2021
March 19-20, 2021 | The goals of this interdisciplinary symposium are: 1) to understand the historic importance of food and subsistence diversity, social practice, and food sovereignty for the resilience of ecosystems and food production systems, 2) to examine the validity of traditional, local and indigenous ecological knowledge for contemporary agroecological practice, and 3) to evaluate the contribution of Japanese case studies to the current discussion of sustainable food production, circulation and consumption. Agroecology initially started during the 1980s as a discipline of natural science, specifically as the study of ecological phenomena in crop fields. Today, agroecology is defined as an interdisciplinary research field, with an emphasis on establishing both scientific and social foundations for alternative agricultural practice. In the latter context, agroecology critically examines whether conventional agricultural practice with large amounts of external inputs, including chemical fertilizer and pesticide, is sustainable in the long run. Agroecological studies in Japan have led several scholars to reevaluate the importance of traditional and local ecological knowledge (TEK and LEK) in mountainous regions of the Japanese archipelago. Scholars in Japanese studies have also emphasized the critical importance of the conservation of regional landscapes, including satoyama (human-impacted rural landscapes that have been heavily utilized for agriculture and everyday living), and traditional social practice, such as iriaiken (collective use and ownership of non-arable areas near villages), for long-term sustainability of human-environmental interaction. In this conference, scholars from North America and Japan will present contemporary and historical case studies on agroecology, TEK and regional landscapes in Japan and other parts of the Pacific region. Particular emphasis will be on the contribution of Japanese data to the current discussion of food safety, environmental conservation, and resilience of agricultural practice at the times of disasters, social catastrophes, and climate change.
Go to JAPANESE PAGE.
2020
Imagining Post 3.11 Futures and Living with Anthropogenic Change
February 14-15, 2020 | The symposium brings together artists, activists and scholars for a series of conversations on the 3.11 disasters and the effects of anthropogenic change. The conversations will explore how people in northeastern Japan are living with the consequences of the 3.11 disasters and how different communities with varying livelihoods and vulnerabilities have responded to and invented tactics to survive them. While the works we discuss will provide attention to details that help contextualize the disasters and their aftermath within Japan, they will also reveal new contours for knowledge production and call forth forms of community existing in the commons of matter, survival and invention.
2018
2018 UC Berkeley Japan Studies Graduate Student Conference
Rethinking Labor: Work and Livelihood in Japan
April 13-14, 2018 | The UC Berkeley Center for Japanese Studies presents its fifth annual graduate student conference: Rethinking Labor: Work and Livelihood in Japan. The conference will explore how historically situated configurations of “work,” “labor,” and “livelihood” operate in Japan ranging from the household to the transnational. We invite proposals for papers from current graduate students from all disciplines that use conceptions, manifestations, and representations of labor as a framework in the study of Japan across all historical periods.
Labor has and continues to be an important analytic in Japan Studies as it illuminates diverse phenomena such as macro-economic change, state-society relations, and industrial development, among other topics. Yet, drawing upon recent approaches in anthropology, sociology, and legal studies, we also seek to invoke the concepts of work and livelihood, which can emphasize subjectivity, sociality and the material conditions to sustaining life in ways that complement and complicate previous studies focusing on traditional concepts of labor. While we welcome papers focusing on labor configurations in Japan such as the salaryman, craftsman, guilds, and factory and day laborers, we also invite papers that reframe what constitutes “labor” by invoking “work” and “livelihood” as a means of addressing categories such as domestic structures, underemployment, volunteerism, care and unwaged labor, among other topics.
This year's keynote speaker is Anne Allison (Duke University), author of Precarious Japan (2013).
27th Annual Meeting of the Association of Japanese Literary Studies 
PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
Evidence, Transmission, and Inheritance in Japanese Literature and Media
In Conjunction with the Kotenseki Seminar, Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library & Chang-Lin Tien Center for East Asian Studies
September 6 - 8, 2018 | The 2018 AJLS Conference seeks to address the history and theory of Japanese literature and media with special attention given to the ways in which writers have grappled with the problems of evidence, transmission, and inheritance and how these problems continue to renew and complicate the relation between the past, present, and future.
CripTech: Disability and Technology in Japan and the United States - An International Symposium
December 7-8, 2018 | Technology has the potential to greatly improve access and the full social participation of disabled individuals in Japan and the United States. Both countries have invested considerable sums in these directions, but often this research is being conducted separately from the key stakeholders. This symposium brings together technologists, anthropologists, educators, and other researchers who are working on the nexus of technology, access, and design in Japan together with scholars, engineers, researchers, and activists in the United States for a four-day symposium and workshop in Berkeley, California, the home of the independent living movement. The majority of the participants identify as disabled people.
2017
New Topics, Technologies and New Times: Japan Ahead
CJS/JSPS Symposium
February 24-25, 2017 | Academic communities play an important role in shaping international perspectives. scholars work within broad networks, developing thoughtful insights on emerging changes long before others become aware of their implications. students, whether within Japan and abroad, will in time become tomorrow’s leaders. How we shape their understanding of Japan establishes powerful influence on the way they will think for decades ahead.
Japan’s role in the world is changing. its long era of postwar prosperity is signaled with a rich harvest of international awards. The Nobel prize once seemed an elusive mark of success, but by 2014, there were three Japanese-born Nobel prize winners and in 2015, two. Japan also boasts more native-born Pritzker prize winning architects than any other nation, in spite of its small size. But the nation’s future international influence is a larger question, its economy overtaken by China’s. Both at home and abroad, Japan faces many other unmapped challenges.
We propose to bring together scholars from Japan and the west to discuss the future of Japan in our academic communities.
2017 UC Berkeley Japan Studies Graduate Student Conference
On Belonging: Gender, Sexuality, and Identity in Japan
April 7-8, 2017 | The UC Berkeley Center for Japanese Studies presents its fourth annual graduate student conference: On Belonging: Gender, Sexuality, and Identity in Japan. We invite proposals for papers from current graduate students and recent graduates from any discipline that focus on past and present inquiries into and expressions of identity and community formation vis-à-vis gender and sexuality in Japan. In particular we welcome abstracts that explore the role of identity (including gendered, sexual, social, and ethnic) in relation to Japanese Buddhist institutions, texts, and community practices.
This conference will also explore representations of and critical engagements with notions of gender, sexuality, and identity that illuminate where and how interpretations of such concepts have manifested barriers to belonging in the forms of discrimination and marginalization. Within this arena individual papers might focus on the expression of private, personal experience as well as the mounting of public demonstrations as critiques of normativity or state practice. Papers might also consider how members of academia deploy theories of gender, sexuality, and queerness as tools for questioning normativity and institutional power to encourage the re-reading of historical objects and events.
Professor Jessica L. Main of the University of British Columbia will be the keynote speaker of the 2017 UC Berkeley Graduate Student Conference.
Drive for the Nobel Prize
2017 CJS-JSPS International Symposium
October 31 - November 1, 2017 | Join us for this exciting two-day symposium featuring public talks by Nobel Laureates Yuan T. Lee (Chemistry, 1986), Saul Perlmutter (Physics, 2011), and Takaaki Kajita (Physics, 2015), as well as several exciting panels discussing the Nobel Prize's impact on institutions, journalism, and research. In addition to his talk, we will be honoring Professor Kajita with the 2017-2018 Berkeley Japan Prize.
Food, Agriculture and Human Impacts on the Environment: Japan, Asia and Beyond
RIHN/UCB International Workshop
November 6-7, 2017 | The goal of this workshop is to link local and regional case studies of food, agriculture, and human-environmental interaction with the broader discussion of global environmental issues and long-term sustainability. Special emphasis is on case studies from Japan, East Asia and the North Pacific Rim. Topics that will be discussed in this workshop include issues on food production, circulation and consumption, changes through time in human-environmental interaction in relation to societal and economic developments, and water-food-energy nexus. This event is organized in collaboration with the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, Japan, with which UC Berkeley has an MOU.
2016
Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra Workshop
January 7-8, 2016 | This workshop brings together scholars from Asia, Europe and the U.S. to explore the formation and impact of the Nirvana Sutra in the evolution of Buddhist thought, belief and practice in India, China, Korea, and Japan, the source of the teachings of buddha-nature, vegetarianism, icchantika, and filled with stunning parables and analogies, this meeting will explore both how its contents reflects developments within the Buddhist communities in India and impacted Buddhist communities in East Asia.
The Poetics of Friendship in Early Modern and Modern East Asia
Romantic in your illness, you repudiate the world;
Friendless in my folly, I forsake the flock.
君病風流謝俗紛
吾愚牢落失鴻群
February 26-27, 2016 | Above is the opening couplet from a poem Nastume Sōseki (1867-1916) wrote before departing to England in 1900. The first line addresses his close friend Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), and the second line expresses his own loneliness. Sōseki was known for being a misanthrope, but the solitude he expresses in the couplet as well as other poems in his corpus highlights symptoms of what some have characterized as modern living: solitude, feelings of isolation, failed friendships and the inability to relate to others in society.
Alienation and fragmentation are themes that resonate throughout The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity (2000), a volume of essays that examine friendship as a philosophical category in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the introduction, Preston King writes: “If we inspect the modern period, the disposition we most commonly encounter with regard to friendship is one of indifference to hostility.” Overall, the essays suggest that modern life adversely affects the formation of deep and lasting friendships. In his discussion of “The Fragility of Modern Existence,” Horst Hutter observes that modern living unsettles the foundations of friendship:
Human beings need to search for relatedness and meaning, the two primary goods of friendship. Relatedness and meaning in turn constitute the foundations of trust, without which civil society disintegrates. Now the trends of modern, urban life are such as seriously to threaten precisely these goods.
If the same can be said for the social and historical milieu of early modern and modern East Asia, how does friendship fare under these grim circumstances? This symposium invites scholars from both Chinese and Japanese Studies to explore the poetics of friendship and the ways friendship is constructed in social and cultural spheres. The larger aim of the symposium is to think about the culture of friendship in an East Asian context. Papers will concentrate on friendship in the early modern and modern periods.
Organizers: Matthew Mewhinney, Matthew Wild, Brendan Morley, Margi Burge
2016 UC Berkeley Japan Studies Graduate Student Conference
Embodied Health, Embodied Knowledge
April 22-23, 2016 | This conference invites graduate students from all disciplines of Japanese Studies to explore past and present concepts, understandings, and experiences of health and the body. How are these embodied in Japan's knowledge systems, institutional structures, and identities?
Keynote speaker: Professor Noriko Horiguchi (University of Tennessee), author of Women Adrift: The Literature of Japan's Imperial Body
The Regime and the Scene: Or, What Difference Did the Tokugawa Shogunate Make to the Visual World of Early Modern Japan?
October 28, 2016 | “Visual World” is spongy shorthand for the physical, representational, and conceptual space of the Edo period. It can conjure the imagery of painting, prints, cartography and other texts. It can conjure urban planning and cityscapes, architecture and infrastructure, and the “look” of the built landscape (from the scale of construction to the universe of night). It can conjure interiors and clothing.
2015
International Workshop on Nuclear Safety:
From Accident Mitigation to Resilient Society Facing Extreme Situations
March 23-24, 2015 | The consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in March 2011 sparked a debate about the nuclear safety. While releases of large amounts of radioactive materials resulted in no casualties due to radiation, the impact particularly on local communities is substantial and manifold. Although local communities want to be ensured that effective actions are being taken to allow them to go back to their normal life as early as possible, the lack of understanding for the transport of radioisotopes in the environment and eventually the uptake in humans as well as in the biological effects of low dose radiation has made it difficult for various stakeholders to develop concerted efforts to accelerate recovery. These challenges are compounded by the eroded public trust for government and operators.
To address this need, currently, a new multi-disciplinary initiative is carried out by scientists at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to provide the necessary guidance for effective assessment and remediation efforts, and to provide trusted, un-biased and nuclear-industry-independent perspective to build trust with local and global communities. UC Berkeley and LBNL have world-leading expertise and capabilities in measuring and assessing the distribution of relevant radioisotopes, in modeling and predicting their interactions and transport, and to ultimately estimate and mitigate their impact on the environment and human health.
In order to achieve a resilient society, society’s exogenous and endogenous conditions and needs prior to, during, and following a disaster must be appropriately responded while monitoring changes in conditions and varied needs for resilience born by different stakeholders with a suite of appropriate performance measures. Public participation and feedback must be implemented not only for determining a right set of measures but also in planning engineering design and risk management. Mines Paris Tech has been actively developing an innovative approach, called “Resilience Engineering,” as a new paradigm of safety, focusing on interactions and integrations of engineering efforts with a society.
Based on such on-going initiatives, there are two emerging questions: (1) how integration between understanding for natural scientific processes and understanding for a society at different scales and regions can be achieved for the objective of accurate monitoring, and then ultimately (2) how such accurate monitoring and public participation can and should be integrated in decision-making processes for achieving a resilient society.
To address such questions and to develop a research plan, we plan to host a two-day international workshop, as titled above. In this workshop, first, we share various observations about "damages" in a severe nuclear accident, and then address the central questions: How can we utilize knowledge of natural science and engineering in monitoring system’s exogenous and endogenous conditions with a suite of performance measures that reflect different needs of resilience by different stakeholders after an accident, and in developing recipes that enable a resilient society? The discussion will focus on (1) state of the art for measurement methodologies and (2) challenges that must be overcome. Then, on the second day, three roundtable sessions are arranged to identify and discuss future research questions.
2015 UC Berkeley Japan Studies Graduate Student Conference
Media & Transmission
"THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE"
- MARSHALL MCLUHAN
April 17-18, 2015 | This conference will bring together graduate students from all disciplines in the field of Japanese Studies to explore the past and present role of media in Japan. What can the examination of various media (including images, texts, discourses, objects, and anything else that functions as a medium of transmission) tell us about the formation and transmission of culture and knowledge in Japan?
May 6-8, 2015 | After a successful workshop was held at Columbia University in 2014, we are now pleased to announce the second Kuzushiji Workshop in North America with Prof. Yuichiro Imanishi, Director-General of the National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL) as the instructor, to be held at the University of California, Berkeley from May 6 to 8 this year. This three-year workshop series is organized in coordination between the NIJL and the AAS/CEAL Committee on Japanese Materials (CJM), Subcommittee on Japanese Rare Books. Additional funding and support will be provided by the Center for Japanese Studies and the C. V. Starr East Asian Library at UC Berkeley.
Soseki's Diversity: A Workshop
May 21-22, 2015 | Soseki's Diversity: A Workshop, is a three day workshop event in which 16 scholars who have written essays on various aspects of the work of the novelist Natsume Sôseki gather to closely read and critique one another's work. This follows upon a conference held in 2014 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The purpose of the workshop is to transform the essays into publishable work to be included in a volume edited by the workshop conveners, Keith Vincent and Alan Tansman, to be published in English, and also in Japanese translation, by Iwanami Press.
Perspectives on 70 Years of the Nuclear Age from Berkeley, a Birthplace of the Atomic Bomb
September 30 - October 1, 2015 | Over the past seventy years, nuclear technologies have brought about both atomic weapons and new sources of electric energy, which are now woven deeply into the fabric of many advanced societies. This symposium brings together scientists, historians, and other experts to share their views on past, present and future in an open, cross-disciplinary exchange. Presentations will start from the political and scientific history of the nuclear industry in Japan and the US and how it influenced the ethical and scientific challenges we face today.
The clash between nuclear and non-nuclear countries, between proponents and opponents, grows greater every day. Japan is a fulcrum for passionate debate on the future, even as many new nations are considering adopting nuclear power and nuclear weapons. This symposium offers a valuable opportunity to consider the weighty philosophical and pragmatic concerns that are revealed by close study of the nuclear industry, bringing together experts from the two nations that together directly witnessed the birth of atomic energy.
2015 Berkeley Buddhist Ritual Music Symposium
November 6-7, 2015 | This symposium is focused on traditional Buddhist ritual music to consider its importance for studying the evolution of Buddhist culture as well as the interaction between Buddhist music and traditional musical culture outside the monastery in China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Nepal and Laos. It will include presentations by scholars in the field of ethnomusicology, Buddhist studies and/or religious studies and performances by Buddhist monastics, renowned in their home countries for their musicality in ritual chanting.
2014
After 3.11: New Architecture + Engineering
March 8, 2014 | Since March 11, 2011, images of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident served as markers that generated massive media attention and transformed our understanding of "disaster." The symposium will explore how the cinema, literature and media of post-3/11 Japan reframe the images of disaster in order to create a new type of literacy about survival and precarity. What new vulnerabilities are made legible by the transpositions of historical trauma into the post-3/11 environment? What becomes of communities and individuals in times of catastrophe? What are the framing effects of media on the impact of the 3.11 disasters within and beyond Japan?
As part of the symposium, the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) will be screening the documentary NUCLEAR NATION (2012) on Friday April 4th at 7pm followed by a post-screening discussion with the director Funahashi Atsushi.
On Saturday April 5th (from 9am-6pm) the symposium will commence with panel presentations examining the roles of cinema, literature, and media in organizing information and collective agency, and of the arts, in general, in raising awareness of 3.11 issues related to nuclear energy, survival and sustainability.
Reframing 3.11: Cinema, Literature, and Media after Fukushima
April 4-5, 2014 | Since March 11, 2011, images of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident served as markers that generated massive media attention and transformed our understanding of "disaster." The symposium will explore how the cinema, literature and media of post-3/11 Japan reframe the images of disaster in order to create a new type of literacy about survival and precarity. What new vulnerabilities are made legible by the transpositions of historical trauma into the post-3/11 environment? What becomes of communities and individuals in times of catastrophe? What are the framing effects of media on the impact of the 3.11 disasters within and beyond Japan?
As part of the symposium, the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) will be screening the documentary NUCLEAR NATION (2012) on Friday April 4th at 7pm followed by a post-screening discussion with the director Funahashi Atsushi.
On Saturday April 5th (from 9am-6pm) the symposium will commence with panel presentations examining the roles of cinema, literature, and media in organizing information and collective agency, and of the arts, in general, in raising awareness of 3.11 issues related to nuclear energy, survival and sustainability.
2014 UC Berkeley Japan Studies Graduate Student Conference
Ecology X Space
May 2-3, 2014 | UC Berkeley's Center for Japanese Studies, with support from the Japan Foundation, is pleased to announce its first annual graduate student conference. This conference brings together prominent scholars and graduate students from all disciplines in the field of Japanese Studies to discuss the concepts of ecology and space from pre-modern times to the present. Space here not only connotes the physical, but also how one views one’s position relative to others and to objects in the world. Resisting the objectification of nature as mere symbol or metaphor, the concept of ecology insists on new modes of reading, writing, and thinking about the material environment that connects the human to the organic world. The international dimensions of ecological questions are particularly suited to considering Japan within the broader fabric of the global environment. Within this general thematic area, we encourage submissions from a variety of disciplines that address diverse substantive topics, including comparative or cross-disciplinary studies on issues such as: natural disaster, geopolitics, human geography, agriculture, urban space and ecology, architecture and the environment, film and visual art, literary ecocriticism, environmental aesthetics, environmental history and soundscape and affect studies.
Long-term Sustainability through Place-based, Small-scale economies
CJS-JSPS Symposium 2014
September 26-28, 2014 | The relationship between food diversity and long-term sustainability in contemporary societies has been discussed widely in various disciplinary fields. However, most of them revolve around the cost-benefit analysis of resource use in the short-term perspective, and subsequently, little research has been conducted that offers insight to the future of food production after 2050 or 2100. Many aspects of the current food system are based on intensive production and consumption, supported by large-scale monoculture with long-distance transportation. An intensive and mechanized food production system can support a larger population for a short period, but the dependence on the current system as such has caused serious environmental costs, which cannot be overlooked any longer. In addition, large-scale monocultural food production is very vulnerable against climate change and natural catastrophes like earthquakes. Meanwhile, food productivity and many other things that smallholder producers offer have been underestimated both economically and socially. United Nations’ Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) has designated 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming to support and promote small-scale economies and societies. Small-scale and diversified food production contributes to global food security, revitalization of rural and regional communities, and maintenance of bio-cultural diversity with long-term sustainability.
This symposium examines the importance of place-based, small-scale and diversified economies for the long-term sustainability of human societies and explores what needs to be done for promoting alternative food systems. Experts in archaeology, ethnology, agronomy from Japan and the United States will present their research on the past and present practice of place-based smaller-scale food production systems, for reevaluating their advantages and limitations and exploring their future potential. This symposium will also aim to discuss the contributions the archaeology of the North Pacific could make to understand the mechanisms of long-term cultural and societal changes and to mitigate environmental issues at multiple scales.
The Japanese Family in the Early Modern Period
October 3-5, 2014 | Professors Mary Elizatbeth Berry (UC Berkeley) and Marcia Yonemoto (University of Colorado - Boulder) are organizing an international, interdisciplinary conference on the history of the early modern Japanese family to take place at UC Berkeley September 26-28, 2014. The importance of the family and the family system in early modern Japan is incontestable, and considerable research, largely centered in the social sciences, was done on the subject between the 1970s and 1990s. But the humanistic dimensions of the family have seldom been examined in a sustained and focused way, and the subject in general has not received a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years. This conference will bring together thirteen leading scholars of early modern Japanese history and literature, who will present and discuss papers on key aspects of the construction, development, maintenance, and representation of the family in general, and of specific families in particular.
After the conclusion of the conference, we plan to revise and then publish the papers as essays in a conference volume to make our research available to a larger audience.
2013
Media Histories/Media Theories & East Asia
February 7-8, 2013 | The Media Histories / Media Theories & East Asia conference will bring together prominent and emerging scholars to discuss Japanese and East Asian cross-cultural developments in media theory and culture from the early twentieth century to the present. The symposium will read East Asian film and visual arts as part of a changing media landscape in relation to commercial cinema, television, and intermedia arts as well as political, economic and cultural transformations. The conference topics include: the relation between urban space and the arts in cultural politics; reading the problems of film audience and reception; the important (and neglected) role of East Asian film and media theory and critical writings; East Asian arts movements in transnational perspective; film and visual art as a mediator of cultural/political history; avant-garde artist networks, commercial culture, and architectural transformation. The symposium aims to foster transnational and local scholarly perspectives on East Asian arts and media theory in the context of recent cross-disciplinary arguments in film and media studies.
In February 2013, UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive will host "Chronicles of Inferno: Japan's Art Theater Guild," a retrospective of the films of Art Theatre Guild (ATG), Tokyo’s center of cinematic innovation from 1961-1988. This conference takes this opportunity, in conjunction with this film series andother events concerning Japanese arts in the 1960s, to bring together five media theorists from Japan, the prominent film director Hani Susumu from ATG, and nearly 40 international scholars to discuss East Asian and Japanese cross-cultural developments in media theory and culture from the early twentieth century to the present.
2012
Healing Texts, Healing Practices, Healing Bodies: A Workshop on Medicine and Buddhism 
April 6-7, 2012 | The prevention, alleviation and cure of physical and mental ills have been central concerns of Buddhist traditions across Asia, as well as a major drive in the creation and promotion of healing rituals and therapies. At the same time, monks have played a key role in the spread and circulation of medical knowledge beyond national borders, and Buddhist institutions have provided fertile ground for the development and consolidation of medical treatises and curative techniques.
The workshop Healing Texts, Healing Practices, Healing Bodies aims to be a platform for scholars working in different fields of Buddhist studies to explore the intersections of Buddhism and medical knowledge in comparative perspective. The papers will analyze different therapeutic strategies emerging from textual sources and ritual practices; discuss how discourses on physical and mental illness have been constructed, represented and embodied; and examine how conceptions of pollution and filth have informed notions of disease as well as their treatment.
Architecture. Energy. Japan. 2012 
August 5-10, 2012 | New conversations between practicing architects, engineers, construction firms, educators and researchers will explore design and simulation, regulation and policy, sustainable certification and utility and government programs as strategies for achieving a wiser use of energy resources without compromise of comfort or aesthetics.
2011
April 8-9, 2011 | Hapa is a Hawaiian term that is now widely used to describe someone of mixed racial or ethnic heritage. A New York Times article cites that just within the United States, one in seven marriages are now between people from different racial/ethnic backgrounds.
The Center for Japanese Studies, along with the Hapa Japan Database Project and All Nippon Airways, will host the Hapa Japan Conference on April 8th and 9th, featuring specialists in the study of mixed-race Japanese history, identity, and representation. Topics range from the history of mixed-race Japanese in the 1500s, part-Japanese communities in Australia, to the exploration of identity and representation through story-telling, films, and a photo-exhibit.