Japan
Directed by Mitsuo Sato & Kyoichi Yamaoka 110 minutes Produced at the height of Japan’s economic boom of the 1980’s, Yama documents the struggles of unionised day-labourers in the San’ya district of Tokyo, on the frontlines of a violent class war. It is a film for the workers, intended to function as a weapon in their struggle – one that cost director Sato his life. On 22 December 22 1985, during filming, he was murdered by Yakuza gangsters whom Sato intended to expose for their criminal involvement in the restructuring of the job market. A collective of directors headed by Kyoichi...
Kigeki: Nippon no Obaachan. 喜劇：にっぽんのお婆ちゃん (1962) Director Tadashi Imai Cast Chôko Iida, Tanie Kitabayashi, Chôchô Miyako Screenplay Yôko Mizuki Cinematography Shunichirô Nakao 95 minutes Two obaachans become fast friends listening to music in front of a record store. They both boast about their loving sons but in reality, one had just escaped a retirement home and the other was looking for an escape from her son and daughter-in-law. With nowhere to go, the two wander around, befriending a cosmetics salesman and a kind waitress who give them beer. This biting social satire starring two...
Director Satsuo Yamamoto Cast Sumiko Hidaka, Sen Hara, Seiji Miyaguchi Screenplay Saburô Tateno Cinematography Minoru Maeda 140 minutes A large-scale on-set agitprop drama based on a classic novel about a real-life labor struggle at a printing factory in 1926. The title refers to tenement houses that received no sunlight, by a sewage river in Shitamachi. An independently-produced epic, featuring 50,000 people on screen, follows two romances amidst the passionate struggle against oppressive forces.
In this talk, Christine Marran, Professor of Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota and co-convener for the UMN’s Environmental Humanities Initiative, will discuss how environmental phenomena associated with climate change inherently test the capacities of particular modes of writing and literary analysis. Starting with author Amitav Ghosh’s claim that the imaginary of the modern realist novel is incompatible with the representation of climate, Marran will discuss forms of Japanese writing to suggest how literary studies can address environmental...
Lunch will be served. Japan’s sixteenth century is often characterized as a time of upheaval, as traditional power structures eroded, martial violence reached new heights, and economic growth fostered intense competition over coveted resources. Although scholarship typically focuses on the destabilizing forces of Japan’s late medieval period, this talk explores collaborative processes that helped to sustain the existing order. Specifically, I will discuss documentary forgery production by Kyoto-based courtiers on behalf of provincial metal caster artisan associations, the goal of which was to...
Lunch will be served. Japan’s 1882 Criminal Code stopped recognizing concubines as family members, but the household registration (koseki) continued to record children born to concubines under fathers’ registries until 1942. During this time, Japanese family law divided offspring into three groups: (1) legitimate children (chakushi) born to married couples, (2) children by concubines (shoshi) listed on fathers’ registries, and (3) illegitimate children (shiseishi) without paternal recognition listed on maternal family registries. This trifold categorization, as opposed to a legitimate-...
Lunch will be served. Legislators are typically members of political parties, but few democracies require legislators to remain with a single party. Legislators are free to switch from one political party to another between elections, but the consequences of party switching remain unknown. Do voters reward party defection if it benefits themselves and their district? Or do they punish these defectors at the ballot box? This research looks at both the electoral and party-based outcomes of party defection. Using Japan as a primary case study, it explores whether party switchers benefit or...
Lunch will be served. In recent years and particularly since the global financial crisis, zombie firms—unprofitable businesses supported by financial relief—have generated widespread concern due to their purported harm to economic vitality. Studies contend that these firms congest the normal flow of capital and human resources to healthy businesses, thereby defying creative destruction and hurting investment and employment growth. Addressing zombie firms from a political economy perspective, I examine a novel hypothesis about the role of credit guarantees in sustaining these weak firms....
The formal patriarchal order of samurai life in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868) discursively erased women of samurai status from much public documentation and encouraged a misogynistic culture. Yet families still needed to keep some records by and about their women. This talk will discuss samurai women’s lives based on the family records of one samurai household and reveals a surprising degree of generalized respect for women’s authority in the family. Luke Roberts is professor of history at UC Santa Barbara, where he focuses in early modern political economy and social history. He is author of...
Japan currently faces some serious challenges of both a short and long term nature. The coronavirus breakout in Wuhan has been a major concern of the whole nation because of its close proximity to and economic relations with China. Japan also has had some serious natural disasters in the recent past and more is in stock: a huge tsunami, for instance, has up to 26% chance of hitting the southern coast of Japan in the next 30 years. The pace of Japan’s population decline seems to have accelerated in the past few years, which is already affecting Japan’s economy and security among others. Japan’...
Sculptors during the Kamakura period at times looked to unconventional sources for their images in other projects. One of the most noteworthy instances of this practice occurred in 1256 when the sculptor Kaijō carved statues of Aizen Myōō and Jizō from wood from the pillars of the Great Buddha Hall at Tōdaiji that had burned in 1180. When preparing to carve the statues Kaijō and his patron, the monk Jakuchō, consecrated the wood, and then Kaijō and his assistants maintained the Eight Pure Precepts while sculpting the images. Through the use of repurposed wood from structures with potent...
Japan has fared very well in averting a major COVID-19 crisis. Death tolls have been minimal compared to many European countries and the United States. This led Japanese policy makers to congratulate themselves on the success of the Japanese model although no one could explain what it was. Today, however, Japan faces the fourth—likely to be the most deadly—wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. This presentation focuses on the most vulnerable population—the frail elderly in long-term care facilities—to explain Japan’s initial success and its subsequent failure. Japan got very lucky in that the...
How does Japanese general public react to the recent drastic changes in its national security environments? Our team has been working on variety of online survey experiments in Japan on its nuclear “possession” taboo, a possible military escalation over the territorial dispute with China — the rising superpower, and “invisible” crises in a distant, isolated open sea/air like one happened between South Korean naval vessel and Japanese Maritime SDF’s P-1 patrol aircraft in December 2018. Our data provides valuable information on how the general public in the East Asian democracy would evaluate...
In early-nineteenth-century Japan, before the advent of mechanical recordings of sound and images, music and famous lines from the stage circulated widely in woodblock print. These printed invocations of performance—including everything from kabuki plays to popular songs and street shows—played an instrumental role in organizing the visual and auditory properties of early modern prose fiction, especially popular genres of illustrated fiction. In this talk, I examine soundscapes relating to the kabuki and other theater genres that were called up through both the text and the pictures in works...
In the modernizing context of the early twentieth century, intellectuals from South America to East Asia addressed the increasing importance of the movies for the transformation of embodied attitudes. Seen by local elites as a pedagogical apparatus, film delivered promises of becoming modern through its mimetic power over the spectators’s bodies. In this talk I will propose that, at the intercrossing between the dissatisfaction and hopes for film displayed by intellectuals in Taishō Japan, such as Murayama Tomoyoshi, and Brazil’s post-slavery First Republic discourse on film, such as...
Highlighting some of the most exciting new voices in cinema, New York Japan CineFest presents a program of short films by emerging Japanese and Japanese-American filmmakers. Followed by a discussion with Megumi Nishikura (director, Minidoka, Joseph Lachman (YC ‘15; actor, Minidoka), and Masayoshi Nakamura (animation director, Albatross Soup). Megumi Nishikura is passionate about addressing our global and social issues through documentary storytelling. She spent five years working for the United Nations, producing and directing documentaries on environmental issues such as climate change and...
Japanese “World Map” Folding Screens: Repositioning Japan and Europe in the Global Baroque Landscape
One relevant consequence of the arrival and presence of the nanban-jin in Japan and of the complex interactions that developed in the context of the challenging encounter with the Japanese political, religious, and military elites, was an unprecedented repositioning of Japan and Europe in both European and Japanese world views, through the integration of knowledge originally developed over many centuries in European, Japanese, Korean and Chinese cartographic and cosmological traditions. World cartography was one of many nanban or foreign topics treated by Japanese painters on the broad...
The workshop assembles a small group of leading scholars, curators, and practicing artists in the US and Brazil to discuss the historical trajectories of the two largest communities of Japanese immigrants and their descendants. It will feature the latest research on the formative modernists in both countries, with a focus on the Seibikai (Seishi Bijutsu Kenkyukai) art collective founded in Sao Paulo in 1935, and their contemporaries in the United States. The workshop will likewise solicit the involvement of practicing contemporary artists whose work interrogates aesthetic, intergenerational,...
In the 1930s, Japan and China experienced several armed conflicts, resulting in the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937-41. These armed conflicts developed in a unique way: in spite of their severity, neither Japan nor China officially declared war until 1941. This put Japan, particularly the status of its occupation policy in China, in an ambiguous legal position. Since a war had not been declared, Japan did not have the legitimacy to occupy China. Many British and American residents in China were aware of this ambiguity and cast doubts on Japanese local governance, but they could not make...
Pages
