Japan
This talk is being presented by the Yale School of Architecture and co-sponsored by the Yale MacMillan Center Program on Refugees and the Yale MacMillan Center Council on East Asian Studies. Livestream Registration Shigeru Ban is an architect, educator, and humanitarian with a global perspective. He believes in the capacity of architecture to raise the quality of life for all people, whether through arts and civic engagement, or emergency shelters in the wake of disasters. The...
Please note that all attendees are required to wear masks for the duration of this event. Born on October 18, 1938, in Hiroshima City, Japan. On August 6th, 1945 At the age of six, Toshiko was exposed to the atomic bomb while on her way to school, 1.4 miles from the hypocentre in Ushita District, Hiroshima City. Though seriously injured in the blast with severe burns to her arms and neck, Toshiko miraculously survived. Up until one week prior her family had lived in Nakajima district, in direct proximity to the epicenter of the blast. It is thought that all her classmates from the school she...
Rakugo is a performative storytelling, born in Japan around the 1600s. It is performed by a single actor kneeling at the center of the stage. As a product of the social class of artisans and merchants, rakugo has a crucial role in engaging its audience with Tokyo’s past, and helps crafting a memory regarding the lifestyle and human interactions in preindustrial Tokyo. That said, the unfolding events after the March 11 nuclear disaster (in 2011) revealed that the narratives of rakugo stories, and the attitude of the protagonists tend to demonstrate characteristics, which reflect on Japanese...
Directed by Yoshimitsu Morita, 1981. 103m, Japan The film depicts a strange love triangle between a fledgling young performer of rakugo (Japanese traditional comic stories) in training, Shintoto, a sex worker he meets as a guest, and a high school girl who belongs to a rakugo club. The commercial feature debut of Yoshimitsu Morita (famous for Family Game), Something Like It is also considered one of the best films depicting the world of “rakugo,” Japan’s traditional form of comic storytelling. This film is being shown as a pre-event for...
Performances will be translated with live subtitles. A reception will follow in The President’s Room at The Schwarzman Center (168 Grove St.) Experience an evening of traditional Japanese comedy and storytelling rarely seen on the American continent! Both Rakugo and Rokyoku invite the audience to use their imagination in creating story worlds as the performer tours through humorous situations and moving storytelling. With hundreds of years of history and evolution, these performances are a unique opportunity to experience an evening of laughter and intrigue. Members of the public are...
Over the past several decades, Tokyo’s most infamous nightlife district experienced a striking renaissance. Driven by metro government “clean up” efforts, changing demographics, and the breathless rush to the ill-fated 2020 Olympic games, the vibrant but seedy neighborhood of Kabukicho garnered global attention. Yet all was not bright: redevelopment efforts faced friction in this independent-minded corner of the capitol. This talk reflects on Kabukicho’s post-WWII history of diversity, its fitful rebranding as a “Cool Japan” tourist mecca, and more recently, ways the neighborhood contended...
All with reading-level Japanese welcome. Preparation will involve trying out translating a page. Places limited to 10; first come first serve. Email rosa.v...
All with reading-level Japanese welcome. Preparation will involve trying out translating a page. Places limited to 10; first come first serve. Email rosa.vanhensbergen@yale.edu to sign up. This translation masterclass is an opportunity for anyone with an...
In this lecture, Marran offers an analysis of island chains in the work of famed writer-activist Michiko Ishimure. Marran shows how Ishimure’s approach to island-chains offers an ecopolitical perspective that rejects geopolitical and ethnic identities as primary modes of belonging. Foregrounded will be a new materialist analysis that uses Marran’s concept of the biotrope to analyze the intersection of biological and cultural formations. Questions to be answered include: how does Ishimure address local island-sea chains in relation to the main archipelago of Japan?; what do the two...
Directed by Suzuki Seijun 83m, Japan An early neo-noir B-movie classic by Japan’s cult master Suzuki Seijun. A notorious murderer Oba escapes from jail. Hayasaki, the Oba’s right hand, tries to get the money by manipulating the horse racing to send Oba to Hong Kong. But Oba has a plan to revenge the police officer who arrested him and to rob a bank again. This film is being screened in tandem with a talk on Suzuki by Will Carroll which will take place at 4:30pm on February 13. Supported by the Japan Foundation.
In the war of Japan’s invasion of Chosŏn Korea (1592-1598) in which Ming China was involved, the three countries were all vigorously engaged in diplomacy while fighting on and off. In fact, diplomacy occupied a far longer period than what military confrontation did in this seven-year war. However, historians in the field by and large ignore Chosŏn Korea’s diplomatic agency. In particular, when it comes to a discussion of the diplomatic attempt from mid-1593 to 1596 for truce, Chosŏn Korea is missing. The discussion is almost invariably focused on the negotiations between Japan and Ming China...
Death, in the eyes of the samurai, was often too important a moment to leave its records to the inconvenient domain of truth. For that reason, death among the samurai was frequently covered with a heavy layer of make-believe. In this lecture, we will blow the lid off the grave of the second shogun to get a glimpse of the mindset it has been hiding for almost four hundred years. Professor Reinier H. Hesselink teaches the history and culture of the Japanese islands from ancient to modern times at the University of Northern Iowa. His specialty is the cross-fertilization of Japanese sources with...
Jidaigeki (Japanese period films set prior to 1868) presented a unique challenge for envisioning postwar modernity and democracy in Japan. US Occupation censors and progressive Japanese critics alike regarded jidaigeki with suspicion, calling into question its relationship to the past as a potential threat to the (re)construction process of postwar Japan. Reflecting on the aftermath of WWII in the emerging Cold War context of Japan’s compromised sovereignty, postwar Japanese intellectual Tsurumi Shunsuke, however, defended jidaigeki as political thought based in the lived experience of “the...
This talk is being held in tandem with a screening of Suzuki Seijun’s Satan’s Town on February 12. Suzuki Seijun was fired by Nikkatsu Studios in 1968, which became a watershed moment in the collapse of Japan’s studio system. As a result of this, Suzuki has typically been understood in opposition to Nikkatsu and the studio system, in spite of the fact that he made 40 feature films there, including his earliest formative films and many of the films for which he is most famous. This presentation...
The Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to present the 23rd Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. Lecture will take place from 4:30pm to 6:00pm, followed by a reception from 6pm to 7pm at the Provost House (35 Hillhouse) across from Luce Hall It has become clear to Japanese leaders and to the Japanese public that the balance of power in Northeast Asia has shifted dramatically now that China has risen, and North Korea has become a nuclear weapons state. These developments, combined with the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine—...
How does racism structure the patterns of cooperation and contestation in international relations? In the century since Japan’s failed proposal for a League of Nations racial equality clause, overt expressions of racism have become increasingly taboo in international diplomacy. However, I argue that institutional racism has emerged as a fundamental feature of the contemporary international order. Much like domestic politics, overt racism has given way to systemic racism, in which seemingly race-neutral rules and institutions perpetuate racial disparities and hierarchies. Despite their many...
Single-party dominance in democracies is an unresolved puzzle in comparative politics, and no case is more extreme than Japan, where the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has dominated elections for more than six decades. Can the LDP’s success be attributed to voters’ support for its policies? To examine this question, we introduce a novel approach to measuring voters’ utilities from parties’ policies through a conjoint survey design and apply this measure to test the theoretical implications of spatial voting models. We find that voters’ policy preferences are positively associated with their...
Cinematic Liars of Asahi-za Television film: 2020, 66m Theatrical film: 2021, 115m Date: Saturday, November 12, 2022 Location: The Alice Cinema (Room L01), Humanities Quadrangle, 320 York Street Time: 6:30pm In a unique experiment, we will be showing both the television and theatrical parts of Tanada Yuki’s multimedia tale of a young woman who, after a tough adolescence, decides to help revive a 100-year-old movie theater in a small town in Fukushima as a way of paying back the teacher who helped her. A lovingly cinephilic tribute to film culture in Japan, the two parts are connected by the...
One Million Yen Girl (2008) 121m Date: Friday, November 11, 2022 Time: 7:30pm Location: Alice Cinema (L01), Humanities Quadrangle, 320 York Street Tanada Yuki’s endearing road movie is about a young woman with a criminal record, played by Aoi Yu, who tries to find independence by never settling down, moving every time she saves up one million yen (about $7000 today). Tanada earned the Director’s Guild of Japan New Director Award for her work with this film. This event is part of the special event with Tanada Yuki
Tanada Yuki is one of the most productive and successful women filmmakers in Japan, a country where even today few women build careers as filmmakers. With a dozen theatrical films since her debut in 2001, she has also directed for television and her work is visible worldwide on Netflix and other platforms. While working in multiple genres from comedy to documentary, she has shown a consistent interest in stories of women struggling through economic inequities. Tanada will be visiting Yale to show two of her works and join students and members of the Yale community in smaller discussion...
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