Japan
The awe-inspiring 1980s image of “Japan Inc.” has all but collapsed in the new millennium. The Japanese social machine has been crippled by self-doubt and the seeming increase of such psychosocial maladies as group suicide, alcoholism, domestic violence, mental illness, eating disorders, shut-ins, and school refusal syndrome. This two-day conference brings together leading medical anthropologists and clinical researchers from Japan, Canada, and the United States to discuss the current state of mental illness and social anomie in the world’s second largest economy. This conference is being...
The poems Akiko wrote about her journey to Europe in 1912 are moving and beautiful in themselves, particularly those which express her love for her husband and her children; but when we complicate our readings of this poetry by factoring in other texts, particularly personal essays and letters about her marriage, we arrive at a deeper and more resonant portrait of the poet who, in addition to her literary importance, was seen as the first New Woman of Meiji-Taisho Japan. Professor Beichman, currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University, is a translator and scholar of well-known...
Spring 1938. As Japan was expanding into China, imperial policies in colonial Korea were fluctuating from that of differentiation/assimilation to imperialization. A catchy official slogan Naisen ittai (One Body of Japan and Korea) promised equality for the colonized in exchange for support in the wartime empire. Not unrelated to this political climate, a metropolitan consumer trend of the “Korea Boom” highlighted exotica from the colony throughout the empire. Responding to such consuming desires, a highly anticipated Japanese-language theatrical adaptation of Ch’unhyang chŏn (The tale of Ch...
Professor Gardner will discuss the global context for the emergence of modernism in Japan in the 1920’s and 1930’s, as well as the ways in which Japanese modernist poetry deployed the distinctive qualities of the Japanese written language. Although the prewar Japanese state could be characterized as both authoritarian and imperialist, the 1920’s were a time of relative political liberalism and cosmopolitanism. This was also a period of rapid urban growth, as well as the rise of communications and transportation technologies such as radio, cinema, and aviation that seemed to shrink the size of...
Come celebrate 2009 the Year of The Ox!
Noh Theater is one of the oldest surviving performing arts of Japan, and makes use of masks, lavish costumes, and a range of stylized gestures to bring characters from traditional Japanese myth and literature to life onstage. The Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University is pleased to announce that members of the Kashu-juku Noh Troupe will be performing on campus the evening of February 5th, 2009. These professional actors will perform part of a Noh play, after which they will engage the audience in discussion about elements of the performance, costuming, music, and their philosophies...
Shugendô, a tradition of mountain asceticism in Japan dating from the 8th century C.E., has been commonly portrayed as a syncretic, folk, practice-based religion influenced by Esoteric Buddhism. It is seen to have flourished in the medieval era but to have declined in the early modern period due to institutionalization and the ritualization of practice. Yet, examination of Tokugawa texts presents us with a different picture.The talk will have two parts. The first will consist of methodological issues in the study of Shugendô, with particular reference to the position arguing for the tradition...
As local debates raged about whether Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s foreign policy had tipped too much toward the United States, and whether it needed to be more “autonomous” or even “pro-Asian,” two of his successors had already started to stake out the case for a Japanese diplomacy that would embrace and promote free markets, liberal democracy, and the rule of law. Although both Abe Shinzo’s “Values Diplomacy” and Aso Taro’s “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity” were implicitly targeted at aligning Japan with the United States, Australia, and India against a rising China, these visions...
The project is an intellectual history of Korean nationalist (民族, minjok, or minzoku) identity formation, inspired by historical memories linked to famous physical locales within the larger Japanese empire. While the capitalist development and modernity as a spatial veil sweeping across undeveloped parts of the globe in the 1910s and 20s, this project inquires how the travels of key nationalist Yi Kwangsu (1892-1950) through the Japanese empire (in travelogues like “Short Letters from Tokyo,” “Record of Travels in the Diamond Mountains,” and “From Manchuria”) as both a colonized intellectual...
In this lecture, based on the AsiaBarometer 2006 which surveyed seven Confucian countries( China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam), several aspects of Asian way of life will be examined. Focusing on the legacy of Confucian virtues in the industrialized and modernized Asian countries, the findings and implications of the comparative analysis about the perceptions of identify, national pride, satisfaction of life, their attitudes in terms of their delight, anger, sorrow and pleasure etcetera will be introduced.
A three-day symposium at Yale University (February 27th - March 1, 2009) This symposium seeks to extend the breadth of current scholarship on East Asia by focusing on literary, cinematic, and choreographic manifestations of movement. Oriented around the multivalent theme of “movement,” participants practicing a range of analytical and creative methodologies will collaboratively interrogate the limits of “East Asia” as presently configured while simultaneously exploring new avenues for engaged scholarly inquiry. By putting pressure on the multiple ways in which the cinematic, literary,...
The Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University will host the next “Waka Workshop” (fourth in the series started at the University of British Columbia and continued last year at Columbia University) on March 6th and 7th, 2009. Readings and discussions at the 2009 workshop will focus on selected texts featuring meisho of the Omi region, from the Daijoe waka of the classical period to the 16th ce. configuration of the “Omi hakkei” (Eight Views of Omi) topos and the poetic content of Omi meisho zue. All readings will involve a...
Seen in spatial terms, the Meiji Restoration was less a quick coup d’etat than a centuries-long project of rehabilitating an ancient map for modern purposes. Beginning with Hideyoshi and Ieyasu, central power-holders had recruited classical geography to the cause of administrative reform. By the nineteenth century, this classicizing strategy was embraced and carried forward not only at the center but by leading lights in the region itself. Drawing on the cartography of Shinano Province (Nagano Prefecture), this illustrated talk traces the continuing career of the classical court’s most...
Despite the storied role of particularistic spending in postwar Japanese politics, expenditures on roads, bridges, agricultural projects and the like have steadily lost ground to more programmatic outlays on social welfare, education, science and technology, and public safety (but not defense or foreign aid). Former Prime Minister Koizumi played an important role in this shift, but the trends preceded him and have continued under his much weaker successors. The shift away from particularism reflects the interaction of three loose policy coalitions: neo-liberals, social democrats, and fiscal...
The metaphor of the “birth of cinema” (eiga tanjô) enjoys great popularity in Japan, as the long list of books that carries it in their titles suggest. Most Japanese film histories follow an evolutionary model in their descriptions of Japanese cinema’s development. After its “birth” (respectively importation) and its “cradle years” as primitive side-show cinema matured and developed into the “seventh art”.In this presentation I will address the problems that this teleological model poses - with respect to the rich and diverse traditions of moving images projected on screen in Japan that...
This lecture will explore the question of where one looks for Buddhism in contemporary Japan. How do sects and temples actually operate? What is the relationship between institutional forms (training monasteries, sectarian research centres, universities, and sect administration) and the local temple manifestations of Buddhism? How do sectarian ideals (teachings, doctrine) actually play out in contemporary Japanese Buddhist organizations? In this paper I will limit my exploration of these issues to tensions over ideas of “edification” or “propagation” (kyōka 教化) between sect intellectuals and...
During the period of Mongol suzerainty of Koryô (1270-1368), Korean literati found themselves caught between a commitment to a universal order symbolized by the Yuan empire and a sense of belonging to a particular socio-political and cultural collectivity represented by the Koryô kingdom. How such literati as Yi Chehyôn and Yi Kok endeavored to reconcile these divided loyalties reflected their particular historical circumstances but also showed interesting parallels with how Korean intellectuals of the 20th century grappled with similar problems under Japanese colonialism.
Screenings in 35mm Free and open to the public In French with English subtitles For More Information Poster
The symposium will feature fruitful academic interactions between scholars at the University of Tokyo and Yale University during the first year of the Todai-Yale Initiative. For More Information http://www.yale.edu/tyi-symposium2008/
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