Japan
Wings of Defeat 特攻 (tokko): Directed by Risa Moritmoto Produced by Linda Hoaglund and Risa Morimoto 2007 USA/Japan, English and Japanese with English subtitles, 90min) Internationally, Kamikaze pilots remain a potent metaphor for fanaticism. In Japan, they are largely revered for their selfless sacrifice. Yet few outside Japan know that hundreds of kamikaze pilots survived the war. By the spring of 1945, when all Japanese planes were reassigned to kamikaze (Tokkotai) attacks, Japan could no longer defend its airspace and its naval fleet was demolished. Old airplanes and inadequate training...
We know about the “lost generation” and the central role that Paris played in Anglo-American cultural production; we know much less about the role that Paris occupied in the Japanese imagination. Japanese artists travelled to Paris in the 1920s for the same reasons as others: it was the most exciting city in the world, it was a refuge from a constricting society at home, and it was the city for art. I will compare the imagery produced by painter Fujita Tsuguharu (1886-1968) and that of poet and painter Kaneko Mitsuharu (1895-1975), whose Paris years overlap.Fujita was one of the most widely...
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence Directed by Nagisa Oshima (1983, 124min.)FORMS OF INDEPENDENCE Although it remains less well known than its European counterparts, the new Japanese cinema that emerged in the 1960s was as diverse, complex, and ambiguous as any in the world. This series highlights the work of two contemporary directors with very different backgrounds and artistic itineraries who worked ardently to make films that were as formally adventurous as they were thematically dense. For More Information...
The Visualizing Cultures project and the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University are pleased to announce a two-day academic conference focused on the relationship between visual imagery and social change in modern Asia entitled, “Visualizing Global Asia at the Turn of the 20th Century.” This will be one of the first academic conferences devoted to “image-driven scholarship” and teaching about Asia in the modern world. We have selected scholars of history, art history, history of photography, and history of technology specializing in China, Korea, Japan, United States, Europe and the...
The recent global financial crisis has prompted broad and radical rethinking of the place of human values in capitalism. In this lecture, I revisit the expanded visions of humanity presented by Malinowski and Mauss in their respective theories of the gift and consider their implications for the ongoing debate about financial markets and their regulation. Toward this end, I examine a variety of business practices, intellectual ventures and personal dreams inspired by the idea of arbitrage in the career trajectories of a group of Japanese derivatives traders in Tokyo from 1987-2010. My...
Come enjoy the festivities from 4:30 to 6:30 PM as the Council on East Asian Studies kicks off the fall term!
SINGULAR SAMURAIA series of samurai films slightly off the beaten track, featuring singing samurai, a samurai Cyrano de Bergerac, and even the samurai who inspired Star Wars, directed by such masters as Kurosawa Akira, Inagaki Hiroshi, and Kato Tai. Vendetta at Sozenji Temple (Adauchi Sozenji baba)Directed by Makino Masahiro, 1957 (16mm, 92 min.) Synopsis: Revenge meets resentment against authority meets love. A thrilling samurai story from the master of genre cinema, Makino Masahiro. Starring Otomo Ryutaro (Tampopo). Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation. For More Information...
Medicalization of suicide in Japan progressed rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The inclusion of suicide into the repertoire of psychiatrists was almost simultaneous with the establishment of Western-style psychiatry in Japanese academia. Although the narrative of medicalization of suicide as a quest of modernity certainly applied to the Japanese case, Japanese attempts to medicalize suicide had an almost diametrically opposite dimension. On the one hand, they characterized suicide as an act prompted by certain pathology of the body and/or the mind. At the same...
Throughout the history of Japanese culture the conspicuous tendency is felt to emphasize the “here and now.” Thus said Kato Shuichi in his last book. His sweeping analysis is conceived of in contradistinction to and against the backdrop of the Western emphasis on the “beyond [au-delà] and eternal.” As a sweeping generalization, it is not without problems but still seems to deserve critical reconsideration, which is to be done from specific and different points of view and approaches. With this in mind, the present symposium tries to shed light on this problematic of “here and now” in an...
Brave Records of the Sanada Clan (Sanada fuunroku)Directed by Kato Tai, 1963 (35mm, 100 min., color)Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation.Synopsis: The legend of the ten Sanada warriors who fought against the Tokugawas is turned into a musical by the masterful Kato Tai, but it is all really about the alienation of 1960s youth. Starring Nakamura Kinnosuke. SINGULAR SAMURAIA series of samurai films slightly off the beaten track, featuring singing samurai, a samurai Cyrano de Bergerac, and even the samurai who inspired Star Wars, directed by such masters as Kurosawa Akira, Inagaki Hiroshi, and...
Hidden Fortress (Kakushi-toride no san-akunin)Directed by Kurosawa Akira, 1958 (35mm, 139 min., black & white). Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation. Synopsis: A general helps a princess regain her lost fiefdom with the help of two bumbling sidekicks. Sound familiar? George Lukas got the outline for Star Wars from this entertainment spectacular by Kurosawa Akira that stars Mifune Toshiro (Seven Samurai).SINGULAR SAMURAIA series of samurai films slightly off the beaten track, featuring singing samurai, a samurai Cyrano de Bergerac, and even the samurai who inspired Star Wars, directed by...
In the April 6, 1903 edition of the Tokyo Asahi shinbun, bestselling translator Hara H*itsuan published “Shiiza sansatsu jiken,” his rendition of a sketch by Mark Twain titled “The Killing of Julius Caesar ‘Localized’.” This minor translation of a minor text by a world-famous American author quickly sparked a knock-down, drag-out fight between Hara and another translator, Yamagata Iso’o. Increasingly incensed by Hara’s failure to grasp Twain’s subtle sense of humor, Yamagata delivered the final, devastating blow in the fight: an annotated retranslation of the same text, published in book form...
International tea practitioners, scholars, curators, and art dealers discuss the international content and aesthetics of Japanese tea culture, (some papers are prepared in Japanese.) For speakers, papers, and detailed information onthe symposium, please visit: For More Information http://artgallery.yale.edu
Japan’s internationally famous contemporary artist, Murakami Takashi, coined the term “Superflat” to refer to an indigenous lineage of art that emphasized surface over depth, motion over stasis, playful aesthetic effects, and a proliferation of perspectives over so-called one-point perspective. “Superflat,” in Murakami’s formulation, also refers to the lack of distinction between high art and mass culture, culture and subculture, and art and craft in Japanese society. Murakami curated three important exhibitions using this rubric of the “Superflat,” including one in 2005 at New York’s Japan...
Reception will follow after the lecture. For More Information Poster
Things, or physical objects, have been a subject matter of representation in many conventions. “Depicting things” (yongwu or eibutsu) became an important literary genre in traditional China and Japan, and has generated strong interest in modern scholarship. In contrast, things were seldom a self-content category in pictorial art, even though they frequently appeared and played a significant role in paintings about figures, landscape, and still life. Moreover, things as implements were delineated in illustrated manuals for ritual, medical or other pragmatic purposes, but they have not yet...
The Right to Philosophy: Traces of the International College of Philosophy Directed by Yuji Nishiyama - The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy (UTCP) EVENT SCHEDULE: 5:00-6:40 PM Film Screening 6:40-7:00 PM Break 7:00-8:00 PM Discussion moderated by Haun Saussy (Yale University), Yasunari Takada (University of Tokyo) and Yuji Nishiyama (The University of Tokyo & film director) This is the first documentary film on the International College of Philosophy (Collège international de Philosophie: CIPH), founded by, among others, Jacques Derrida and François Châtelet in 1983 in Paris....
“Forgetting, and I would even add, historical error are an essential factor in the creation of a nation, and for this reason the advance of historical studies often presents a danger for nationality…. Take a city like Salonica or Smyrna, where you will find five or six communities, each with its own memories, but as a group holding almost nothing in common. But it is essential to a nation that all individuals have a great many things in common, and also that all of them must have forgotten a number of things.”—Ernest Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” (What is a Nation?), 1882.春秋無義戰。彼善於此，則有之矣...
Harakiri (Seppuku)Directed by Maski Kobayashi, 1962 (133 min.)Japanese Film Series: The Postwar Period Epic The most enduring and codified of all Japanese film genres, the period film is also the most sophisticated and expansive, reaching its artistic and commercial peak at a time when the major studios were rapidly adopting various offshoots of Cinemascope. From the highly formal architectonics of Masaki Kobayashi’s revisionist samurai dramas to the lush landscapes of Kurosawa’s famous Soviet coproduction, these four films reveal the full creative possibilities of the new formats and...
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