CEAS Colloquium Series
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.
The lecture will be include three main topics: 1. A brief history of Tibetan Buddhism. 2. The subject and aesthetics expression of Tibetan Buddhist art. 3. Tibetan Buddhist artistic development: styles, sources and schools.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is the author of works such as China’s Brave New World–And Other Tales for Global Times (2007), and a frequent contributor to newspapers (such as the Los Angeles Times), magazines (such as the Nation), and blogs (such as “The China Beat”). In July, he will start a term as the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. For More Information http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5310
Globalization has been a trend in manufacturing industry. Necessary functions of manufacturing industry such as research and development, product development, and commercial production are in many cases located in different countries which hold diversified cultures.Ethnic or national culture is reflected on management style as well as on features of technology. To be successful in global operation, mutual trust among host government, management staff and employees serves as a key.Each country holds expertise of different nature. The US is featured with systemic technology. Japanese technology...
Political ideology in ancient Japan was not limited to divine imperial ancestry as spelled out in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Mytho-history constituted only one phase or layer of multiple ways of symbolizing Yamato’s new ruling authority; and vertical sacralization was only half of its message. Posthumous names for rulers also reveal alternate, patterned ways in which individual reigns were conceived and represented. Daoist symbols were used; some rulers presented themselves as servants of the Buddha. Finally, the new palace-cities of Fujiwara-kyō and Heijō-kyō were designed to give spatial...
In 1876 the Japanese government installed an Army Medical Inspector General as the central authority for the physical examination of conscripts, all twenty-year-old men. This move by the Japanese state and, by extension, the imperial armed forces established the notion that membership in the body politic hinged upon true manhood, which then manifested itself only in men who could and were willing to fight.Today’s military is no longer tied in with the body politic in the manner of the imperialist state. Members of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces labor in the name of a state that is...
In the winter of 1909, at the height of Japan’s informal rule in Korea, the protectorate government sent the Korean emperor Sunjong (r. 1907-1910) on an extended tour of the provinces. A reinvention of the traditional royal progresses of the Chosŏn dynasty, what was intended to be an exercise in promoting the residency-general’s policies through the throne sparked a series of acts of resistance that culminated in a major confrontation in the peninsula’s northwest. This paper explores the strange dynamics behind the progresses, the role of the media in Korea and Japan in shaping public opinion...
Presentations will be primarily in Chinese. Song Binghui - Professor of Comparative Literature, Shanghai International Studies University Chen Xiaolan - Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Shanghai University Zhang Yesong - Associate Professor of Chinese Literature, Fudan University Wang Yao - Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, Suzhou University Yan Feng - Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, Fudan University Li Nan - Associate Professor of Chinese Literature, Fudan University Zhang Xinying - Professor of Chinese Literature, Fudan University Wang...
Feminist International Relations scholars have been claiming that both theories and the actual practice of international relations reflect gender. More specifically, these scholars claim that the underlying assumption that the international world consists of rational actors seeking to maximize power (and foreign policies based on this assumption) reflects male experiences and masculine ideals. In my lecture, I will reflect on this view by examining gender, masculinity in particular, in Japan and its foreign policy.
Poetry played an important role in Japan’s missions to the Tang court from the seventh to ninth centuries. Whether composed by the envoys themselves, mothers seeing off their sons, previous envoys dedicating poems to an incumbent ambassador in Japan, or by Chinese officials and friends celebrating their Japanese guests at farewell banquets in China, poetry—both vernacular and Sino-Japanese— accompanied the perilous route of the Japanese Tang envoys from their embarkment at Naniwa Port to the Tang capital Chang’an and back.How do the Tang embassies appear through the mirror of poetry? How did...
Among the numerous challenges facing Chosôn Korea in the late 19th century was the need to clarify and modify Korea’s international status, particularly the nature of its relationship with the Qing Empire. A close examination of the key elements in Korea’s efforts-treaties, legations, and the politics of symbol and display-reveals a story far more problematic and complicated than the simple narrative of the Chosôn Kingdom struggling to pry itself loose from a traditional Sino-centric order in favor of entering the Western-style “family of nations.” Moreover, the simple categories of...
This presentation will address the understudied Great Korea Exposition, a major cultural spectacle aimed at commemorating the history of the Japanese Empire and promoting the struggles of the Asia-Pacific War (1937-45). Held in the fall of 1940, this celebration coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of Japan’s rule over colonial Korea and the 2,600th anniversary of the mythical foundations of the Japanese Imperial nation. As I will suggest, the convergence of past, present, and future on a completely new exposition site (and one closely linked to other sacralized sites throughout the...
As modern classifications separated sho (calligraphy) from its traditional partner ga (painting), calligraphy as bijutsu (fine art) was being questioned. As a calligrapher, Nakamura Fusetsu (1866-1943) studied the works of the Stele School in China, introducing an archaic style that was unfamiliar to the Japanese audience at the time. In so doing, not only did he establish links to leading Chinese calligraphers and theorists, notably Kang Youwei, he also brought sho closer to fashionable notions of “art” predicated on inventiveness and historicism. This paper focuses on the theoretical and...
By most accounts, 1877 marks the year when Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen coined the term die Seidenstrasse (Silk Road). Little has been written about what Richthofen had in mind in 1877 but his neologism generally bookmarks a division between pre-modern Silk Road history, and modern Silk Road re-discovery and studies. This paper explores Richthofen’s conception from the twin perspectives of classics and cartography - of nineteenth century studies of antiquity, and a symbolic “field” of German precolonial geography of China and Central Asia. In Richthofen’s juxtaposition of classical Chinese...
Archaeological excavations during the past half-century have brought to light important evidence on social developments in pre-Imperial China. This lecture will focus on finds from a dozen or so cemeteries that allow us to observe the division, during the 6th century BC, of a formerly homogeneous ruling class into two hermetically distinct segments. Whereas the rarefied upper stratum comprised the ruling families of the various states that existed in China during that period, the far less privileged lower aristocracy was the social basis for the intellectual developments that occurred in...
Yi Gwangsu’s Jaesaeng (Rebirth) was one of the most popular novels in colonial Korea during the 1920s. One reason for its popularity was that it was a romance novel set against the backdrop of the March First Movement Jaesaeng was also one of the first full-length novels to feature the “new woman” and her more commodified and eroticized counterpart, the “modern girl.” The “modern girl” was an embodiment of the excesses of modernity; in particular, the crass materialism and the craze for romance that overwhelmed Korean society after 1919. By depicting the fall of a “new woman” into a “...
There are many countries that enjoy prosperity without political liberty in the non-Western world today. People who find this situation hard to accept must find ways, however difficult, to realize liberty in these countries. Through the analysis of Japanese experience, this presentation aims to think about some of these ways, other than simply denouncing the lack of human rights and forcing Western models on these countries. Japan enjoys liberal democracy although it does not have strong liberalism still today. If we analyze its history carefully, we can see an example of a dynamic public...
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