Japan

Recent studies on the historical social mobility of immigrants in the United States during the ‘Age of Mass Migration’ (mid-19th to early-20th century) have found very weak persistence of first-generation immigrants’ pre-migration family characteristics among their second-generation children’s socio-economic attainment. However, such extant studies have focused on European origin groups (e.g., Italians and Irish) and have neglected non-European population that migrated at the same historical period but were incorporated in different social, legal and cultural contexts. Using historical,...

Despite prewar modernization and imperialism and postwar economic growth, Japanese diplomacy has long suffered from a sense of victimization. The sentiment derives from “Unequal Treaties” thrust upon Japan in the mid-nineteenth century. Japanese citizens relived the experience with the US-Japan Security Treaty after World War II, as incidents arose between Japanese citizens and American soldiers in Japan. This talk examines little known tactics used by Japanese officials to restore some sovereignty under both the “Unequal Treaties” and the US-Japan Security Alliance. How might we adjust the...

Professor Toshiyuki Kawano from Yokohama National University will give a lecture on the importance of developing Japanese pitch accents of learners and a hands-on workshop about teaching Japanese pitch accents. This workshop will allow us to consider the necessary skills to teach pronunciation and guide us to train ourselves.  We will learn the basic knowledge of Japanese pitch accents and techniques that we can utilize in our class.  Professor Kawano will also demonstrate how to guide students to realize and produce the pitch accents depending on the words’ part of speech and origin. Prior...

Today, Americans are some of the world’s biggest consumers of black teas; in Japan, green tea, especially sencha, is preferred. These national partialities, Robert Hellyer reveals, are deeply entwined. Tracing the trans-Pacific tea trade from the eighteenth century onward, Green with Milk and Sugar shows how interconnections between Japan and the United States have influenced the daily habits of people in both countries. Hellyer explores the forgotten American penchant for Japanese green tea and how it shaped Japanese tastes. In the nineteenth century, Americans favored green teas, which...

The presentation is regarding BTS, Britney Spears, and the #MeToo movement in Japan.  Since BTS and Britney Spears are two notable things I encountered in Los Angeles, I would like to discuss these subjects from a journalistic point of view; how we are influenced by society’s underlying gender bias. The three topics may seem unrelated. However, through the perspective of “Toxic Masculinity” which is associated with “suppressing emotions or “maintaining an appearance of hardness” and using “violence as an indicator of power”, these topics are strongly related. We tend to be entrapped with the...

As a hyper-aging society, Japan has one of the highest global life expectancies and is undergoing a demographic transition that Western nations have yet to experience. The Japanese government is encouraging robotic solutions to a labor shortage in elder care, and Japanese authorities have adopted an agenda of introducing social robots to assist with elder care. However, Japanese society increasingly experiences the phenomenon of people becoming emotionally attached to anthropomorphic machines such as social robots. The introduction of social robots into the realm of elder care may be...

Lab-experiment and survey based studies find that intergroup threat and group identity have significant implications on the formation of political attitudes, that those factors encourage individuals to approach information with directional motivation. On the other hand, unrealistic assumptions prevent those findings to be directly generalized to the real-world context. In this study, we use novel twitter network data during rising territorial disputes in Japan to capture real-world information communication process under intergroup threat. In our data, twitter users communicate information...

Most letters in Tokugawa Japan were written in sōrōbun, the epistolary style of classical Japanese. Yet there were also letters composed in kanbun, or Literary Sinitic prose. This talk will focus on a set of three letters, written in Literary Sinitic prose in Genroku 11 (1698) by Muro Kyūsō (1658–1734), then a Confucian scholar in the service of the Kaga domain lord Maeda Tsunanori (1643–1724), and addressed to Aochi Norimoto (1675–1744), a samurai retainer of the same domain. These letters contain bits of information that may not have surfaced otherwise: Kyūsō and Norimoto’s secret...

The radical framework of the Black Pacific offers a unique way to make sense of the multiple afterlives brought together in the heavily militarized island of Okinawa, Japan.  This talk will focus on key lessons learned while researching and writing about the entanglements of Black and Asian intimacies, colonialities, and forms of anti-Blackness in Okinawa.  Carter will also discuss how the Black Pacific, as a conceptual lens, gives scholars of Okinawa a way to raise better questions about the legacy of White supremacy in the Pacific and better analysis of the persistence and vitality of Black...