be the forth in a series of academic conferences devoted to “image-driven scholarship” and teaching about Asia in the modern world. All conference sessions are free and open to public. We have selected scholars of history, art history, history of photography, and history of technology specializing in China...
This presentation analyzes the earliest Japanese map of the world, painted by a fourteenth-century monk and based on fifth-century Indian and seventh-century Chinese Buddhist texts. Preserved within temples, the map was copied and printed well into the nineteenth century. The popularity and reproduction of such an ahistorical geography long after European-style world maps were in common use forces us to recognize the persistent role of the Buddhist imaginary in early modern debates over geography, cosmology, and cultural identity. This paper explores the map’s genealogy to examine the...
Suicide prevention has become a major public health policy issue in Japan over the past decade due to extremely elevated suicide rates since 1998. Discourse in Japan on suicide prevention has nevertheless focused almost exclusively on the state of the Japanese economy and levels of mental illness, neglecting the subjective experience of suicidal individuals and the roles that meaning and positive mental health play in suicide and its prevention. Increasing evidence suggests that a lack of positive mental health may be more important than the presence of mental illness in predicting future...
This lecture will scrutinize the transnationality of Japanese cinema after World War II. Challenging the rigidities that shape the discourses of “national” cinema, I look at the ways in which Japanese studios and filmmakers actively engaged China between the 1950s and the early 1960s–an era of robust cinematic output. Focusing on the films by one studio (Toho), I examine two types of representational efforts: (1) the construction of an imagined “China” by Japanese actors and in Japanese location sites, as in the Desperado Outpost (Dokuritsu gurentai) films directed by Okamoto Kihachi, and (...
The eighteenth-century book Kōetsu sanjūrokkasen (“The Kōetsu Thirty-Six Immortal Poets”) in the Freer Gallery of Art Library is believed to be the very first poetry book focusing on illustrations rather than text. But was it originally a book? Two other copies of this work (in the New York Public Library and Tenri University Library) were produced in different formats–as a scroll and as a set of loose sheets. Paintings of the Sanjūrokkasen (“The Thirty-Six Immortal Poets”) were traditionally appreciated as framed pictures or as decorations on sliding doors or folding screens. Japanese...
The Asia-Pacific War, like all wars and especially all defeats, polarized domestic society in Japan. Yet in postwar Japan, people who had been imprisoned for their political beliefs worked surprisingly well with the people who had put them there – or at least with people who had stood by and done nothing. That engagement permitted important new economic, political, cultural and social initiatives. In earlier work I argued that appeals to “scientific” (including social-scientific) reasoning and assiduous cultivation of personal networks were two key strategies for finding common ground among...
Two-day workshop organized by William W. Kelly and J. A. Mangan Members of the Yale and New Haven communities are invited to all sessions and reception. DAY 1: Room 202, Henry R. Luce Hall1:45 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. Welcoming remarks, William W. Kelly 2:00 p.m. to 2:35 p.m. | J. A. Mangan (Cairns Institute, James Cook University), Singapore, Imperialism and Post-Imperialism, Part One: Cultural Imperialism, Curricular Control and Moral Mandate: Athleticism as Ideological Intent. 2:40 p.m. to 3:15 p.m. | Peter Horton (Cairns Institute, James Cook University), Singapore, Imperialism and Post-...
Professor J.A. Mangan is a world-renown scholar of sport history whose work has inspired a generation of historians and social scientists across the globe. His seminal book on athleticism and imperialism commanded attention and applause, opening new horizons of inquiry and providing the field with a richly perceptive study of hegemony and patronage, of cultural assimilation and adaptation, and of the ways that power elites used sport for socialization, acculturation and social control. His later works continued to pose critical, sometimes controversial, questions and offered fresh insights...
9:00-10:30am “Law and Governance in Early Modern Japan-With Special Reference to Mapping and Spatiality”. Special Lecture by Professor SUGIMOTO Fumiko, Historiographical Institute, Tokyo University. LECTURE IN JAPANESE ONLY. 10:30-10:50am Coffee Break 10:50-11:30am “Mind Maps and Land Maps”, Professor Ronald P. Toby, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne 11:30-12:10pm “Corporate Land Tenure: A GIS Assessment”, Professor Philip C. Brown, The Ohio State University 12:10-1:40pm Lunch 1:40-2:20pm “Politics and Panoramic Views” (Ichiranzu no seijigaku), Professor Henry D. Smith III,...
Come enjoy the festivities from 4:00 to 6:00 PM as the Council on East Asian Studies kicks off the fall term and welcomes our new students, postdocs, and scholars!
DAY ONE: Beyond Smithian Growth: Revisiting the Economic History of Early Modern Japan and ChinaPrior to the opening of the treaty ports in the mid-19th century, both Japan and China were dependent on peasant economies. And, yet, they were to follow very different paths of economic development after that point. In order to make sense of this difference, it is necessary for us to look beyond simple notions of Smithian growth, and examine the nature of exchanges that took place among peasant households. Paying attention not only to the division of labour among households by vocation or...
This talk covers the remarkable impact of Chinese vernacular narratives on literary practice in Korea and Japan (17th-19th centuries). Chinese vernacular had a unique role in Korea and Japan as a language that partook of the authority of the Chinese tradition, but that also described the most quotidian aspects of daily life and employed extremely vernacular expressions. For this reason, Chinese vernacular literature suggested to readers in Korea and Japan that vernacular narrative, not only Chinese, but also indigenous, could also be considered as literature and taken seriously as a means of...
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