Japan
3:00-5:00PM Short Films with Director Tetsuya Mariko and Producer Eisei Shu Room 106, 212 York Street New Haven, CT 06511 The Far East Apartment Director& Composition: Tetsuya Mariko 32min/ 2003 I live in an apartment with a rent of 10,000 yen, and in front of it, there is a newly built apartment where my family lives. I started video production with an 8mm camera in one hand, and I tried to go to Cambodia alone to try to shoot film against myself since I had nothing to point to the camera, but I received severe criticism from my family and challenged myself for more radical video...
Historical and contemporary movements of people, goods, and cultural meanings that have defined Asia as a region. Reexamination of state-centered conceptualizations of Asia and of established boundaries in regional studies. The intersections of transregional institutions and local societies and their effects on trading empires, religious traditions, colonial encounters, and cultural fusion. Finance flows that connect East Asia and the Indian Ocean to the Middle East and Africa. The cultures of capital and market in the neoliberal and postsocialist world.
In 1939, Japan passed the Film Law to mobilize cinema in the empire’s war efforts, and the colonial government in Korea continued moving toward total control of the domestic culture industry. From such political turns, Korean filmmakers and producers found both perils and opportunities in the film business. Korean cinema was on the verge of losing its ethnic ground, as it was to be incorporated into the empire’s greater film sphere; at the same time, the national cinema’s crisis presented an opportunity for colonial filmmakers to explore a larger film market ensured by the empire’s expansion...
This talk examines recent remembrances of the Chernobyl accident in popular culture as a means to consider how the Fukushima accident will be remembered in another twenty years, and how Japanese fiction writers have already been trying to imagine that very future. The Chernobyl accident has acquired newfound visibility in the US through the recent HBO miniseries Chernobyl and the Netflix German TV show Dark. In Japan, the Fukushima accident spurred a wave of literary responses, and this talk looks to the fictional stories of contemporary writers, both elite and popular, including Tawada Yōko...
Façade Truths in Tokugawa Japan and Beyond is inspired by a 2012 book by Luke Roberts. In Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan, Roberts argues that the politics of early modern Japan turned on an interplay of two socially agreed versions of reality: omote (literally: face, façade, surface, also used in the sense of ritual and decorum) and uchi (the inside of a delegated political space, also used in the sense of confidential versions of reality), connected through naishō interactions (confidential understandings and agreements). Omote and naishō found...
In November 1973, media reports described a strange phenomenon—people, mostly housewives it seemed, were lining up at stores by the hundreds in a rush to buy toilet paper. Almost immediately adopting the language of a panic, newspapers were puzzled about why people were suddenly going to such lengths to get their hands on toilet paper, of all things. This assumption of irrationality was echoed in later studies of the frenzied purchasing, resonated with the scholarly literature about panics, and endured in histories and memories of the “toilet paper panic” as emblematic of the disorienting...
The Council is pleased to present the 21st Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies. Lecture will take place from 4:30 PM to 5:30PM in the Amphitheater Room 101 at Henry R. Luce Hall, followed by a reception in Luce Common Room from 5:30PM to 6:15 PM. The Summer Olympic Games is the most watched sports mega-event in the world. It is also the costliest, the most politically precarious, and the most strangely constructed sports mega-event on the planet. What we will see at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games are not just elite bodies in motion, in agonistic contests and aesthetic displays of...
Abstracts Abstracts can be downloaded here. Schedule Friday, May 3 5:30 pm Keynote by Jeffrey Lesser (Emory) Saturday, May 4 9:00 am – 10:30 am Japanese Diasporic Literature in Comparative Context Jonathan Abel (Penn State, Chair) Facundo Garasino (Osaka) Hideto Tsuboi (Nichibunken) Yoshitaka Hibi (Nagoya) 10:45 am – 12:15 pm Japanese Brazilian Literature and Print Culture Seth Jacobowitz (Yale, Chair and Presenter) Ted Mack (UW) Zeli Rivas (Marshall U) 1:30 pm – 3: 00 pm...
The Saishôshi Tennô-in residence was built for Retired Emperor Gotoba in 1207. The purpose of this talk is to understand the aesthetic, symbolic and political issues of this exceptional undertaking which combines architecture, religion, painting and poetry. First of all, we will recount in detail the genesis of the project, using mainly the Meigetsu-ki (The Journal of the Harvest Moon), the diary of Fujiwara no Teika, who was the main coordinator of the enterprise. Then, we will analyse some of the twenty-nine poems which were actually written on the sliding doors of the Palace (gosho) — the...
It should no longer be at all controversial to begin with the premise that the formation of the genre of science fiction is intimately intertwined with the history of empire. However, few of the existing analyses on the subject address the specific case of Japan, despite the fact that the examination of Japanese science fiction provides a particularly effective prism for illuminating these issues as a consequence of its historical position as the only non-Western colonial empire with a science fiction tradition that emerged out of its history of imperial conquest while at once fetishized...
Mapping the politics of demolition and displacement exposes the physical effects of the Olympics on the urban landscape of Tokyo and the displacement of vulnerable and precarious persons. How can the Olympics be considered a cyclical ‘practice of subtraction,’ where the city is not only rebuilt but unbuilt? Focusing on specific sites uncovers the intertwined layers of the urban development history of the 3 Tokyo Olympics and the imperial (1940), high-growth (1964) and post-growth (2020) periods they represent. An examination of local and international pressures being exerted on these spaces...
During the last eighty years of the Tokugawa period (1603–1867), gazetteers called meisho zue enjoyed tremendous commercial success as a fresh but familiar form of popular geography. The multivolume large-format books combined equal parts image and text in painstakingly sketched and researched surveys of meisho (famous places) located in cities, domains, provinces, and regions throughout the Japanese archipelago. This presentation demonstrates how meisho zue function as innovative maps that leverage the place-making capacities of the codex, graphic illustration, single sheet maps, and...
What emerges from the collision of poetry and the digital? This talk will present an alternative account of both contemporary Japanese literature and the last two decades of the Japanese internet. By exploring poetry generators, game-poems, twitter poems, wiki poems, augmented reality poems, Japanese Sign Language poetry videos, and more, we will not only consider what effect did the internet have on poetry, but how poetry reimagined the internet itself. Andrew Campana is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University, where he will be joining the Department of Asian Studies as...
An attentive observer of the space surrounding him, Nagai Kafū (1879-1959) appeared particularly fond of spaces inhabited by geisha, actors, prostitutes and other vocational types of people embodying endangered collective memories vis-à-vis systems of power, marginal social figures hardly aligned with the dominant ideologies; in his mindscape, backward shitamachi neighborhoods seemingly left behind by the rebuilding of the city, alongside leisure districts and pleasure quarters, represented spaces of resistance against—but also of resilience to, thanks to their capacity to withstand and cope...
In this talk, Frühstück examines the “use value” of children—as well as the necessity and inevitability of such use—in the ideological reproduction of modern war and empire building. She asks how a large body of pictures and narratives that tie soldiers to children have reproduced a multi-sensory emotional register that has been attributed to and drew from a specific modern conceptualization of the child: the assumption that children were politically innocent, morally pure, and endowed with authentic feelings; and the expectation that adults would respond to the sight of children with a...
Marginal Social Groups and Historical Documents in Asia—Japan and the Ottoman Empire (アジアの周縁的社会集団と史料—日本とオスマン帝国) In this two-day workshop we will consider various aspects of the social history of Japan in the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, while also examining the experiences of marginal social groups in the Ottoman Empire in order to develop a broad comparative perspective on the transition to modernity in different parts of Asia. The morning of the second day of the workshop will also include a session focused on reading Tokugawa period documents from the Beinecke Library. The event is part...
In Michel Foucault’s terminology, the “disciplinary society” is produced by and in turn sustains the institutions that constitute individuals as subjects and objects of dispersed power. In colonial Taiwan (1895-1945), deficit spending on land-surveys, rentier-capitalist buy-outs, and “bandit eradication” established the foundations for disciplinary society in the densely populated areas of the island. However, in what became Taiwan’s indigenous territories, the costs of building an infrastructure (including schools, courts, prisons, hospitals, banks) that could produce self-...
In conjunction with a Yale University Art Gallery rotation featuring the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s Tekagamijō calligraphy album and related works, an international group of scholars will gather for a series of roundtable discussions about tekagami albums, anthologies and albums as assemblages of dispersed materials, and the culture of appreciation and collecting of calligraphy and related works of art in 16th and 17th century Japan. Special focus will be given to the section of the Tōdaijigire—Minamoto no Toshiyori’s 1120 version of Minamoto no Tamenori’s 10th-century Sanbō...
In the spring of 1874 the Japanese government sent an expedition to southern Taiwan ostensibly to punish indigenous villagers who had murdered dozens of people from Ryūkyū. Contemporary records show that the Japanese government also attempted to colonize eastern Taiwan and it justified its actions using the argument that a state must spread civilization and political authority to territories where it claimed sovereignty. The expedition took place in the context of the unequal treaty system in East Asia and during the contentious early years the Meiji period, and it shows how Japan’s new...
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