CEAS Postdoctoral Associates Lecture Series
Lunch will be provided. Tokyo has recently decided to utilize foreign aid more strategically so as to make ‘Proactive Contributions to Peace and Security’ and align aid with what is identified as Japanese national interests: to protect an international order governed by rules and based on democracy, human rights and rule of law. Some scholars have even started to talk about Japan as a ‘Normative Power’—an actor with the ability to set what is considered ‘normal’ in international affairs. In this talk I make the case that Japan could be identified as a normative power with regards to framing...
Lunch will be provided. In the early 1970s, second-generation “Zainichi” Koreans in Japan—many of whom, in contrast to their parents, had little or no Korean language ability—were starting to outnumber the first generation. At this time, Zainichi authors debated the ethical and psychological implications of writing in Japanese. At stake was the question of whether these authors could maintain a specifically Korean identity if that identity could be expressed only in the Japanese language. Kim Sŏkpŏm (1925- ) was a particularly active participant in this debate, writing numerous essays on the...
This talk explores the circulation of West African dance in contemporary Seoul through dance classes and festivals, and the perspectives of Korean individuals, particularly women, practicing West African dance on the corporeal and affective qualities of blackness and Koreanness. Based on an ethnographic case study on Guinean Dance Class at the Salim Health Co-op, a feminist and community-oriented organization, I show how the West African dance practice is mobilized as a “liberating” experience for the female dancing body that has been traditionally seen as lewd and suspicious throughout the...
In 1934, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began the Long March, a 9,000-kilometer retreat from its base areas in Southern China that eventually took it to the plains of Northern China. It was in Northern China that the CCP earned its reputation as one of the most effective insurgent forces of the 20th century. There, it swam as “fish” among the “sea” of the people, fighting first the Japanese from 1937 to 1945 and then against the Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang, KMT) from 1946 to 1949 in the Chinese Civil War. Why was the CCP so successful in Northern China and so manifestly unsuccessful in...
Female literacy is an issue with both historical and contemporary relevance. My study traces women’s engagement and involvement in text-based activities back to the second half of the 1st millennium, a period during which the written word played an ever-increasing role in people’s day-to-day lives. By introducing the concepts of “literacy practices” and “literacy events” into this work’s analytical framework, I expand the scope of my research to encompass women who used literacy without necessary being literate themselves. This view of literacy is concerned less with an individual’s unaided...
In 1966, Pyongyang releases its first color light comedy film, Merry Ring (dir. Kim Yŏng), ushering a new era of politically correct cinema in North Korea, with the musical comedy genre as its crown jewel. After years of unsuccessful struggle against the rowdy audiences that would systematically hijack screenings of propaganda films at the nation’s movie theaters, the state film studio finally decides to make a bold move and give its troublemaking patrons the circus they had only been too eager to experience. An adaptation of Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 silent classic, The Circus, this inaugural...
Despite strong theoretical claims that politicians should target distributive benefits to swing voters and competitive districts, the empirical evidence is mixed. This paper resolves the inconsistencies by focusing on the time-varying incentives of an incumbent government. To the extent that election-motivated behavior entails directing government resources to marginal voters and constituencies, this behavior can be expected to peak in the period just prior to an election. An analysis of subsidy allocation in South Korea provides evidentiary support for this claim. In general, more subsidies...
On February 6, 1963, Hiroshima’s main newspaper, the Chūgoku Shinbun, published an account under the somber title, “Exchanging Mementos of Death,” detailing an exchange of A-bomb and Holocaust relics between a Hiroshima peace delegation and an Auschwitz survivors’ organization. The exchange, which took place on the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, also included actual ashes and bones of Auschwitz victims, given to the Japanese by their Polish hosts. This symbolic encounter, in which the dead were literally conscripted in the service of the politics of the living, serves as the focal point of ...
Nineteenth-century Eastern Turkestan witnessed a series of Islamic resistances against the Qing empire and its local allies - commercially-oriented members of oasis elites (Begs.) A prominent family of Sufi holymen from the area (Khwajas) led five wars against the Qing empire and Begs from 1826 until 1864. This talk offers a brief examination of the Khwaja wars in the broader context of politics of the state building and agrarian development in nineteenth-century Central Asia. This talk argues that the Beg-initiated agrarian development project under the Qing protection realigned the local...
Many had never heard of Tōhoku before March 11, 2011. But in Japan, the Northeast has never been far from public consciousness. Tōhoku has been everything from a vexing internal social-political problematic to the nation’s rice basket, and from a savage and alterior outland to the spiritual home of the Japanese people. Focusing on postwar visions of Tōhoku, I will unravel the multivalence and polysemy of Tōhoku in public discourse, and what this means for regionalisms and nationalisms both in Japan and worldwide. Nathan Hopson received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012....
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Chinese state sent about 17 million secondary school graduates (zhiqing, short for zhishi qingnian, “the educated youth”) to villages and state farms for political, economic, and social purposes. Among them there were China’s President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. This large-scale migration program ended in the late 1970s when the state implicitly admitted its failure. Since the zhiqing returned to cities, their memory flourished in various cultural objects, commemorative sites, and reunion activities. Central to the memory is a “difficult past” problem. ...
What environmental histories can Mongolian and Manchu archives of the Qing empire tell? This talk finds an answer in a curious and forgotten event: the rush for wild steppe mushrooms in nineteenth-century Mongolia. In the 1820s, thousands of undocumented workers crossed the internal boundary from China to Mongolia in search of mushrooms. As the booming trade transformed the land, field reports poured into Beijing: not only did mushroom pickers violate imperial law, they allegedly destroyed a pristine environment. As tensions rose, the Qing state mobilized around a dramatic response: a “...
One of the most prominent, but still understudied, aspects of Korean urbanism is the prolific and often dense array of advertising, most often consisting of billboards and neon-signs of store names and announcements hung on the exterior of commercial buildings. In this talk, Paek will focus on discussing how sign-filled environments in South Korean cities are a crucial part of everyday urban experience, where people can find new ways of being in common and making sense, which cannot be simply reduced to our general rubrics of spectacle, private consumption, or the culture industry. From its...
Oyabe Zen’ichirō (1867-1941) studied in educational institutions in the United States between 1889 and 1898, such as the Hampton Institute, Howard University, and Yale University, which together formed the epicenter of American racial discourse in the late nineteenth century. After he returned to Japan, he educated the Ainu, by establishing an Ainu school in Hokkaido in 1905. In the 1920s, he became one of the strongest advocates for the legendary myth that Genghis Khan, a Mongolian hero of the twelfth century, was identical to Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a Japanese warrior. He also published...
At the end of the First World War, one French newspaper called saltwater pearls an “international currency.” Not long thereafter, the arrival of round pearls cultivated along the shores of Japan threw the relationship between a pearl’s appearance, provenance, and exchange value into disarray. What was a “cultured” pearl, and what was its opposite? This presentation addresses this surprisingly complex question by first tracking the formation and transformation of export pearl cultivation estates along imperial Japanese coastlines. Pearl cultivation arose amid legal changes to fisheries...
In early-modern Japan, physical contact with the corpses of four-legged animals was considered a cause of defilement, and the handling of dead animals was conducted by the hereditary outcast group. This assumption seems to have constructed a dietary map in which Japanese began the practice of meat eating in the wake of the modern period in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, meat eating itself was widely practiced under the pretext of “medicinal eating” (kusurigui). For example, in a block of the Kôjimachi neighborhood of Edo (modern-day Tokyo), people could walk into the “beast...
The concept of storage lurks in the background of archaeological studies on the origins of early complex societies. However, a problem with many studies of formation and change in societies is that the significance of storage is assumed rather than demonstrated. In this talk, the practice of storage in prehistoric Korea and its relationship with structural changes of a socio-political nature are reviewed. The archaeological features of the storage landscape in the Mumun Pottery Period (c. 1500-300 BC) changed in form diachronically and demonstrate that household storage remained constant...
This lecture examines the work of Imamura Taihei (1911-1986) in an attempt to illuminate the complex nature of mass culture in wartime Japan. One of the most acclaimed critics in the history of Japanese cinema, Imamura and his writings are marked by his dual interests in animation and documentary, the two marginalized genres that garnered greater popularity in the period following Japan’s full-fledged participation in the war against China. In contrast to the commonplace assumption that treats these genres as the opposite poles of film practice at large, Imamura shrewdly redefined them as...
The sharebon, or “fashion-book,” emerged in the early eighteenth century as a hybrid form combining brothel guides with elements of Chinese courtesan fiction. Such works quickly coalesced as a genre with its own unique conventions. Almost from the start, the fashion-book constituted a sort of proto-anthropological study of strange peoples, manners, and customs. Authors later developed a concern with dialogue, wit, and ostensibly realistic speech, as well, creating intensely polyphonic works populated with a variety of characters. But this concern with realistic detail was for the most...
Qu You’s (1347-1433) “Peony Lantern,” one of the most popular Chinese ghost stories in early modern East Asia, begins with an encounter of a ghost woman and a young scholar in Ningbo in 1360. Dr. Jōo’s paper aims to contextualize this renowned tale within the micro-regional history of Yin County, Ningbo, and examine the literary and socio-political discourse of uncanny women in the area. Through investigating the historical setting of the Huxin Temple in Ningbo and the legendary Buddhist sisters who patronized the monastery, Dr. Jōo discusses how “The Peony Lantern” gained a strong...
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