Japan
The first part of the lecture investigates the impact of accounting fraud by Kanebo and the resulting penalties on Kanebo and its auditor, ChuoAoyama, on the stock prices of clients of ChuoAoyama and the other Big 4 auditors in Japan. Studying the case of a low-litigation country provides us an opportunity to test whether reputation loss of auditors matters without an insurance rationale. We find that the announcements of poor audit quality significantly decreased the stock prices of clients of both ChuoAoyama and the other Big 4 auditors. Such industry-wide spillover has not been examined...
Come celebrate the start of the fall term and meet colleagues and friends interested in East Asian Studies!
Professor Tsuda will speak on the history of Japanese migration to Brazil and return migration of Japanese Brazilians to Japan during the Late 1980s
This event is free and open to the public.*All teachers who would like to receive up to 0.4 CEUs can bring cash (exact change) or a check made out to “Yale University” in the amount of $5.00.Did you know that Brazil is home to the largest Japanese population outside of Japan? While the first Japanese immigrated to Brazil over a century ago, since the late 1980s, there has been an interesting trend in return migration to Japan. Dekassegui is a term used in Latin American cultures to refer to ethnic Japanese people who have migrated to Japan, having taken advantage of Japanese citizenship and...
The Society for Creative Aesthetic Education, Sōbi for short, had an idealistic, even fanciful conviction that natural growth would tend towards the good. They advocated a thoroughly child-centered education, where the teacher’s role was to remove all possible interferences (including themselves) from the path of the child’s development. The form of this emergent, uninhibited balance promised to correct modernity’s tragic overreliance on rationality, and Sōbi proposed their pedagogy as a model for all education in the newly democratic Japan. Though the early postwar in Japan is often...
The Council is pleased to present the Eleventh Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. In one widely held perspective, “wartime modernity” is an oxymoron. In one widely held perspective, “wartime modernity” is an oxymoron. Japan’s road of the 1930s into World War II veered sharply from the liberalizing trends of the 1920s, an era both cosmopolitan and internationalist, and thus modern, into a “dark valley” of militarism and anti-Western, anti-modern thought and behavior. This change included a “break in the Japanese evolution toward Western dress” through the militaristic top down...
Samurai Rebellion (Jôi-uchi: Hairyô Tsuma Shimatsu)Directed by Maski Kobayashi, 1967 (127min.)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...
Art and Critique in 1960s Japan: Political Aesthetics, Urban Daily Life, and the Yomiuri Indépendant
KwaidanDirected by Maski Kobayashi, 1964 (183min)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 exemplify a...
Dersu UzalaDirected by Akira Kurosawa, 1975 (144 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 exemplify a...
Together with Haruki Murakami, who enjoys an enormous popularity both in Japan and internationally, there is in Japan today another best-selling author: Dostoevsky. A new translation of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov – an unlikely best-seller candidate – sold more than a million copies. Although Murakami is usually considered a “very American” Japanese writer, he is quick to declare his love of Russian literature and to cite The Brothers Karamazov as among the greatest novels in world literature and one which has influenced him. With this in mind, I shall discuss some salient...
Woman In The Dunes (Suna no onna)Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara (1964, 123min)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...
In Okinawa, as perhaps anywhere else, the past exists uneasily alongside the present. It can pass unnoticed, occasionally rising for a moment of recognition, slipping away again under the weight of the routine tasks of daily life. Like the unexploded bombs that still lie close to the surface of the Okinawan landscape, it can erupt into the present with painful and unexpected and consequences, casting its shadow over a future not yet experienced. For many years, I have worked with performers who did not simply shoulder the burden of their traumatic history: they engaged it, contested it and...
Having stumbled into a project that has me doing a video ethnography of a colleague doing field-note ethnography – a project in ethnography squared – I keep tripping over issues of awareness. Do life course convoys act differently when they include an ethnographer? How should we reconcile the cold-eyed recordings of the camcorder with the warm-eyed memories of participants? And how do we preserve ethnography’s human scale while we widen its reach with digital technology – and avoid drowning in information overload? With words and film clips I raise these issues for discussion.
Tokyo Twilight (Tokyo boshoku) (1957, 140 minutes) Ozu Yasujiro RetrospectiveUniversally considered to be one of the great masters of Japanese (or any) cinema, Ozu Yasujiro had a remarkable career that crossed five decades. This weekly retrospective, co-sponsored by the Council on East Asian Studies and the Cinema at the Whitney, will provide a rare opportunity to see films from all periods of Ozu’s career, drawing attention to his playful humor as well as his formal genius and profound understanding of shifting family relations. All films will be screened in new 35mm prints. For More ...
Slow Motion is a technique in film-making by which the action appears slower than it actually is. It’s primary purpose is demarcation; it helps highlight a particular scene by revealing its details and showing it as ‘different’. But, interestingly, slow motion also seems to be colored by some sentiment, akin to what we may call pathos or sorrow. Why is slow motion sad? To address this issue, we look into the mechanism of the slow in poems and paintings, and consider how our reception of images is related to the sense of speed. 1) Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’ - The apparition of...
A current discussion topic of immense interest and importance is the extent to which the current banking crisis, keyed, in part, by problems in the U.S. subprime mortgage market that then spread throughout financial markets more generally, could lead to a persistent stagnation in the U.S. economy that resembles the prolonged malaise in Japan beginning in the early 1990s. After providing a brief overview of the Japanese banking crisis and some explanations for its persistence, I will discuss why I do not believe that the U.S. economy is likely to follow a similar path. Among the themes...
In 1953, flush from the stunning international success of Rashomon (1951, Kurosawa Akira), Daiei Film Studio president Nagata Masaichi set out on a tour of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaya, the Philippines and Thailand as member nations in order to establish the Federation of Motion Picture Producers of Southeast Asia (FMPPSA). Leveraging the considerable influence that his films were gaining on the international festival circuit, Nagata appealed for the necessity of creating a Pan-Asian market as both a showcase and marketplace for films produced in the region. He also saw this Pan-Asian...
Ohayo (1959, 94 minutes)Ozu Yasujiro RetrospectiveUniversally considered to be one of the great masters of Japanese (or any) cinema, Ozu Yasujiro had a remarkable career that crossed five decades. This weekly retrospective, co-sponsored by the Council on East Asian Studies and the Cinema at the Whitney, will provide a rare opportunity to see films from all periods of Ozu’s career, drawing attention to his playful humor as well as his formal genius and profound understanding of shifting family relations. All films will be screened in new 35mm prints. For More Information...
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