Japan
This lecture attempts to reconcile the relationship between two images found in the art of Asia but separated by significant time periods and geographical locations. One, which was developed in China but has been preserved primarily in Japan, features an exhausted and emaciated Buddha Shakyamuni as he descends to civilization after years of physical and spiritual discipline in a remote mountainous location. The other, which predates the East Asian images by nearly one-thousand years, and also features the psycho-physical effects of such austerities, is found in Pakistani sculptures, some life...
Land reform will not just reduce rural poverty, write development officials. It can raise productivity. It can promote civic engagement. Scholars routinely concur. Land reform may not always raise productivity and civic engagement, but it can – and during 1947-50 in occupied Japan it did. This lecture will attempt to demonstrate how this account of the Japanese land reform program is a fable, a story officials and scholars tell because they wish it were true. It is not. The program did not hasten productivity growth. Instead, it probably retarded it. The areas with the most land transferred...
A new brand of lyricism, very much colored by satire, defines the paintings of Hanabusa Itchô (1652-1724). This explicates Itchô’s relatively unknown painting album, now entitled Fûzoku gajô (or, “album of genre subjects”), delineating how its thirty-six leaves combine strands of poetry, song, and painting to culminate in a complex opus. Trained under one of the top Kanô painters during a moment when the school was actively reworking their synthesis of continental and native styles, Itchô’s mode broke new ground. His own amalgamation of Chinese/ Japanese and ancient / modern exemplified the...
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project with the University of Tokyo’s Historiographical Institute to study the remarkable collection of pre-modern historical documents assembled at Yale by Professor Asakawa Kan’ichi in the first half of the 20th century, we are pleased to announce a special symposium to be held at the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 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM on Friday, October 7, 2011. In addition to four brief presentations by scholars working on different aspects of Edo period history and culture, members of a team of researchers from the...
Interested in becoming an East Asian Studies Major or an East Asian Languages & Literatures Major? COME TO AN INFORMAL GATHERING WITH Koichi Shinohara, DUS East Asian Studies Edward Kamens, DUS East Asian Languages & Literatures LEARN MORE ABOUT East Asia Course Offerings, Programs and Study Abroad Opportunities and MORE!
Did guns first arrive in Japan in 1543? Were they brought by the Portuguese; were they of western manufacture? What were they primarily used for? These and other questions will be addressed in this talk. In addition, Professor Walthall will discuss the evidence for the use of guns at the famous battle of Nagashino, the development of shooting as a martial art, and the connection between shoguns and guns. Professor Walthall will argue that by 1600, guns had become naturalized as a weapon of war, as a hunting implement, and as a martial art, but their meaning varied dramatically depending on...
Nikki Floyd is a postdoctoral fellow at Williams College in the Department of Asian Studies. She has long been interested in Japan-Korea relations, particularly during the colonial period. She has taught courses that examine modern Japanese and Korean literature in comparative perspective, and her dissertation, entitled “Bridging the Colonial Divide: Japanese-Korean Solidarity in the International Proletarian Literature Movement,” explores the solidarity relationship between left-wing writer-activists in the 1920s and 1930s. Floyd’s remarks will focus on the costs and benefits of...
Special Documentary Screening and Panel311Directed by Mori Tatsuya, Watai Takeharu, Matsubayashi Yojū, and Yasuoka Takaharu (2011, Japan, HD, 94min.)311 is one of the first documentaries completed about the March 2011 disaster in Japan and focuses not just on the destruction and human toll, but also, in a self-reflexive fashion, on the fundamental problems of media attempting to report on such suffering. This will be a North American premiere screening.The award-winning Japanese documentary filmmaker and journalist, Mori Tatsuya, was scheduled to present 311 in person at Yale but has had to...
Come enjoy a special screening and panel discussion of ANPO: Art X War with Director Linda Hoaglund! In 1951, Japan signed the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty (ANPO in Japanese), giving the United States the right to maintain armed forces on their soil. A growing resistance to the U.S. military presence culminated in protests against the renewal of the treaty in 1960, in which millions of citizens took to the streets. ANPO: Art X War depicts resistance to U.S. military bases in Japan through a collage of paintings, photographs and films by Japan’s foremost contemporary artists. Director...
Qu You’s (1347-1433) “Peony Lantern,” one of the most popular Chinese ghost stories in early modern East Asia, begins with an encounter of a ghost woman and a young scholar in Ningbo in 1360. Dr. Jōo’s paper aims to contextualize this renowned tale within the micro-regional history of Yin County, Ningbo, and examine the literary and socio-political discourse of uncanny women in the area. Through investigating the historical setting of the Huxin Temple in Ningbo and the legendary Buddhist sisters who patronized the monastery, Dr. Jōo discusses how “The Peony Lantern” gained a strong...
The Modern Japan History Workshop will be held at Yale University on Saturday, November 12, 2011 from 10:00 AM to 5:30 PM, with a dinner afterwards for anyone who would like to attend. Information regarding the three panels can be found below. PANELS Amino Yoshihiko, “Village Japan” and 3.11 In an effort to encourage discussion across the usual boundaries of temporal specialization, the first panel will focus on Amino Yoshihiko’s efforts to re-conceptualize the history of the archipelago, from ancient times to the present. Alan Christy (University of California-Santa Cruz), whose...
The historiography of Japanese native ethnography (民俗学), in both Japanese and English, attributes the central role in the discipline’s formation to Yanagita Kunio (with an honorable mention to Orikuchi Shinobu). Professor Christy’s talk considers the work of a less well-known, yet arguably as influential, group of ethnographic researchers who called themselves the Attic Museum. Headed by Shibusawa Keizô, the grandson of Shibusawa Eiichi, the Attic Museum was best known for pioneering the ethnological study of Japanese material culture, which they dubbed “mingu” (民具). In a discipline devoted...
The sharebon, or “fashion-book,” emerged in the early eighteenth century as a hybrid form combining brothel guides with elements of Chinese courtesan fiction. Such works quickly coalesced as a genre with its own unique conventions. Almost from the start, the fashion-book constituted a sort of proto-anthropological study of strange peoples, manners, and customs. Authors later developed a concern with dialogue, wit, and ostensibly realistic speech, as well, creating intensely polyphonic works populated with a variety of characters. But this concern with realistic detail was for the most...
Dandy Sashichi Detective Story – Six Famous Beauties人形佐七捕物帖 妖艶六死美人[英語字幕付] 1956 Nakagawa NobuoWatching Dandy Sashichi Detective Story: Six Famous Beauties, one can hardly believe that director Nakagawa Nobuo began his career predominantly as a director of slapstick comedies for Tōhō Studios before WWII. The film was directed during a now famous stint at the short-lived Shintōhō studio, in which Nakagawa created a run of graphic horror movies culminating in what is largely believed to be his masterpiece, Jigoku. While Six Famous Beauties is not nearly as grotesque or disturbing as some of...
At the same time in 1940 that Japanese representatives of the Government Railways of Korea, an integral part of the Government General of Korea, were endeavoring to promote tourism, officials in the same colonial bureaucracy were strengthening assimilation policies designed to Japanize Koreans. But why would a Japanese tourist from the mother country want to visit Korea if it had been rendered into no more than a replica of Japan? Tourism and assimilation are concepts that do not necessarily go together. This lecture examines how individuals endeavoring to promote tourism represented an...
黒田騒動[英語字幕付] 1955 Uchida TomuThe Kuroda AffairThe Kuroda Affair tells the story of one of the greatest family uprisings in Japanese history at the beginning of the Edo Period, with a thrilling portrayal of love & lust, rebellion, and betrayal. Director Uchida Tomu is an underrated master of jidaigeki whose 1956 film is a must-see.不知火検校 [英語字幕付] 1960 Mori KazuoThe Blind MenaceKnown as the film that inspired the famous “Zatoichi” series, The Blind Menace is the breakthrough film for the leading actor Katsu Shintaro, who would soon become one of the biggest jidaigeki stars in the postwar era....
This lecture aims to analyze and explain the background of the current Japanese debate on internationalization, focusing particularly on the globalization of Japanese universities. It will propound upon the post-3.11 search by the Japanese people for an identity as a nation in today’s complex world. The “Kokusaika”, or “internationalization” of Japan’s higher education is currently a frequent topic of conversation at Japanese universities. In fact, there seems to be a sense of urgency particularly among the Japanese business, government, public intellectuals and the press that these...
國士無双[デジタル修復版][英語字幕付] 1932 Itami MansakuThe Peerless PatriotAlong with his 1936 film Akanishi Kakita, The Peerless Patriot is known as one of director Itami Mansaku’s representative works and a masterpiece of “nonsense jidaigeki.” Fragments from the original feature-length film have been edited together to create this digest version, following a country bumpkin as he impersonates the ruler. With its sharp sense of satire, the film parodies the conventions of the period film genre and ushers in a new approach to the period film in Japan.エノケンのちゃっきり金太[英語字幕付][総集篇] 1937 Yamamoto KajiroEnoken’s...
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