Japan
The Ōuchi, a warrior family claiming to be descended from Korean kings, came to dominate Japan during the Muromachi age. Administratively skilled, they created a trading network with the continent, and protected their interests with formidable force. Cultural patronage and elaborate rituals, focusing on star worship, served to legitimate their authority, but an attempt to move the capital precipitated their collapse.Thomas D. Conlan, Professor of Japanese History at Bowdoin College, graduated from the University of Michigan (BA) and Stanford University (MA, PhD). He has taught at Bowdoin...
As part of a multi-year collaborative project with the University of Tokyo’s Historiographical Institute to study the remarkable collection of pre-modern historical documents assembled at Yale by Professor Asakawa Kan’ichi in the first half of the 20th century, we are pleased to announce a special symposium to be held at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library from 10-12pm on Friday, October 5, 2012. In addition to two brief presentations by scholars working on different aspects of Japanese special collections at Yale, members of a team of researchers from the Historiographical...
3:00 PM - Talks on the return of the “Harimaze” folding screens5:00 PM - Reception on the Beinecke MezzanineAll are welcome to a talk and reception to 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...
Natsume Sōseki, Japan’s most canonical modern novelist, wrote a loose trilogy of works between 1908 and 1910: Sanshirō, And Then, and The Gate. The author organizes each narrative around the borrowing and lending of money, the exchange of gifts, and, more generally, around the motifs of reciprocity and circulation. After mapping the exchange of objects and money in the three novels, I develop a framework for analyzing this aspect of Sōseki’s fiction by extending anthropological theories of the gift into the literary-critical domain of narratology. This approach shows that Sōseki’s fictional...
The Makioka Sisters (Sasame-yuki/Fine Snow)Directed by Kon Ichikawa, 1983 (140min.)This lyrical adaptation of the beloved novel by Junichiro Tanizaki was a late-career triumph for director Kon Ichikawa. Structured around the changing of the seasons, The Makioka Sisters (Sasame-yuki) follows the lives of four siblings who have taken on their family’s kimono manufacturing business, in the years leading up to the Pacific War. The two oldest have been married for some time, but according to tradition, the rebellious youngest sister cannot wed until the third, conservative and terribly shy, finds...
Academic writing reveals, in many cases, an understanding of Japanese cinema based on a selective transnational canon of films. Consequently, the majority of academic writings on Japanese films are about films that have received at least limited transnational distribution. Often times, these writings are about those films that have most emphatically crossed between countries. For example, we have much more academic work on Japan’s famous “Golden Age” directors like Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, and more work on critically lauded newer directors like Hayao Miyazaki and Takeshi Kitano, than...
This lecture examines the work of Imamura Taihei (1911-1986) in an attempt to illuminate the complex nature of mass culture in wartime Japan. One of the most acclaimed critics in the history of Japanese cinema, Imamura and his writings are marked by his dual interests in animation and documentary, the two marginalized genres that garnered greater popularity in the period following Japan’s full-fledged participation in the war against China. In contrast to the commonplace assumption that treats these genres as the opposite poles of film practice at large, Imamura shrewdly redefined them as...
Three Outlaw Samurai (Sanbiki no Samurai)Directed by: Hideo Gosha, 1964 (93 min.)This first feature by the legendary Hideo Gosha is among the most beloved chanbara (sword-fighting) films. An origin-story offshoot of a Japanese television phenomenon of the same name, Three Outlaw Samurai is a classic in its own right. A wandering, seen-it-all ronin (Tetsuro Tamba) becomes entangled in the dangerous business of two other samurai (Isamu Nagato and Mikijiro Hira), hired to execute a band of peasants who have kidnapped the daughter of a corrupt magistrate. With remarkable storytelling economy and...
The panelists will first analyze the geographic disputes that have dominated the news this past summer and fall: the Kuril Islands, Dokdo/Takeshima, Senkaku/Diaoyutai, and the South China Sea, before discussing the conflicts more generally and answering questions from the audience.
In early-modern Japan, physical contact with the corpses of four-legged animals was considered a cause of defilement, and the handling of dead animals was conducted by the hereditary outcast group. This assumption seems to have constructed a dietary map in which Japanese began the practice of meat eating in the wake of the modern period in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, meat eating itself was widely practiced under the pretext of “medicinal eating” (kusurigui). For example, in a block of the Kôjimachi neighborhood of Edo (modern-day Tokyo), people could walk into the “beast...
In 2006 and 2007 a parliamentary commission initiated by the South Korean government made public two lists totaling just over 200 Koreans deemed guilty of collaboration under Japanese rule (1910-1945). The commission was motivated by the task of putting to rest what one recent publication described as Korea’s “original sin”: the assistance that Koreans offered their Japanese occupiers at a time when their country faced its biggest challenge in historical memory. Failure to reconcile the collaboration issue, this publication continued, threatened Korea’s “utter survival.” Missing from such...
High And Low (Tengoku to Jigoku)Director: Akira Kurosawa, 1963 (143 min) Toshiro Mifune is unforgettable as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy industrialist whose family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper in High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku), the highly influential domestic drama and police procedural from director Akira Kurosawa. Adapting Ed McBain’s detective novel King’s Ransom, Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on contemporary Japanese society.
It has been over three decades since the onset of contemporary migration from China to Japan. Chinese immigrants have been the largest foreign resident community in Japan since 2007. Over one third of resident Chinese are either naturalized citizens or permanent residents. However, the Chinese in Japan generally do not consider themselves “immigrants.” A sense of non-belonging is prevalent in immigrants’ discourses and practices. The Chinese immigrant media circulates an identity label – “New Overseas Chinese”. In practice, Chinese immigrants prefer permanent residency over naturalization,...
The Six Dynasties poet Tao Yuanming is today remembered as a paradigmatic recluse, a man fond of drinking and simple agrarian pleasures, but also one who eschewed public service to maintain his personal integrity and to fulfill his loyalty to the declining Jin dynasty. Recent work by Tian Xiaofei, Wendy Swartz, and others has shed light on the ways in which this image came to be constructed, recuperating alternative visions of the canonical figure. Yet Tao Yuanming loomed large in the broader East Asian literary context as well, where he was subject to similarly multifarious readings and...
Come and see a lecture-demonstration of kyōgen, a form of comic theater from medieval Japan. Katsumi Yanagimoto, a Kyoto-based kyōgen actor, will introduce the tradition, discuss and demonstrate its conventions, and perform scenes from two farcical plays.
Panelists will discuss the new leadership in China, Japan and South Korea. What impact will these new leaders have across East Asia in 2013, and how will it affect the United State and its relationship within the region?
Bad Boys (Furyō shōnen)1960-1961, Japan (89 min., English subtitles) Directed and scripted by Susumu Hani.Cinematography by Manji Kanau.Music by Tōru Takemitsu.With Sachio Yoshida, Kōichirō Yamazaki. Considered one of the fundamental films of Japanese New Wave, Bad Boys was voted the best Japanese film of 1961 in Kinema Junpo, outvoting Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (Yōjinbō, 1961), Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition (Ningen no jōken, 1959-1961), Nagisa Ōshima’s The Catch (Shiiku, 1961) and other titles by major filmmakers. The film portrays the inner maturation of the juvenile delinquents...
Children in the Classroom (Kyōshitsu no kodomotachi, 1954, Japan, English subtitles, 30 min.) Directed and scripted by Susumu Hani. Cinematography by Shizuo Komura.Hani considers this educational film as his directorial debut. Sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Children in the Classroom was initially designed to be a tutorial film that would demonstrate how to discipline troubled children. However, employing uniquely observational methods to film real children in a real school, the film brought a decisive change in the history of documentary cinema in Japan. Hani’s sensational debut as a...
**LECTURE IN JAPANESE**In the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Eastern Japan in 2011, there has been a new upsurge of interest in historical research on past disasters from which important lessons for the future might be learned. This presentation will focus on the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, which destroyed much of the city of Tokyo, introducing some of the new research that has appeared in Japan in recent years. Specifically, the presentation will address the following four points:• What was the overall extent of the damage caused by the 1923 earthquake?• Given...
The term “digital native” was coined at the turn of the century and it has drawn much attention and stimulated discussions about who digital natives are and the concept itself. Digital natives are usually defined as those born in 1980s and later, who are also called “Y Generation,” “Net Generation,” “Millennials,” “Eco Boomers,” and so on. Kimura’s research has paid much attention to varieties or diversities “within” Japanese digital natives, rather than to differences between natives and immigrants. Using an analytical framework based on the finding that technologies, institutions,...
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