On the Literature of Epilogues
Ho-Ung Jung
January 15, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
Fashioning Womanly Confucian Virture: the Virtuous Woman (Yollyo) in Post-war Literary Discourse
Michael Pettid, CKS Postdoctoral Fellow
January 21, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
Japan Mapped: Historical Maps For Digital Display and Research
David Rumsey, Founder/Director, Cartography Associates
January 22, 2003
Digital presentation
East Asian Library, Center for Japanese Studies, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, GIS Center
About the Elementary Structures of Kinship
Hua Cai, Director of Anthropology, Institute of Sociology & Anthropology, Peking University,
January 24, 2003
4:00-6:00 p.m.
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton St., 6th Floor
Colloquium
Center for Chinese Studies
A Blast from The Past: Meiji Sound Recordings of Oral Storytelling
Scott Miller, Professor, Japanese Language and Literature, Brigham Young University
January 30, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
Beginning with performances by members of the Kawakami Theatre Troupe at the 1900 Paris Exposition, pioneer recording companies used both cylinders and wax discs to capture and market Japanese music and stage performances to European and Japanese audiences. Pristine copies of these early recordings, which the speaker recently discovered in a British archive, allow us the rare chance to hear Meiji voices and music in relative clarity. The presentation will feature an aural sampler of hits from both the Kawakami Paris recordings and storytellers recorded in Tokyo in 1903.
Foreclosed Performance: Yu Shangyuan's Huijia and Other Possibilities of Spoken Drama
John Zou, Assistant Professor, Bates College
January 30, 2003
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
The Dynamics of Implementing Education and Human Resource Policy Reform in Korea
Chon Sun Ihm, Professor/Dean, College of Humanities and Letters, Sejong University
January 31, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
Professor Ihm's presentation reviews the issues and paradoxes of implementing education and human resources policy reform in Korea. The focus is on how educational policy has been linked to human resource development in a transitional economy. Recent policy efforts to strengthen the link between schools and workplace skill requirements will be reviewed. In particular, constraints and new issues for skill formation will be explored. Also, workplace requirements for skills and their relevance to school education will be assessed in light of recent economic restructuring. Finally, new policy agenda for education and social policy reform will be made.
Chon Sun Ihm received his Ph.D. in education from Harvard University (1990). Currently Dean of Humanities at Yonsei, he has served as dean of the Graduate School of Education (1997-1998); Director, Institute for Higher Education Policy (1995-1997), and has held executive and consultative positions with the Korean Council of Humanities and Social Research Institutes, the World Bank, Office of Economic Development and Cooperation, the Korean Social Science Research Council and National Federation of Teachers, and the Korean Presidential Commission of Educational Reform.
The Writing of the Postwar Constitution and the Promulgation of Equal Rights for Men and Women in Japan
Beate Sirota Gordon
February 4, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies, Graduate School of Journalism
Beate Sirota Gordon was born in Vienna and lived in Tokyo until she moved to the United States in 1939 to go to Mills College. While Gordon was in the U.S. studying and working, the Japanese government imprisoned her parents because they were Jewish. After the war, Gordon returned to her home in Japan. First, she found and rescued her parents, who had been relocated to a rural area and were suffering from malnutrition. Then, she began her work in the Government Section at the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander, General MacArthur. The 25 employees of the Government Section were charged with researching and writing the new post-war constitution for Japan. As the only woman among the 25 drafters, Gordon was determined to make sure that Japanese women were treated fairly by the new government. In less than a week, she and the other workers had written the new constitution for Japan - a code of laws that gave women constitutional equality. Japanese women have benefited greatly from the work of Beate Sirota Gordon. Just think how much better off U.S. women would be if there had been a woman in the room when our own constitution was written.
The Geography of Exchange, or An Atlas of the Huaben
Tina Lu, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania
February 4, 2003
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Gutai group and Mono-ha: Art Movements in Japan, 1950's - 1970's
Akira Tatehata, Professor, Japanese Modern Art, Tama Art University
February 6, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
How can the originality of art movements in postwar Japan be evaluated and reconciled with the noteworthy simultaneity they shared with contemporary movements in the West?
This presentation will examine the activities of the Gutai group and Mono-ha, the two most important vanguard movements in postwar Japan. The Gutai group, formed in 1954 in Osaka and considered to be akin to Abstract Expressionism, were pioneers of later directions in art such as "Happening" performance art, "Environmental Art" and Conceptual Art. Mono-ha, on the other hand, a movement that emerged in Tokyo in the late '60s, was more limited in scope and favored a material-based approach that bore an indirect relationship to Minimalism. These two movements offer us a unique perspective on the international dynamics of postwar Japanese art.
The Story of 'Heart of Fortune,' A Wandering Buddhist Monk in Eighteenth-Century China, Who Became a Cross-Dressing Actor, Prostitute, and Confidence Man — Only, in the End, to be Beheaded for Foolishly Impersonating an Imperial Censor
Matthew Sommer, Associate Professor, History, Stanford University
February 7, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Korean Hereditary Shamans and Their Washing Rituals for the Dead
Mikyung Park, Department of Music, Keimyung University
Monday, February 10, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
For over twenty years Professor Mikyung Park has devoted intense study to the Shamanistic performance traditions of Chindo island, documented in her book Music and Shamanism in Korea and many articles in Korean and English. This lecture will explore the topic of Korean hereditary shamans and their rituals for washing the dead ("Ssikkim-gut"). These rituals embrace various ritual and artistic element, including spirit possession, divination, oracles, feats, magic, music, dance, craftsmanship, and entertainment. The hereditary Shamans of Chindo island are highly musical, and thus the core aspect of their rituals is musical. Their washing rituals stand out by their beautiful and energetic music. In the latter part of the lecture Professor Park will discuss this music in detail, examining the stylistic variety and remarkable musical capacities of the Chindo island Shamans. Professor Park is currently a visiting scholar at U.C., Berkeley's Center for Korean Studies.
Allah and the Wuji: Ma Zhu Ponders a Neo-Confucian Creating God
Jonathan Lipman, Professor, History, Mt. Holyoke College
February 11, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Comparative Study on Enterprising Behavior — China and Japan
Lixing Chen, Professor, Sociology, Nihon Fukushi University
February 12, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Information, Technology and Democracy in Japan: From Internet to I-mode
Laurie A. Freeman, Assistant Professor, Political Science, UC Santa Barbara
February 13, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies, Graduate School of Journalism
Professor Freeman will present material from her book in progress examining the intersection between information technology and democracy in Japan and the US. Contrary to much of the literature on globalization, she has found that local factors (historical, regulatory and technological) have played an important role in shaping the development and use of the Internet in Japan and the US. Among important examples in the Japanese case are the use of radically different platforms for connecting to the Internet (such as web-enabled cell phones) and restrictions on the use of the Internet during electoral campaign.
This event is free and open to the public.
The North Korean Nuclear Crisis and Challenges Ahead for the Roh Moo-Hyun Government
Chung-In Moon, Professor of Political Science, Yonsei University
February 14, 2003
Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Korean Studies
Chung-in Moon accompanied President Kim Dae-jung to the historic Pyongyang Korean summit in June 2000. He is also a member of president-elect Roh Moo-hyun's special delegation to the United States and just met with Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld on the Korean Nuclear crisis. Professor Moon currently serves as an advisor to the South Korea's National Security Council, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Ministry of National Defense.
Chung-in Moon is professor of political science at Yonsei University. He served as dean of Yonsei's Graduate School of International Studies, and currently is vice president of the International Studies Association (ISA) in North America. Dr. Moon is also an adjunct professor at the Asia-Pacific Studies Institute, Duke University. Prior to joining to the Yonsei faculty, he taught at the University of Kentucky, Williams College, and University of California, San Diego. He has published nineteen books and over 190 articles in edited volumes and such scholarly journals as World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and Journal of Asian Studies. His most recent publications include States, Markets, and Just Growth (co-edited with Atul Kohli), Kim Dae-jung Government and Sunshine Policy, Korean Politics: An Introduction, and Arms Control on the Korean Peninsula.
Free and open to the public. Wheelchair accessible. For information about other disability-related accommodations, please call IEAS at 510.642.2809.
The program is funded in part by a grant from the Title VI program of the US Department of Education.
The Vanishing City
Deborah Sang, Assistant Professor, University of Oregon
February 14, 2003
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
The United States and the Fall of the Syngman Rhee Government
Steven Lee, Department of History, University of British Columbia
February 14, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
The United States and South Korea had a turbulent relationship for much of the 1950s. American and Korean officials disagreed with each other over a number of substantive issues, including the armistice negotiations, the size of the Korean military, nuclear weapons, and economic development. In mid-1952, amidst a perceived political crisis in South Korea American diplomats seriously considered the option of overthrowing the Syngman Rhee government and replacing the Korean President with a new leader. Nevertheless, Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower continued to support Rhee, and provided his government with significant amounts of military and economic aid throughout the decade. In the late 1950s, however, the bilateral relationship entered into a period of sustained crisis and instability, one which ultimately contributed to the fall of the First Republic. This paper will examine the reasons for the increase in tensions in Korean-American relations after 1958, and explore the role of the Eisenhower administration in facilitating the removal of Syngman Rhee from office in the spring of 1960.
Steven Hugh Lee is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1991 and is author of two books: Outposts of Empire: Korea, Vietnam and the Origins of the Cold War in Asia, 1949-1954 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995) and The Korean War (Longman, 2001).
Perils of the Yellow Race: Nationalism and Literature in China, 1895-1937
Jing Tsu, Society of Fellows, Harvard
February 18, 2003
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
The Present State of North Korea's Nuclear Weapons Development and Delivery Missiles Systems
Dae-Hyun Chung, Pan Pacific University
February 20, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
North Korea's revelation of its secret nuclear weapons program reportedly contained three elements as follows: (1), North Korea admitted the program in response to U.S. evidence presented by Assistant Secretar of State James Kelly on October 16, 2002. The program is based on the process of uranium enrichment, in contrast to pre-1995 plutonium reprocessing. North Korea began secret uranium enrichment program after 1995 reportedly with the assistance of Pakistan, which it provided with intermediate range ballistic missiles in the late 1990s. (2) North korea's Vice Foreign Minister, Kang Sok-ju (an influential figure in the regime), asserted that the disclosure of the secret nuclear program "nullifies" the October 1994 U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework, which shut down North Korea's known plutonium reprocessing facilities. (3) Kang declared to Kelly that North Korea also possesses "more powerful" weapons and is developing missiles believed to be capable of delivering nuclear warheads. Its nuclear weapons program and delivery missiles system became an immediate foreign policy issue facing the U.S. and the world. In this "unclassified" lecture will examine the current state of North Korea's nuclear weapons development and deliver systems.
Dae Hyun Chung is scientist-at-large retired in 1996 from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory after 23 years of service. Since 1999 he has been professor of science and humanity and provost of Pan Pacific University.
From Intellectuals to Academics: On Professionalization with Chinese Characteristics in the 1990s
Timothy Cheek, Professor, Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia
February 21, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Science in a Chinese Entrepot: Art, Commerce, and Natural History in the Early Modern World
Fa-ti Fan, State University of New York at Binghamton
Monday, February 24, 2003
Office for History of Science and Technology
The Appeal of Anime: From Akira to Spirited Away
Susan Napier, Professor, Japanese Studies, University of Texas
February 25, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies, Graduate School of Journalism
Japanese animation has spawned a cult following in American pop culture, attracting an audience as large and as diverse as the "anime" phenomenon itself. This presentation combines the speaker's new research on anime audiences in America with a broad overview of the greatest anime films and series from the past decade, beginning with Otomo Katsuhiro's Akira in 1989 and ending with the US release of Spirited Away in 2002. She examines how Western perceptions of anime often differ according to age group, gender, and sexual orientation. By exploring the "appeal" of the anime phenomenon in America, the speaker shows how anime's international following is made up of a widely varied audience.
This event is free and open to the public.
Politics of Land Development in Chinese Cities
You-tien Hsing, Associate Professor, Geography, UC Berkeley
February 25, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Shadows, Relics, Landscape: Writing, Photography, and Shanghai's Projected Past
William Schaefer, Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota
February 27, 2003
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Nuclear Crisis in Korea: Peering Into the Abyss
K. Anthony Namkung, Council on Foreign Relations, Korea
February 28, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
For the second time in less than a decade, the U.S. and DPRK are locked in a major confrontation over North Korean weapons of mass destruction. In 1994, the U.S. came within hours of bombing the Yongbyon plutonium reactor, an act that might have unleashed a second Korean War. In response to recent DPRK provocations, President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld declared that "all options are on the table," and while that the U.S. has "no intention of invading North Korea," the U.S. does not appear to have precluded a "surgical strike" on Yongbyon. Now the U.S. cannot count on the cooperation of the ROK, Japan, China, Russia, nor the EU. The Bush administration remains divided between hardliners and moderates, the latter looking for a multilateral framework within which bilateral talks with Pyongyang can resume, the most prominent among them being "P5+5 Talks" (the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council joined by the two Koreas, Japan, Australia, and the EU. The search for a negotiated solution to the current crisis would be well served by a deeper understanding of the true nature of the North Korean regime including an understanding of its American roots and its interest in a more or less permanent American presence in the region.
K.A. (Tony) Namkung, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and consultant who has served for years as an unofficial liaison between the U.S. and DPRK, ROK and DPRK, and Japan and DPRK. As a "back channel," he has occupied a near-front row seat in the various official negotiations that began in the late 1980s to bring an end to the Korean War, helping to defuse various crises along the way. Most recently, he participated in the quasi-official talks between Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico and North Korean diplomats. Dr. Namkung has served as the Executive Director of the Asia Society, Senior Adviser to Shearman & Sterling, Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, and Senior Scholar at the Atlantic Council of the United States. He has received numerous major grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy for his work on North Korea. He is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on its Korea Task Force. He has traveled to North Korea twenty-five times. Dr. Namkung has received a MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Grant with which he is currently preparing a study of North Korea's perceptions of, and general relations with, the West.
Imperial Japan's Language Policies in Colonial Korea
Yeounsuk Lee, Hitotsubashi University/UBC
February 28, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
It is well-known that Imperial Japan executed a series of language policies in Colonial Korea in the name of promoting "national language" (Japanese) to the Korean colonial subjects. In 1941 Korean language was completely removed from the school curriculum. This seminar concerns how Imperial Japan's language policies in Colonial Korea were molded, applied, and implemented by focusing on the role of Hoshina Koichi (1872-1955), who offered key ideas and policy suggestions to the colonial government. Hoshina, who studied in detail the example of colonial language policies in Germany toward Poland under the financial support of the Government General, envisioned the imperial assimilation of colonial subjects through the "national language" movement in relation to the vision of Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. This seminar will trace his intellectual trajectory to see what was really behind his endeavor and how his ideas worked for Imperial Japan's colonial rule of Korea.
Professor Yeounsuk Lee (Ph.D., Hitotsubashi) teaches graduate seminars at the Graduate School of Language and Society of Hitotsubashi University in Japan. Her main research interests involve the role of language in the construction of nation-state in modern Japan and language policies in East Asia. Her major works include The Thought of National Language: Perceptions of Language in Modern Japan [Kokugo to iu shiso] (Iwanami shoten, 1996), which was awarded Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities in 1997, and articles on ethnic minorities and languages, language and modernity, and ethnic selfhood and language.
Worldly Stage: the Figure of the Theater in Seventeenth-Century China
Sophie Volpp, Assistant Professor, University of California Davis
March 4, 2003
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Labor Issues in South China
Kaiming Liu, Founder and Executive Director, Institute of Contemporary Observation, Shenzhen, China
March 5, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of Industrial Relations
Anti-Object
Kengo Kuma, Kengo Kuma & Associates, Tokyo, Japan
March 5, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies, Department of Architecture
Kuma's work successfully incorporates traditional building materials such as straw, bamboo and stone into a clean, modernist architecture. His best known works include the Water/Glass House at Atami, a glass villa that is a guest house for a neighboring villa designed by architect Bruno Taut. The building features a staircase, bridges, and even furniture constructed of laminated glass, with the floor in one area under a shallow pool of water and lit from below. His work also shows a sensitivity to site; at Atami, the glass walls and floors blend with the Pacific beyond.
In 1985-86, Kuma received an Asian Cultural Council fellowship Grant, allowing him to spend a year as a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University. His work has received numerous awards, most recently the Residential DuPont Benedictus Award in 1997. His entire body of work received the prestigious "International Spirit of Nature" Wood Architecture Award in 2002.
Free and open to the public.
The Question of Violence
March 7-8, 2003
Great Hall, Bancroft Hotel, 2680 Bancroft Way
Annual Symposium
Center for Chinese Studies
Description
The Center for Chinese Studies of the University of California at Berkeley will hold a two-day conference on the question of violence in China, a question that has intrigued and puzzled many scholars working on that vast social space. As some scholars have earlier argued, there seems to exist a contradiction in Chinese society, that which awards prestige to literary figures and seeks harmony over all other values on the one hand and, on the other, displays a wide range of violence or violent behaviors. How can one understand such a phenomenon as a way of understanding the relationship of violence to society and vice versa? What is the meaning of violence, collective or individual, historical or contemporary, real or imagined, in the formation of social relations and institutions? Why does the image of violence, textual or visual, ideological or practical, material or metaphorical, persist in everyday imagination and representation as a significant source for social action? It is to these questions that the Symposium hopes to form a conversation among concerned scholars.
More specifically, three sets of questions are to be raised: First, the inquiry of violence requires us to look into the context, economic or political, that gives rise to violent action or reaction, which might include a wide range of behaviors, such as revenge, suicide, domestic violence, mass demonstration, popular resistance, political or other forms of punishment, and so on. Secondly, it is not an exaggeration to say that the 20th century is a century of violence, only to mention the special kind of collective violence legitimized during the radical years of the Maoist revolution. Therefore, we hope to raise the question of the extent to which violence must be considered as and in historical terms. Violence is not only the result of a certain historical formation but plays an active role in it, only to think about recurrent famines, struggles for power, repressive or selective representations of the past, and so on. Thirdly, a number of associated images of conflict or antagonism will arise when the idea of violence is brought up. What are the motivations for those to settle their conflicts by force? If emotions are socially constructed, as some would have argued, how can we understand the reasoning behind violent actions or interactions by different social groups or individuals?
Schedule
Friday, March 7, 2003
8:30-9:00 — Coffee and Registration
9:00-9:15 — Opening Remarks
Fred Wakeman, UC Berkeley
9:15-11:15 — Panel I: Violence and Its Representations
Moderator/Discussant: Steve West, UC Berkeley
"Violence, Sovereignty, and Rhetoric in Medieval China: The Xuanwu Gate Incident (AD 626)" — Jack Chen, UC Berkeley
"Heroism & Violence in the Writings of Gong Zizhen (1792-1841)" — Stephen Roddy, University of San Francisco
"Domestic Violence in the Life and Afterlife of Li Qingzhao" — Ronald Egan, UC Santa Barbara
"Corpses on Display: Literary Representations of Torture and Political Killing" — Hua Laura Wu, Huron University College
"Death and Revenge: Moral Heroism, Rhetoric and Martyrdom in the Ming-Qing Transition" — Alison Bailey, University of British Columbia
11:15-11:30 — Coffee Break
11:30-1:15 — Panel II: Violence and Intellectuals and Gangs
Moderator/Discussant: Jonathan Lipman, Mount Holyoke College
"Violence, Justice and Revenge in the Nationalist Quest for Modernity" — Eugenia Lean, Columbia University
"'The War They Wanted;' Chinese Intellectuals, the Outbreak of the War of Resistance, and the Rhetoric of Violence, 1937-1941" — Parks Coble, University of Nebraska
"The Anatomy of Terror — A Case Study of Xifeng Concentration Camp" Klaus Mühlhahn, Free University, Berlin & Youwei Xu, Donghua University, Shanghai
1:15-2:30 — Lunch Break
2:30-4:15 — Panel III: Domestic Violence
Moderator/Discussant: Paul Pickowicz, UC San Diego
"Kitchen Knives and Unmediated Domestic Violence: Republican Beiping in the 1920s and 1930s" — Yamin Xu, University of North Alabama
"Women's Status and Domestic Violence Against Women in China" — Tianfu Wang, University of Chicago)
"Domestic Violence in China" — Xiao E Sun, University of Oregon
"The Social life of Poison: The Routinization of Suicide in a Chinese Village" — Bingzhong Gao, Peking University)
4:15-4:45 — Coffee Break
4:45-6:30 — Panel IV: Suicide and Its Implications
Moderator/Discussant: Wen-hsin Yeh, UC Berkeley
"Ruan Lingyu's Dual Suicides: Media and the Pressures of Urban Life" — Peter Carroll, Northwestern University
"Female Suicide and Moral Order in the High Qing" — Janet Theiss, University of Utah
"'The Crime of Economics': Suicide and the Early Shanghai Stock Market" — Bryna Goodman, University of Oregon
"A Death of One's Own. Representing Suicide, 1900-2000" — Paola Zamperini, UC Berkeley
7:30 — Participant Dinner
Saturday, March 8, 2003
8:30-9:00 — Breakfast and Coffee
9:00-10:45 — Panel V: Violence in Its Manifold Expressions
Moderator/Discussant: Matthew Kohrman, Stanford
"The Spatial Violence: Illegal Construction and Urban Contradictions in Beijing, 1949-1965" — Duanfang Lu, UC Berkeley
"Paradox of Class Labeling in the Mao Era: Maoism, Bio-Power, Racism and the Question of Violence" — Seio Nakajima, UC Berkeley
"The 'Black and White' History: Violence in Jiang Wen's 'Devils on the Doorstep" — Gary Xu, University of Illinois
"Triangles and Targets: Rethinking Sovereignty and Economic Globalization through the May 1999 Jianguomenwai Protests" — Shannon May, UC Berkeley
10:45-11:00 — Coffee Break
11:00-12:45 — Panel VI: Violence and (post)Socialism
Moderator: Tom Gold, UC Berkeley
Discussant: Kevin O'Brien, UC Berkeley
"Is the Customer Always Right? Status, Service and Conflict in Chinese Department Stores" — Amy Hanser, UC Berkeley
"Stranded in Midstream: Chinese Policy Responses to Lay-offs and their Effects on Workers" — William Hurst, UC Berkeley
"The Morality of Power: Violence Reactions of State Managers to Restructuring and Status Differentiation in State-Owned Enterprises" — Kun-Chin Lin, UC Berkeley
"Violence to One's Mind: The Making of Homo Economicus in China" — Jaeyoun Won, UC Berkeley
12:45-2:00 — Lunch Break
2:00-3:45 — Panel VII: Islam, Muslims, and Violence in China
Moderator/Discussant: Steve Harrell, University of Washington
"Why So Little Violence in Xinjiang?" — Gardner Bovingdon, Washington University, St. Louis
"Why Did They Rebel? Muslim Motivations to Violence in Qing and Modern Sources" — Jonathan Lipman, Mount Holyoke College
"Locality-based Massacre: Zuo Zongtang's Strategy of Violence in Northwest China" — Haiyun Ma, Georgetown University
"Violence, Gender, Ethnicity, and Survival: How the Muslims of Yunnan Remember the Role of Women in the Aftermath of the Du Wenxi Rebellion" — Jacqueline Armijo-Hussein, Stanford University
3:45-4:00 — Coffee Break
4:00 — Round Table: Open Discussion
Why It Matters: A Human Look at North Korea with Helie Lee
Heilee Lee, Author
March 13, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
Rethinking a Classic of Chinese Historiography: Three Lectures on the Zuozhuan
Stephen Durrant, Professor, East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Oregon — "Names and Narrative in Zuozhuan"
Wai-Yee Li, Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard — "Rhetoric and Power in the Zuozhuan"
David Schaberg, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages & Cultures, UCLA — "Anecdote Collections and Sources of the Zuozhuan"
March 13-14, 2003
Special Spring Workshop
Center for Chinese Studies
Composing Identity: Korean Sentiment and Sounds in an American Context
March 14, 2003
Seminar
Center for Korean Studies
Summary
In contemporary South Korea, some composers look to the structures and aesthetics of kugak (literally, "national music," or Korean traditional court and folk music) for compositional inspiration. New genres of music using kugak structures have surfaced through such compositional efforts, and offer new possibilities for Korean composers in the twenty-first century. Many Korean American composers and musicians also draw on a Korean musical soundscape, offering fresh sounds to ears unaccustomed to the timbrel, rhythmic, and melodic complexities of Korean traditional music. This seminar features the words and works of four Korean American composers and performers who, each in her own way, addresses the issue of individual creative freedom and expression of cultural and ethnic identity in her work. Each individual's presentation will offer an understanding of the ways in which they employ compositional techniques to reference a Korean sound, and of the effect of the American context on compositional perspectives and practices.
Presentations
1:30-2:35 p.m.
Hilary Finchum-Sung "Korean Perspectives, American Audience"
Serra Hwang Lecture: "Rhythm, Rapture, Rapprochement: Korean Folk Drumming and the Bridging of the Contemporary Music-Audience Divide," with performance of Hwang's work by Nathan Hesselink, changgo) and Guy Hamilton, cello).
2:35-2:45
Coffee Break
2:45-4:20 p.m.
Hyo-shin Na Lecture: "Korean Music on the West Coast," with performance of Na's work by the Del Sol String Quartet.
Jean Ahn lecture/demo
4:20-4:30 p.m.
Coffee Break
4:30-6:30p.m.
Chan Park lecture/demo (Hawai'i p'ansori)
Nathan Hesselink Concluding remarks
Discussion (with brief commentary by Susie Lim)
6:30 p.m.
Seminar adjourns
Educate a women, educate a nation: Islamic education as a force for change among China's Muslim minority population
Jacqueline Armijo-Hussein, Acting Assistant Professor, Religious Studies, Stanford
March 19, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Modernizing China's Military: Progress, Problems & Prospects
David Shambaugh, Professor, Political Science and International Relations and Director, China Policy Program at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University
March 19, 2003
Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies
Hybrid Heaven
Mark Dytham, Klein Dytham, Tokyo, Japan
March 19, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies, Department of Architecture
The architectural partnership Klein Dytham's witty projects use a variety of unusual materials, such as the fake-snakeskin of the Chu-Coo chair, silvery inflatable canopies for Virgin airlines, or a gummy-bear like synthetic rubber, for an Italian outdoor bathtub. Their work is colorful, cleanly organized, and highly popular with clients from advertising agencies to artists. Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham received the Kajima Space Design Award for best young practice in Japan in 1993. Three years later, their Id? Workstation won both the Asahi Glass Design Award and the National Panasonic Design Award. Their office is frequently mentioned in fashion and design magazines in Tokyo, and is also well known at home and abroad for its quirky support of performance art (they once had a woman in a bathtub full of feathers hanging above their conference area for a week) and its web-based collection of Japanese commercials featuring Western celebrities in peculiar roles.
This lecture is free and open to the public.
Sino-Japanese Relations Since World War II
Ezra Vogel, Henry Ford II Research Professor in the Social Sciences, Harvard) March 20, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
The Authority of Heaven and the Five Elements in the Shiji of Sima Qian (second century B.C.)
Hans van Ess, Professor, Chinese Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munchen
March 21, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry
Janine Beichman, Professor, Japanese Literature, Daito Bunka University
April 1, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
Janine Beichman is the author of the literary biographies Masaoka Shiki and Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry, and also of Drifting Fires, an original Noh play written in English, which has been performed in Japan and the United States. Her translations include Setouchi Harumi's award-winning fiction The End of Summer, and two collections of the celebrated poet and critic Ooka Makoto: Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets: Selected Poems 1972-1989 (Ooka's own poems), and Poems for All Seasons: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry from Earliest Times to the Present (an anthology chosen by Ooka with his commentary). She has read her translations of the poetry of Yosano Akiko and Ishigaki Rin in New York, Tokyo, and Edmonton, Canada.
Civil Service and Regime Consolidation on the Two Sides of the Taiwan Straits in the 1950's
Julia Strauss, Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Studies, SOAS, London
April 2, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
The Influx of Katakana Japanese
Yoshimi Nagamine, Journalist, Yomiuri Shimbun
April 2, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
Keeping Good Companies: Embeddedness in Buyer-Supplier Relationships in Taiwan's Computer Motherboard Industry
Kuang-chi Chang, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Chinese Studies, UC Berkeley
April 4, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Semantics of Korean Causative Constructions Revisited
Jeong Woon Park, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
Monday, April 7, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
There have been arguments for or against the homonymy hypothesis between the "short-form" (lexical) and the "long-form" (periphrastic) causatives in Korean since early 1970's. I revisit this issue with the prototype semantics perspective. I first point out the problems and limitations of previous studies on this topic which are based on the classical theory of categorization. Assuming that causation is a cluster concept, which typically shows prototype effects, I show that various aspects of the meaning/function of Korean causative constructions, which are very elusive to the checklist approach to linguistic meaning, are systematically accounted for in terms of prototypes and prototype effects: the short-form and long-form causatives are prototypically used to express direct and indirect causation respectively, while they both exhibit prototype effects. I also examine the diachronic development of the short-form causative and discuss the interactional relationships between the short-form and the long-form causatives from the ecological perspective.
Jeong-Woon Park is Professor of School of English, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Ph.D. in linguistics at University of California, Berkeley (1944). Research interests: syntax, semantics, cognitive linguistics, Korean grammar. Used to be a co-editor of several linguistic journals published in Korea.
The Battle for the Japanese Corporate Soul
Ronald Dore, Economics, Political Science, Centre for Economic Performance at London School of Economics
April 8, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
Dore recalls the "modernization theory" that so much influenced academic analysis of the trajectory of Japan's development in the 1950s and 1960's, and asks what connection it has to the changes which Japan's "reformers" seek to bring about. He takes in particular the debates surrounding corporate governance. Is there indeed some process of social evolution which makes it inevitable that there should be some convergence on "global standards" or is it primarily a matter of the pressures to conform deriving from the political and economic hegemony of the the United States?
This event is free and open to the public.
Shiina Rinzo and the Questions of Tenko and Subjectivity
Seiji Mizuta Lippit, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA
April 9, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
The fictional writings of Shiina Rinzo had a significant impact on the establishment of literary discourse during the immediate postwar period in Japan. In particular, Shiina's evocation of his "ideological conversion" (tenko), an act of apostasy common to many Japanese leftist thinkers who abandoned their beliefs during the 1930s in the face of pressure applied by the state, helped to establish a conceptual basis for the "postwar school" in Japanese literature. Shiina presents his experience of the aftermath of war as a continual repetition of this earlier act of ideological conversion, thereby linking the prewar and postwar periods. This lecture examines Shiina's influence on Japanese literature by placing particular emphasis on his use of the trope of the ruin as the representation of a collapsed and fragmented subjectivity, which in turn determined his relationship to various competing ideological discourses.
This event is free and open to the public.
Religion in Japanese History
April 15, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
Hiroki Kikuchi, Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo, Visiting Fellow, Princeton University — "Reevaluating 'Genko-shakusho' in the Buddhism of the Kamakura Period"
Kokan Shiren (1278-1346) was an eminent zen monk in the early period of the Gozan sect. "Genko-Shakusho," the earliest comprehensive history of Japanese Buddhism, is the most famous of his literary works. This lecture reevaluates previous interpretations of "Genko-Shakusho" as a text that deliberately privileges Japanese Buddhism over that of China and favors Zen Buddhism over other sects. The speaker argues that, far from being "nationalist" or "sectarian," "Genko-Shakusho" should instead be seen as Kokan's attempt to trace the history of his own Shoichi branch from its origins in China through its development in the context of Japanese Buddhism.
Kojiro Hirose, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Visiting fellow, Princeton University — "'Judo' or 'Aikido': Propagation Strategies of Tenrikyo in the U.S"
Of the "new" religions in modern Japan, Tenrikyo has one of the largest followings. Its doctrine emphasizes the importance of joy and harmony to bring about "world salvation." In 1927, the first Tenrikyo church in the United States was founded in San Francisco. Although their activities were interrupted by the Pacific War, there are now more than fifty Tenrikyo churches (including seven in the Bay Area) in the United States. This lecture will focus on how Tenrikyo is practiced in the United States and in particular on how this religion represents "Japaneseness" to its American practitioners.
Culture and Cognition in Chinese Contexts
Kaiping Peng, Assistant Professor, Psychology, UC Berkeley
April 16, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
The Mystery of Yunnan's Snub-nosed Monkey
Lihong Shi, Visiting Scholar, Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley
April 17, 2003
Film screening
Graduate School of Journalism
The Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley, presents a screening of the documentary film by Shi Lihong, a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate School of Journalism. Shi Lihong is an environmental activist whose documentary "The Mystery of Yunnan's Snub-nosed Monkey" has received the TVE Award at the Wildscreen Film Festival. She was a reporter for China Daily, China's only national English newspaper, from 1994 to 1997, and is also the Founder and Executive Director of the Yunnan-based Green Plateau Institute in China.
The snub-nosed monkey is an endangered species found only in Yunnan province — one of the 200 most important eco-regions of the world, according to WWF. When the monkey and its natural habitat were threatened by the local authority's deforestation plans. Ms Shi and her husband Xi Zhinong launched a media campaign that saved the animals. Their last recorded sighting by a scientific team was sometime in the late 1890s, and the 40-minute film, which took 10 years to make, follows the story of a group of researchers in their quest to rediscover the monkey.
Something Rotten in the State of Song: The Frustrated Masculinity of the Generals of the Yang Family
Wilt Idema, Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard
April 18, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Lessons from the 20th Century and Visions for the 21st Century Korea
Saturday, April 19, 2003
Second Annual Graduate Symposium
Center for Korean Studies
9:15-10:45
Welcome and Introductory Remarks
Robert A. Scalapino, Co-Chair, Center for Korean Studies
I. Politics, Economics, and Labor
Moderator: Intaek Han, Ph.D., UC Davis
Myung-Koo Kang, UCB Political Science — "Out of the Vortex?: Financial Restructuring since the Financial Crisis of 1997"
Min Gyo Koo, UCB, Political Science — "Bilateral Free Trade Agreements and Korea's Trade Policy in the 21st Century"
Steven S. Park, UCB, Asian Studies — "The ROK Army Strategic Vision: Anachronistic Assumptions and Portentous Implications"
Discussion
10:45-11:00
Coffee break
11:00-12:15
Jennifer Chun, UCB, Sociology — "Re-defining Employers through Unionization: Struggles to Organize Subcontracted Janitors in South Korea and the United States"
Taek-Jin Shin, UCB, Sociology — "Labor Force Participation of Korean Women: Comparison of Koreans in South Korea and the United States"
Simone Chun, UCB, Sociology — "Making of a Labor Party: Democratization, Neoliberal Reform, and the Politics of Resistance, South Korea, 1987-2002"
Discussion
12:15-1:45
Lunch
1:45-3:25
II. Ideology, Identity, and Social Change
William A. Hayes, UCB, Sociology — "Do Springs of Democracy lead to Falls of Justice?: State-Civil Contest and the Politics of Accountability"
Paul Yunsik Chang, Stanford, Sociology — "Koreanizing Liberation Theology: Understanding the Uniqueness of Minjung Theology"
Michael Hurt, UCB, Ethnic Studies — "Hangukinron: The Shape of Korean National Ideology, 1987-1997"
Yoon Choi, NYU, Humanities and Social Thought — "The Panoptic Gaze of Globalization: South Korea and the 2002 World Cup Tournaments"
Discussion
3:25-3:40
Coffee break
3:40-4:55
III. Modern Korean Literature and Cinema
Moderator: Michael Pettid, Ph.D., CKS
Christopher Hanscom, UCLA, East Asian Languages and Cultures — "Beyond Self: Undermining Secular Temporality in Cho'oe Inhun's The Square"
Youngju Ryu, UCLA, East Asian Languages and Cultures — "Revising Histories, Exorcising Ghosts: Hwang Sogyong's The Guest"
Kelly Jeong, UCLA, Comparative Literature — "Projections of Masculinities: Nation Re-Building and Postwar Korean Cinema"
Discussion
4:55-5:30
Conclusion
Closing remarks by Clare You, Co-Chair, Center for Korean Studies
Berkeley Graduate Working Group and Center for Korean Studies, U.C. Berkeley acknowledge the generous support of the Korea Foundation.
Machiavelli's Children: Leadership and Historical Choices in Italy and Japan
Richard Samuels, Political Science, Center for International Studies, MIT
Monday, April 21, 2003
Distinguished Speaker Lecture
Center for Japanese Studies
Two late-developing nations, Japan and Italy, similarly obsessed with achieving modernity and with joining the ranks of the great powers, have traveled parallel courses with very different national identities. Beginning with the founding of modern nation-states after the Meiji Restoration and the Risorgimento, a similar developmental dynamic can be identified in both countries through the failure of early liberalism, the coming of fascism, imperial adventures, defeat in wartime, and reconstruction as American allies. This lecture argues that although Japan and Italy have often traveled along convergent historical paths, the respective leaders of the two countries and the historical choices they made have led to very different national identities. Drawing upon a fascinating series of paired biographies of political and business leaders form Italy and Japan, the speaker emphasizes the important role human ingenuity plays in political change.
This event is free and open to the public.
Co-sponsored by Institute of East Asian Studies, Department of Political Science and Center for Italian Studies.
The Transformation of Familism in Modern Korean Society
Dongno Kim, Department of Sociology, Yonsei University
Monday, April 21, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
Familism in Korean society has long been considered as one of the most important social values since the Chosun dynasty. Familism, defined as a form of social organization in which all values are determined by reference to the maintenance, continuity, and functions of family group, went through a radical transformation with the overall social change in Korea, especially in her process of economic development and economic crisis. The Korean people adopted a family oriented strategy to gain more economic benefits during the process of industrialization and to overcome an economic crisis since the late 1990s. This talk will investigate why the Korean people relied upon the family strategy in the competition for economic success and what impact it has had on Korean society.
Dongno Kim (Sociology, Yonsei University) received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. He is the author of numerous papers in Korean and English, including "The Formation of Ruling Alliance and its Challengers in Modern Korea," in Modern Korean Society, edited by Bok Song (to be published); "The Theoretical Foundation of Marx's Historical Sociology: The Historical Specificity of Capitalism and its Transcendence by Human Praxis," Critical Sociology. Vol. 21, No. 1, 1995, and "The Transformation of Familism in Modern Korean Society: From Cooperation to Competition," International Sociology, Vol. 5, No.4, 1990.
You are What You See: Shaping the Subject in Early Chinese Poetics
Paula Varsano, Associate Professor of Chinese, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Smith College
Monday, April 21, 2003
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
The Woman Trap. Beauty and Syphilis in Late Qing Shanghai
Paola Zamperini, Visiting Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley
April 23, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Developing a Taiwanese Consciousness: From Lee Teng-Hui to Now
Bruce Chun-ming Chen, IEAS Visiting Scholar
April 24, 2003
Institute of East Asian Studies
Writing Personally: Self-Knowledge and Space in the Informal Prose of Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Korea
Jiwon Shin, Yale Postdoctoral Fellow/UC Berkeley
April 25, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
Late Choson informal prose (including "random jottings," informal letters, prefaces and colophons, and various accounts on travels, objects, and people) is commonly characterized as personal, due mostly to its spontaneous and casual mode of presenting its subject matter. Informal prose as personal writing also signifies two seemingly incompatible literary presentations of the self: writing about the self, which at the same time effaces the self. This unique self-presentation suggests that being "personal" in regard to informal prose means not how the texts might describe a person, but how the texts function like a map, in which knowledge about a person is charted. My discussion concerns the spatial notion of what it means for writing to be "personal" with a focus on two seemingly different writers, Pak Chi-won and Cho Hui-ryong, of the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century, respectively. I address the ways in which informal prose writing might help us chronicle the manner of knowing about a person and a unique understanding of space generated by that "personal" knowledge, as they shift from the late eighteenth through the late nineteenth century.
Jiwon Shin received her PhD from Harvard University, and is currently a fellow at the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. In the fall of 2003, she will be joining Berkeley's Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as assistant professor teaching Korean literature. She has also taught at Dartmouth College and Bowdoin College as a visiting lecturer. Her main research interests include: late traditional and early modern Korean poetry and informal prose; cartographic writing; and visual culture. She has received the Daesan Foundation Grant for co-translating poetry of Pak Chae-sam with David R. McCann, and the Korea Literature Translation Institute Grant for translating poetry and essays of Kim Hye-sun.
Treasures from the History of Chinese Printing: A Study of Berkeley's Invaluable Chinese Rare Book Collection
Xianxing Chen, Visiting Scholar, East Asian Library, UC Berkeley
April 29, 2003
Colloquium to be conducted in Chinese
Center for Chinese Studies
Mr. Chen Xianxing is a prominent scholar-librarian from China. For many years, he headed the Department of Rare Books in Shanghai Library, and is an author and editor of major Chinese national bibliographic utilities such as the National Union Catalog of Rare Books in China. He studied and worked under the late Chinese librarian and renowned scholar Gu Tinglong for over twenty years, and is one of the few recognized experts on the authentication of Chinese rare books and manuscripts. He is currently a Visiting Scholar to East Asian Library where he is assisting the Library to compile an annotated bibliography of Chinese rare book holdings in Berkeley.
In this talk, he will discuss findings from his study of Berkeley's Chinese rare book collection, and analyze some important items in comparison with those in other collections in North America and China. He will also discuss Chinese history of printing in general. A small exhibit of Song-Yuan editions of Chinese woodblock imprints will be assembled on the lecture site to allow the audience to view those treasured items first-hand.
The Military Directives of Mao Zedong and Jiang Jieshi
Zongzhen Zhu, Researcher, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Modern History Research Institute
April 30, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
War Memory, Tourism, and the Politics of Peace at Okinawa's Himeyuri Peace Museum
Linda Isako Angst, Anthropology, Lewis and Clark College; Reischauer Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard
May 1, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
The story of the Himeyuri Student Nurse Corps, in which Okinawa's top female students were killed caring for Japanese soldiers on the battlefield in the last days of the Battle of Okinawa, has become the emblematic story of Okinawan wartime suffering. This talk explores the complex historical and symbolic role of the Himeyuri in postwar Okinawan identity politics, particularly as represented in the Himeyuri Peace Museum, and points to the gendered dimensions of national discourse in the relationship of Okinawa to Japan. Time permitting, film and video clips will be included.
Hearing the Imperial Voice in Traditional Chinese Poetry
Jack Chen, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Chinese Studies, UC Berkeley)
May 2, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
K-12 Teachers' Workshop: "Teaching about Korea
Saturday, May 3, 2003
Workshop
Center for Korean Studies
Schedule
8:40-9:00 — Reception
9:00-9:05 — Greetings: Clare You, Co-Chair, The Center for Korean Studies
9:05-9:50 — "Living in a divided nation: comparisons between Korea and Ireland" by Rick Girling
Using the movie "JSA" as an introduction to the DMZ and the conflict between the two Koreas, Mr. Girling will demonstrate his lesson plan to discuss the contemporary issues regarding stationing of U.S. troops in Korea. In doing so, he will be looking at some similarities and differences between Korea and Ireland by drawing upon his personal experiences of life in Northern Ireland.
Richard Girling is currently teaching AP World History and American Democracy at Lowell High School in San Francisco. He also teaches the Curriculum and Instruction course for Social Studies teachers at SF State University. He began teaching at Galileo High School and has been teaching for 16 years in the SF Unified School District. He also has taught high school and lived in Northern Ireland for 2 years. Mr. Girling's fields of teaching include AP Economics, Economics, World History and African American History.
9:50-10:35 — "The Korean experience in the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1973" by Thomas Priddy
Mr. Priddy will examine the Korean role in the Vietnam War, analyze narrative descriptions of operations by Korean forces, and compare the similarities and differences between the Korean and American experience during the conflict. He seeks to tie his lesson plans in with a unit on the Vietnam War (in a U.S. History course), or with a unit on Korea (a Modern World History course).
Mr. Priddy is currently teaching Modern World History and United States History at Lowell High School in San Francisco. He received his M.A. in History from San Francisco State University, having earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Southern California. His research emphasis was on 20th Century European history and United States foreign policy. He also has done extensive research and writing on the subject of the Vietnam War for more than 20 years.
10:35-10:50 — Coffee Break
10:50-11:35 — "Korean Language and Culture: Korean Typography and Folk tales" by Ah-mi Cho
Mrs. Cho will investigate how Koreans in modern society are still bound to traditional family structures in various aspects of life. The relationship between parents and children in Confucian Korean society is reflected in the Korean folk/fairy tales: "The Woodcutter and the Fairy" and "Kyon-u the Herder and Chik-nyo the Weaver." By referring to these stories, Mrs. Cho will attempt to show the influences of the close knit family structure upon individuals in Korea. In addition, she will also introduce the Korean alphabet and proverbs.
Ahmi Cho has been teaching Korean and German at Lowell high school since 1993. She started the Korean language courses at Lowell high school, the only public high school in Northern California that has Korean course in its regular curriculum. She received her M.A. and completed her coursework for Ph.D in German language and literature at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Ms. Cho has also taught post-secondary level Korean at the Korean Center in San Francisco.
11:35-12:00 — Q & A and Discussion
12:00-1:00 — Lunch (Provided)
1:00-1:40 — General Discussion
1:40-2:00 — Introduction of Resources for Teaching about Korea
2:00-2:10 — Evaluation/Meeting Adjourn
A Roundtable Discussion on SARS
Panelists:
Moderator: Tom Gold, Sociology and Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies at Tsinghua University
Lawrence Cohen, Anthropology
Teh-wei Hu, School of Public Health
Kevin O'Brien, Political Science
Arthur Reingold, School of Public Health
Carolyn Wakeman, School of Journalism
Monday, May 5, 2003
Roundtable Discussion
Center for Chinese Studies
The Innovation of New Model Development: Case of Toyota
Takashi Shimizu, Accounting, Waseda University; Visiting Scholar, UCB
May 8, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
In the mid-1990s, Toyota Motors struggled to compete with other automobile manufacturers. This talk focuses on the new model development strategies Toyota has implemented in order to regain its competitiveness. In particular, Toyota's lack of popularity among Japan's younger generation caused its market share to shrink considerably. Although Toyota had had many previous successes based on "just-in-time" (JIT) and target costing, it now needed a new breakthrough to gain a continuous competitive advantage. The speaker argues that Toyota has achieved this breakthrough mainly by formulating two new strategies. One has been to develop cars well suited for the 21st century and the other has been to develop cars that would be popular with the Japanese youth.
Korean American Literature and the Visual Arts
Saturday, May 10, 2003
Regional Seminar, for the Centennial Commemoration of Korean Immigration to the United States
Center for Korean Studies
Agenda
8:30-9:00a — Coffee
9:00-9:15a — Welcome: Clare You, co-chair, Center for Korean Studies
Opening Remarks: Elaine Kim, U.C., Berkeley
9:15-11:05a — Session One
"Deep fermentation and other phenomena" — Y. David Chung, visual artist
"Ghost stories: reflection of writing, family and works in progress" — Nora Okja Keller, writer
"Love, Sex, Family, Death... and Robots: Greg Pak's Asian American Films" — Greg Pak, independent film maker
11:05-11:30a — Q & A and Comments
11:30a-12:30p — Lunch
12:30-2:20p — Session Two
"How to film an identity crisis" — Grace Lee, independent film maker
TBA — Michael Joo, artist
"On writing 'American Woman'" — Susan Choi, writer
2:20-2:45p — Q & A
2:45-3:00p — Coffee
3:00-4:40p — Session Three
"Insider/Outsider: Roadblocks, Reflection, and Possibilities" — Nathan Adolfson, independent film maker
"I am a Korean but...; I am an Artist but..." — Yong Soon Min, visual artist
"Dear Elaine: Images of My Mother" — Leonard Chang, writer/critic
4:40-5:00p — Q & A and General discussion
5:00-5:25p — Summary: Laura Kang, U.C., Irvine
5:25-5:30p — Closing Remarks: John Lie, University of Michigan
Supported by a Grant from the Korea Research Foundation, Seoul
How Asia Got Rich: Japan, China, and the Asian Miracle
Edith Terry, Opinion Pages Editor, South China Morning Post
May 16, 2003
Shorenstein Seminar
Institute of East Asian Studies
Reception and book signing will follow the presentation.
Japan has, for the past two decades, been seeking new alliances in Asia through trade and aid, in an effort to enhance its security. As its fortunes have risen and fallen in the west, Japan has built enduring ties in East Asia, culminating this year in China replacing the U.S. as Japan's number one trading partner. Could productive economic ties with its neighbors eventually supplant Japan's Cold War pact with the U.S.? Author Edith Terry argues that this quiet progress, with Japan's leadership and China's growth, could create a new regional movement counter to the convergence theories of free markets and globalization. Join us for this forward-looking discussion.
Edith Terry is an author, journalist, and consultant based in Hong Kong. She has been a foreign correspondent and bureau chief for Business Week Magazine and Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper, and is currently Opinion Pages Editor of the South China Morning Post. Ms. Terry has been a visiting fellow at research institutes in East Asia and the United States, including the Japan Institute for International Affairs in Tokyo, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, Gaston Sigur Center for Asian Studies in Washington, DC, and the Economic Strategy Institute, also in Washington. She has been the recipient of grants and awards including Journalist in Residence at the East-West Center in Honolulu; an Abe Fellowship from the Center for Global Partnership of the Japan Foundation; and a Fulbright Pacific Rim fellowship. Her most recent book, How Asia Got Rich: Japan, China and the Asian Miracle, was published by ME Sharpe in 2002.
Chinese labor disputes in the 1990s: State coercion or legal resolution?
Mattias Burrell, Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Uppsala University, Sweden
June 12, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Association of American Teachers of Korean (AATK) Annual Conference
June 24-28, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
Forestry Reform and the Transformation of State Capacity in Fin de Siecle China
Julia Strauss, Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Studies, SOAS, London
August 27, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Where the Girls Are: Establishing Japanese Girlhood and Identity in Women's Magazines
Kazue Sakamoto, Associate Professor, Sociology, Ochanomizu University
August 28, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
Identity Politics and its Discontents: Postmodernity-as-Coloniality in Hong Kong since the 1990s
Mirana Szeto, Instructor, East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Oregon
August 29, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
The Japanese Constitution in the 21st Century
Taro Nakayama, Chairman, Research Commission on the Constitution, House of Representatives, Japan
September 2, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
Dr. Taro Nakayama, the head of a blue-ribbon commission on constitutional reform and a former foreign minister, will speak on "The Research Commission on the Constitution and the Japanese Constitution in the 21st Century" from 12 noon to 1:30, Tuesday, September 2, at Alumni House.
Japan's blue-ribbon commission on constitutional reform will be visiting Berkeley to speak with faculty experts on constitutional law and US-Japan relations. The commission is considering the highly controversial move of revising the constitution's famous Article 9 — the peace clause. Article 9 states that Japan will not maintain military forces or other war potential. The commission is also considering a wide range of other constitutional revisions.
The commission has been deliberating since 2000, and published an interim report in November 2002. It sent a research mission to Europe, but this is its first delegation to the United States. Former Foreign Minister Taro Nakayama is leading the delegation, along with two other Diet members: Yoshito Sengoku (Democratic Party of Japan) and Tomio Yamaguchi (Japanese Communist Party).
This event is free and open to the public.
Japanese language lecture with English translation.
Regressive Taxation and the Welfare State: Japan in Comparative Perspective
Junko Kato, Associate Professor, Law and Politics, Tokyo University
September 2, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
This lecture challenges the conventional wisdom that progressive taxation goes hand-in-hand with large public expenditures in a mature welfare state, and qualifies the partisan-centered explanation that dominates the welfare state literature. Since the 1980s, the institutionalization of effective revenue-raising by regressive taxes during periods of high growth has ensured resistance to welfare state backlash during budget deficits and consolidated the diversification of state funding capacity among industrial democracies. While presenting a comparison of eight OECD countries with statistical analysis, this lecture focuses on the Japanese case, in which the lack of a strong revenue machine resulted in a small government with large deficits.
The Archaeology of Ferry Money: An Archaeological Approach to Numismatics and Monetary History of 14th-18th Century Japan
Kimio Suzuki, Professor, Archaeology and Ethnology, Keio University, Japan
September 4, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
Appropriating the Past: How an Ancient 'Korean' State Became Newly 'Chinese'
Mark Byington, Department of History, Harvard University
September 19, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
This presentation concerns an instance in which present-day political borders have brought about a conflict between Korean historiographical traditions and Chinese territorial concerns. The early (1st century BC to AD 668) Koguryo state stretched across vast regions on both sides of the Yalu River that currently marks the political boundary between North Korea and the People's Republic of China. In the 7th century AD, Koguryo was incorporated into what we now recognize as the historiographical traditions of both North and South Korea. While Chinese scholarship had previously acknowledged the Korean historiographical views, beginning in the twentieth century Chinese historians began to claim Koguryo as an integral part of Chinese historiography. This has resulted in academic debates between Chinese and Korean scholars that reach even into the political realm. I will argue that this clash of interests was largely due to Chinese territorial sensitivities and ways in which modern historical depictions of ancient states have been recast to bring them into alignment with conceptions of modern nation states.
My research focuses on early history and archaeology of northeastern China and Korea, particularly Koguryo, on the earlier state of Puyo, and on Parhae. In 1997-98 I conducted field research affiliated with Jilin University in Changchun, China. My dissertation (Harvard 2003) deals with the formation of the earliest states in the Korea-Manchuria region, and addresses problems of state formation as a social process as well as historical representation of state foundation. I explore the ways in which the foundation myths of the earliest states were incorporated into a developing historiography that encompassed multiple states, an example being the later Silla historical representation that included the pasts of both Koguryo and Paekche in an inclusive history of a newly conceptualized "Three Kingdoms." Much of my work is grounded in the interpretation of recently gained archaeological data as a way to re-read the written historical record. I am currently spending a year at Harvard University as a Korea Foundation postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the Korea Institute.
Transforming Life in China: Big Pharma, Biotech & Science
Nancy Chen, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz
September 26, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
The Circulatory System: Blood Donation, 'Gift' Exchange, and the AIDS Epidemic in China
Kathleen Erwin, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, UCSF
October 1, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Naturalism, Westernesque Femme Fatale, and Matsui Sumako
Indra Levy, Assistant Professor, Asian Languages and Culture, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
October 2, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
The Apology in Korean Dispute Settlement
Ilhyung Lee, School of Law, University of Missouri
October 3, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
The discussion will examine the apology in the Korean setting, including: a brief review of traditional dispute resolution methods in Korea; the social construction of the apology, including its intended shaming effect; a brief comparative analysis of the apology in Korean and Western (American) settings; the continuing effect of the apology in a society with both deep rooted Confucian norms and plans for an international presence; and most importantly, the role of the apology in the resolution of legal disputes in contemporary Korea.
Professor Ilhyung Lee's private practice experience includes positions at Cravath, Swaine & Moore (New York) and Kim & Chang (Seoul, Korea). Previously, he was law clerk to the Honorable Joseph F. Weis, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. As a student, he was an articles editor on the law review, and graduated with Order of the Coif honors from Boston College Law School. Professor Lee's primary research interests relate to law and culture in East Asian jurisdictions, with a focus on Korea. He teaches courses in intellectual property and international dispute resolution (International Commercial Arbitration and Cross-Cultural Negotiations). He has lectured in Japan as a Fulbright Scholar. Professor Lee also serves as Senior Fellow at the Law School's Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution, and is Member, Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.
The Tripods of Yu and the Politics of Picturing
Patricia Berger, Associate Professor, History of Art, UC Berkeley
October 10, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Choice as a Form of Governing: Neo-Liberal Rule, Late-Socialism, and Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China
Lisa Hoffman, Assistant Professor, Urban Studies, University of Washington, Tacoma
October 15, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Massacre of Koreans: A Note on the Connection between Homo Sacer and the Emergence of Japan's Modern National Sovereignty
Sonia Ryang, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University
October 17, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
New Singaporean Writing: Readings and Poems
Daren Shiau, Poet, 2002 Young Artist Award, Singapore National Arts Council
October 17, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Southeast Asian Studies
Old Photo Fever in 90's China: An Art Historical Perspective
Hung Wu, Director, Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago
October 24, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Japan's Surrender and Redefinition of the Kokutai
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Professor, History, UC Santa Barbara
Monday, October 27, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
Although hopelessly divided over whether and on what terms they ought to terminate the Pacific War, Japanese policymakers during 1945 were unanimous about the need to preserve the kokutai, the national polity. Yet, what was meant by this ambiguous term? What Japan's leaders meant by kokutai remained unclear until intense debates took place triggered by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6th and the Soviet entry into the war on August 14th. Advocates of peace successfully challenged the prevailing mythical view of the kokutai as a national essence that transcended the mere political structure surrounding the emperor. In so doing, they jettisoned two of the most crucial features of the kokutai: the emperor's monopoly of the military command and the notion of the emperor as a living god. Drawing on research from his recently completed book manuscript, the speaker demonstrates how concern for preserving the imperial institution and political calculations made in anticipation of peace negotiations with the United States and the Soviet Union influenced this redefinition of kokutai.
This event is free and open to the public.
Identity vs. Development: Taiwan's Dilemma with China
Chien-min Chao, Professor, Sun Yat-sen Graduate Institute, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
Monday, October 27, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
East Asia at Berkeley
October 31-November 2, 2003
Faculty Club, Zellerbach Hall, PFA Theater
Institute of East Asian Studies
"East Asia at Berkeley" showcases a small cross-section of the intellectual and artistic pursuits that are an integral part of the East Asia programs on the Berkeley campus. Berkeley is one of the premier institutions for the study of East Asia in the United States.
The Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS) at UC Berkeley promotes teaching and research on East Asia in all disciplines and professional programs. The Institute and its three regional centers sponsor a wide variety of activities including academic seminars and colloquia series, public lectures, cultural events, and other programs that facilitate appreciation of the multifaceted Pacific Rim.
Friday, October 31, 2003
Berkeley Faculty Club, Heyns Room and Seaborg Room
- The Development of Complex Societies in East Asia
- The East Asian City - Understanding Colonial Legacies
- Securing Northeast Asia: Resolving the Crisis on the Korean Peninsula
- From Bust to Boom? A Post-Crisis Evaluation of East Asian Financial Markets
- Matter: A Talk by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien
- Fusing Dance Techniques from East and West
Friday-Saturday, October 31-November 1, 2003
Zellerbach Hall
- Moon Water, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan
Saturday-Sunday, November 1-2, 2003
Pacific Film Archive Theater
- Anime: A Celebration
Schedule
Friday, October 31, 2003
9:30 am - 10:50 am — The Development of Complex Societies in East Asia
Heyns Room, Berkeley Faculty Club
East Asia provides a unique archaeological and historical record of how social complexity and state formation developed in ways whose legacies are still with us to this day. Panelists will discuss the interaction between different regions from prehistoric hunter-gatherers to the elites of Han China. The presentations will draw on the extensive slide collections of UC Berkeley archaeologists and historians.
Panelists include:
- Junko Habu, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley;
- H. Mack Horton, Professor and Chair, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley;
- Michael Nylan, Professor, Department of History, UC Berkeley; and
- Minkoo Kim, Graduate Student, Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley.
11:00 am - 12:20 am — The East Asian City - Understanding Colonial Legacies
Heyns Room, Berkeley Faculty Club
This panel explores the impact of colonialism on different cities throughout the East Asian region. The presentations highlight different patterns of colonization and the effect these have had on various aspects of political, economic and cultural life in each city.
Panelists include:
- Wen-hsin Yeh, Professor, Department of History, UC Berkeley;
- Andrew Barshay, Professor, Department of History, UC Berkeley; and
- Peter Zinoman, Associate Professor, Department of History, UC Berkeley.
12:30 - 2:20 pm — Securing Northeast Asia: Resolving the Crisis on the Korean Peninsula
Seaborg Room, Berkeley Faculty Club (invited guests only)
Heyns Room, Berkeley Faculty Club (brown bag lunch)
This luncheon panel will focus on security threats in Northeast Asia, particularly those on the Korean peninsula, as well as efforts to resolve them. The speakers will highlight issues that are key to understanding the dynamics on the Korean peninsula as well as the foreign policy concerns of China, Russia, the United States and Japan. A dialogue among the participants, as well as a question and answer session involving the audience will follow these short presentations.
Participants include:
- Ambassador Sung-Joo Han, Embassy of Korea, Washington D.C.;
- Susan Shirk, Professor, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, UC San Diego;
- Leon Sigal, Director, Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project, Social Science Research Council.
Chaired by Professor Robert A. Scalapino, former director of Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Studies and professor emeritus, Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley
2:30 pm - 3:50 pm — From Bust to Boom? A Post-Crisis Evaluation of East Asian Financial Markets
Heyns Room, Berkeley Faculty Club
The panelists will assess the recent performance of financial markets in East Asia, highlighting their role both in facilitating national economic recovery and transnational investment, and in fostering competition between different cities as hubs for financial sector activity.
Panelists include:
- Richard Koo, Chief Economist, Nomura Research Institute, Tokyo;
- Paul Matthews, Chairman, Matthews International Capital Management, San Francisco;
- Brewer Stone, Managing Director, East Peak Advisors, Corte Madera; and
- T.J. Pempel, Professor, Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley and Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies.
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm — Matter: A Talk by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien
Heyns Room, Berkeley Faculty Club
Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, New York
5:00 pm - 6:30 pm — Reception
Seaborg Room, Berkeley Faculty Club
5:30 pm - 6:30 pm — Fusing Dance Techniques from East and West - A Conversation with Lin Hwai-Min, Artistic Director, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan
Presented in cooperation with Cal Performances
Seaborg Room, Berkeley Faculty Club
- Jacquelynn Baas, Director emeritus, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and program director for the arts consortium, Awake: Art and Buddhism;
- Lin Hwai-Min, Artistic director, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre.
8:00 pm — Moon Water
Pre-performance Talk by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre Artistic Director Lin Hwai-Min (7:00 pm - 7:30 pm)
Zellerbach Hall
Presented by Cal Performances
The innovative modern dance work of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan comes to Berkeley with artistic director Lin Hwai-min's Moon Water, a poetic expression of Taoist philosophy based on the art of Tai Chi, set to movements from Bachs cello concertos.
Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan is considered a national treasure in its native country and has thrilled audiences worldwide. The troupe's rich repertoire has its roots in Asian myths, folklore, and aesthetics, but it brings to these age-old beliefs and stories a contemporary perspective.
Saturday, November 1, 2003
8:00 pm — Moon Water
Pre-performance Talk by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre Artistic Director Lin Hwai-Min (7:00 pm - 7:30 pm)
Zellerbach Hall
Saturday-Sunday, November 1-2, 2003
Anime: A Celebration
This weekend of special film screenings celebrates the role of anime in the cultural exchange between Japan and the U.S. Focusing on two key studios, Studio Ghibli and Tezuka Productions, this showcase features the Bay Area premiere of Studio Ghibli's latest film, The Cat Returns with producer Nozomu Takahashi in person. Two films by the founders of Studio Ghibli will be shown in English-subtitled 35mm prints: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Only Yesterday, as well as rare screenings of two films based on manga by Osamu Tezuka, a major figure in the history of graphic novels and animation, perhaps best known as the creator of the beloved Astro Boy. Space Firebird (Phoenix) 2772 and Black Jack were inspired by two of Tezuka's most popular serials.
Sponsors: Consulate General of Japan, San Francisco; the Japan Society of Northern California, The Pacific Film Archive and the Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley.
This program is part of the 150th Anniversary of U.S. - Japan Relations commemorative project, with additional funding from The Japan Foundation Los Angeles Office.
All films will be screened at the Pacific Film Archive Theater (PFA), 2575 Bancroft Way (between College and Telegraph) in Berkeley. For information call 510.642.1412 or visit http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
Schedule of Films
Saturday, November 1, 2003
4:00 pm — Space Firebird 2772 / Hi no tori-2772, a.k.a. Phoenix 2772
Suguru (Taku) Sugiyama (1980). Based on the manga by Osamu Tezuka.
A major link between 1970s European feature-length animation and contemporary Japanese anime, Space Firebird 2772 conjures up cliffhanging moments, fascist threats, natural disasters, and space battles, lending the hero's struggles the epic feel of a classic myth, albeit one framed by a strange, robo-sexual love story between boy pilot and robot girl.
7:00 pm — Only Yesterday / Omoide poroporo
Isao Takahata (1991). Based on the manga by Hotaru Okamoto.
Studio Ghibli producer Nozomu Takahashi in person.
Only Yesterday is perhaps Takahata's best and purest work, and certainly one of the greatest anime films of the last four decades, daring to use Studio Ghiblis jewel-like color and superb command of technique not in the service of depicting fantasy, science fiction, or even war, but to show the infinite value of an ordinary life lived in ordinary times.
9:45 pm — Black Jack
Osamu Dezaki, Fumihiro Yashihara (1996). Based on a story by Osamu Tezuka.
Black Jack takes place in a future in which humanity is fixated on genetic engineering and body-enhancing super-drugs. The mysterious Black Jack lives above the law as a "medical pirate"; the world's finest surgeon, he saves the dying but asks top dollar for his troubles. Written in the 1970s, Black Jack was then famous for its graphic portrayal of medical science and its realistic depictions of the human body (in all its extremes); now, like all great science fiction, it is fascinating for predicting certain elements of "the future" that have almost come to pass.
Sunday, November 2, 2003
3:30 pm — The Cat Returns / Neko no ongaeshi
Hiroyuki Morita (2002). Northern California Premiere!
Studio Ghibli producer Nozomu Takahashi in person.
Followed by panel discussion.
We are pleased to present the much-anticipated new film from Studio Ghibli in an exclusive Northern California screening. Filled with medieval cat-town squares, castle cat-swordfights, and romantic court cat-waltzes, The Cat Returns is pure magic, using its fantastical Errol Flynn-like tale and watercolor-style impressionist animation to illuminate childrens desires to findand bethemselves.
Producer Nozomu Takahashi will join Mark Andrews, Head of Story at Pixar and cultural critic Kaori Shoji in a panel discussion moderated by Professor Russell Merritt. The panel will provide insiders' views of creation and marketing, and consider cross-cultural influences and differences in U.S. and Japanese reception.
7:00 pm — Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind / Kaze no tani no Nausicaä
Hayao Miyazaki (1984). Based on his manga.
A thousand years after genetically engineered weapons have burned civilization to the ground, Nausicaä's eponymous princess — a girl both soldier and scientist — seeks to reconcile the last remnants of her still-warring species with the monstrous biological order overtaking Earth. Based on an early draft of Hayao Miyazaki's thousand-page manga Nausicaä, this award winning anime is a stirring, sweeping epic of war and adventure, and one of the best science-fiction films made anywhere during the 1980s.
Participants
Ambassador Sung-Joo Han, of the Republic of Korea to the USA
Ambassador Han has a Ph.D. in Political Science from UC Berkeley and is a former professor at Korea University. He served as Korean Foreign Minister(1993-1994), United Nations Secretary-General's Special Representative for Cyprus (1996-1997), Member of the UN Inquiry Commission on the 1994 Rwanda Genocide (1999), and Acting President of Korea University (2002-2003).
Susan Shirk is a professor in the University of California San Diego's Graduate School of International Relations. She is also Research Director at the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Dr. Shirk's publications include her books, How China Opened Its Door: The Political Success of the PRC's Foreign Trade and Investment Reforms; The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China; and Competitive Comrades: Career Incentives and Student Strategies in China. Dr. Shirk received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Leon V. Sigal is director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York and author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea, published by Princeton University Press. He was a member of the editorial board of The New York Times from 1989 until 1995 and served in the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, in 1979 as International Affairs Fellow and in 1980 as Special Assistant to the Director.
Richard Koo is a graduate of UC Berkeley and the Johns Hopkins University, and he was a Doctoral Fellow of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System before serving as an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Joined NRI Tokyo in 1984 where he is now the chief economist. Author of many books and a visiting professor of Waseda University. Has served in many government functions ranging from the MoF's committee on financial liberalization to the Defense Agency's study group on national security.
Paul Matthews is Chairman and Chief Investment Officer of Matthews International Capital Management, the Advisor to the Matthews Asian Funds. Mr. Matthews has been investing in the Asian markets since 1982.
Brewer Stone is a Managing Director at East Peak Advisors, a boutique investment bank that focuses on mergers and acquisitions and capital raisings for technology companies including firms located throughout the Pacific Rim. Previously Mr. Stone, who is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, opened Prudential Securities first office in China in 1994 and subsequently headed the firm's Asian investment banking business. Mr. Stone earned his Ph.D. in Government at Harvard, his M.A. in international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and his BA at UC Berkeley.
Defining "Our Country": Exploring Historical Changes in the Conceptions of Korea and Korean-ness
John Frankl, Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Berkeley
October 31, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
Contemporary discourse on definitions of Korea and Korean-ness often revolves around notions of race, as opposed to civilization. Put more concretely, a fictitious racial purity is often posited as the defining characteristic of Korean-ness. This was not always the case. In fact, for the great majority of the history of the peoples who inhabited the Korean peninsula, common culture and civilization, not race, were the prime categories by which "Koreanness" was granted or withheld. The various kingdoms on the Korean peninsula, often proactively, took in and naturalized innumerable people from both East and West, making the present category of a pure Korean race no more than a fabrication. Through concrete historical examples and textual accounts, this colloquium will explore both the open traditional and narrow modern conceptions of Korean identity, as well as the processes by which the former became the latter.
John M. Frankl received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University with a dissertation titled: "'Our Country': Changing Images of the Foreign in Korean Literature and Culture." He has taught courses on Korean literature and history at both Harvard University and Smith College, published numerous translations of works of Korean fiction and poetry, and presented papers at several academic conferences. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Korean Studies, University of California at Berkeley, where he is developing his dissertation to a book manuscript.
Sponsored by a grant from the Korea Foundation.
Japan's Politics of Apology with Korea
Alexis Dudden, Department of History, Connecticut College
Monday, November 3, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies, Center for Korean Studies
What role does "apology" play in Japan's current-day international politics? Most discussions of this question either focus on Japan's inability to apologize for its past aggressions or compare Japanese atonements with that of a supposedly more penitent Germany. This lecture, however, argues that Japan is an apologetic nation according to international standards. The speaker approaches this problem through a selective analysis of Japan's official-level involvement in the politics of apology during the past several decades with special emphasis placed on Japan's relations with Korea. The lecture demonstrates how the Japanese government has co-opted the substance of apology that its historical victims originally wanted for themselves.
This event is free and open to the public.
Drinks will be served.
Qualifying "Quality": Locating and Defining Suzhi in Contemporary Beijing
Terry Woronov, Postdoctoral Fellow, CCS, U.C. Berkeley
November 5, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Shan Sa and Diaspora Literature: a roundtable discussion
Shan Sa, Novelist
Fred Wakeman, Professor, History, UC Berkeley
Karl Britto, Associate Professor, French and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley
November 5, 2003
Roundtable, Lecture will be conducted in French, Chinese, and English, with translation
Center for Chinese Studies, Department of French, French Studies Program
The New Chinese Empire
Ross Terrill, Associate in Research, Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard; Visiting Professor, University of Texas at Austin
November 6, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Chinese Emigration: Aspects of a World History
Philip Kuhn, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History, Harvard
November 7, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Recasting Urban Life: Films from Contemporary China — Film Festival and Directors' Roundtable
November 10-14, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
China's filmmakers are in an optimistic mood at the moment, and this film festival provides an exciting opportunity to find out why by giving participants an early look at the new films and the opportunity to meet the new directors.
In the generation game that seems so popular among Chinese film critics, Teng Huatao, Wu Bing, Zhang Yibai, and Lu Chuan are almost all post-Sixth Generation filmmakers. And they are all based in Beijing, which has become the center of the industry over the last decade.
These young filmmakers are fighting the crisis that overtook Chinese cinema in the late nineties, when it was almost wiped out by Hollywood imports and pirated VCDs. Zhang Yimou's spectacular martial arts epic Hero beefed up everyone's confidence by breaking Titanic's record at the Chinese box office. But big budgets are difficult to come by in China, and the road taken by these filmmakers is representative. Their films draw on genres like romance and action, and are contemporary, urban, and slickly made. With a pragmatic attitude, they have succeeded in appealing to the public, avoiding the wrath of the censors, and winning the hearts of the critics — something almost no previous generation of Chinese filmmakers has achieved.
One film will be screened each night, followed by a short question-and-answer session with the director (in Chinese with translation). On Friday, the directors will be joined by Berkeley faculty to discuss their own works, the work of their contemporaries, and Chinese cinema in general. The four works showcased here reflect changes taking place in contemporary Chinese society — particularly contemporary Beijing — yet represent themes relevant to anyone struggling to find their place in modern society.
Sponsored by:
Center for Chinese Studies
Institute of East Asian Studies
Division of Film Studies, Department of Rhetoric
This program is supported in part by a Title VI grant from the US Department of Education.
Tickets, $4.00, on sale by phone and at Cal Performances Ticket Office.
The ticket office is located at the northeast corner of Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Ticket Office hours are: Mon - Fri, 11 am - 5:30 pm; Sat 1:00 - 5:00, and approximately one hour prior to curtain. For more information about ticket sales call 510.642.9988.
All films will be screened in Wheeler Auditorium. All movies are in Chinese, with English subtitles.
Monday, November 10, 7:30 P.M.
One Hundred 一百个
2001, 88 min.
plus the director, Teng Huatao 滕华弢, in person!
Wheeler Auditorium
All that seventeen-year-olds Ma Hui and Yu Tan have ever thought of is putting on uniforms and becoming real policemen, able to catch real bad guys. When they both fail the police academy entrance exams, it seems that their dreams will never be realized, until local know-it-all Uncle Sun lets them in on a secret — he's been told that if they can catch one hundred petty thieves, the police academy will recruit them. Without a thought they decide then and there to catch one hundred crooks on their own and prove their worth. But their chosen profession does not turn out to be quite what they had expected.
Wednesday, November 12, 7:30 P.M.
The Fragrance of Bitter Tea 苦茶香
2002, 90 min.
plus the director, Wu Bing 吴兵, in person!
Wheeler Auditorium
Recently retired Fu Qing must adjust to her new role in life, and persuade her son Fu Qiang that she will not be lonely living alone. When she meets and then gradually become friends with neighbor Zheng Shi — whose equally busy son also worries about his widower father — their children can't help but hope that love is in the air. But life is never certain and, like good tea, is often bitter and sweet at the same time.
Thursday, November 13, 7:30 P.M.
Spring Subway 开往春天的地铁
2002, 93 min.
plus the director, Zhang Yibai 张一白, in person!
Wheeler Auditorium
Jian Bin can only kill time all day by riding the subway... at least until he can work up the courage to tell his wife that he lost his job three months ago. Despondent and unsure of himself, Jian Bin finds himself unable to communicate with his wife and strangely drawn to a young kindergarten teacher he does not know. Meanwhile, his wife, Xiao Hui, is being crushed by the growing distance between them, and finds herself drawn towards a sympathetic local bar owner. Whether this marriage will come to an end or whether the dulled passion of Jian Bin and Xiao Hui can be rekindled all depends on where the spring subway is leading them.
Friday, November 14, 5:00-7:00 P.M.
Director's Roundtable — Beijing: Cinema City
Wheeler Auditorium
Though the old centers of Chinese film-making used to be Shanghai and Hong Kong, over the last fifteen years Beijing has unexpectedly emerged as the as both the epicenter of the Chinese film industry and the setting for many of its most groudbreaking films. In this roundtable discussion with four Beijing filmmakers, we explore the city's output, the conditions of production, and the image of the city on film. With:
Teng Huatao 滕华弢
Wu Bing 吴兵
Zhang Yibai 张一白
Chris Berry, Associate Professor, Film Studies
In Chinese with English translation.
Free and open to the public.
Friday, November 14, 7:30 P.M.
Missing Gun 寻枪
2002, 90 min.
Wheeler Auditorium
Ma Shan, an ordinary cop in a small hinterlands town, faces the darkest time in his life when he wakes up one morning to discover that his sidearm has disappeared! Searching frantically for his missing gun, Ma Shan finds suspicion in every face and discovers that, in one night, the little town that he thought he knew too well has become completely foreign and full of deception and danger. When Ma Shan's first love, Li Xiaoming, whom he hasn't seen in over ten years, suddenly appears and is then found murdered, the case of the missing gun becomes even more perplexing!
Film Screening: One Hundred 一百个
November 10, 2003
7:30 p.m.
Wheeler Auditorium
Film Festival and Director's Roundtable
Center for Chinese Studies
Film Screening: The Fragrance of Bitter Tea 苦茶香
November 12, 2003
7:30 p.m.
Wheeler Auditorium
Film Festival and Director's Roundtable
Center for Chinese Studies
Art Imitates Life: The Avant-Garde Works of Akasegawa Genpei
Reiko Tomii, Independent Scholar, Japanese Modern Art
November 13, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies, History of Art
The Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei first emerged in the vanguard scenes of Tokyo as a member of Hi Red Center in the early 1960s. An adept practitioner of Anti-Art, Akasegawa deployed a methodology that can be best summarized as "art imitating life." This interventional mode of operation could have real-life consequences, as amply demonstrated by his replica 1,000-yen note (1963), which lead to a criminal trial of the artist in 1966. This lecture examines Akasegawa's works before and after the trial, from Hi Red Center's Cleaning Event (1964) to The Sakura Illustrated, within a changing socio-political and cultural context.
Reiko Tomii is an art historian, curator, writer, translator, and editor, based in New York. Since 1992, she has worked as an independent scholar and curator with museums in Japan, Europe, and the United States. She has been a regular columnist for the Tokyo-based thrice monthly publication Shin Bijutsu Shinbun (New Art Newspaper) since 1996.
This event is free and open to the public.
Film Screening: Spring Subway 开往春天的地铁
November 13, 2003
7:30 p.m.
Wheeler Auditorium
Film Festival and Director's Roundtable
Center for Chinese Studies
Female Experience and Feminist Identity: The Case of Lee Tai-Young (1914-1988), the First Woman Lawyer in South Korea
Haesook Kim, Long Island University
November 14, 2003
Center for Korean Studies
The Korean legal profession remained exclusively male until 1952, when Lee Tai-Young passed the judicial examination, the sole gateway to the elite Korean legal profession. How was she able to imagine the previously-unimaginable? How was Lee Tai-Young able to chart a career that no woman had traveled before? To answer these questions, this talk focuses on Lee Tai-Young's formative years. Her childhood, education and marriage, most of which took place during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), can be seen as important factors that influenced her unique career. It concludes with an account of how she was able to become the first woman to pass the judicial examination. Her life history serves as a case study of a woman who struggled between feminist and feminine identities in the process of achieving her goal in a modernizing society.
Haesook Kim is Associate Professor of Sociology at Long Island University, having received her PhD in Sociology from Columbia University. She has given invited lectures at major universities, presented a number of papers at scholarly conventions, and has written numerous articles and book chapters. She is currently serving as a Trustee of the Law and Society Association and is working on a book manuscript entitled "Women and Law in Postwar Korea."
Free and open to the public.
Sponsored by a grant from the Korea Foundation.
Director's Roundtable — Beijing: Cinema City
November 14, 2003
5:00-7:00 p.m.
Wheeler Auditorium
Film Festival and Director's Roundtable
Center for Chinese Studies
Film Screening: Missing Gun 寻枪
November 14, 2003
7:30 p.m.
Wheeler Auditorium
Film Festival and Director's Roundtable
Center for Chinese Studies
Theoretical Issues in the Study of Rural and Small-Town China
November 14-15, 2003
Friday 8:30 am - 5:30 pm
Saturday 8:30 am - 1:30 pm
Workshop
Center for Chinese Studies
Description Co-organized by Mayfair Yang 楊美惠, U.C. Santa Barbara, Anthropology) and You-tien Hsing 郉幼田 (U.C. Berkeley, Geography)
Much of the ongoing development of social and critical theory in the academic world issues from the specific historical experiences of the West and its global encounters and interventions. The experiences of Chinese modernity have equal claim to shaping the contours of social theory, yet this claim has not been adequately realized due to the tendency of China Studies to address mainly other China scholars, and its focus on descriptive studies treating China as a special case, rather than an arena of processes of modernity. We envision this conference as an opportunity to engage with a larger body of interdisciplinary theoretical reflection and to get out of the mold of "area studies" (China Studies) and descriptive studies. Thus, we urge participants to place their empirical studies of postsocialist rural and small-town China in a broader historical and global context, and to engage with and challenge reigning (Western) theories of modernity, power, globalization, the modern state and governmentality, nationalism, subjectivity, gender and sexuality, capitalism, and postcolonialism.
Theory can be thought of as a domain of intellectual inquiry that combines empirical specificity with a desire for greater generalizability and mediates between groundedness in reality and a certain license of speculation and social critique. Theory also reflects upon the grounds of knowledge and upon the process by which it is produced, and gives insight into the social aims and effects of knowledge. Modern knowledge and social theory have not only been the means through which we have understood China, but more importantly, they have had major effects on the shaping of Chinese reality, sometimes with disastrous consequences in the 20th century. Thus, in examining the recent changes in rural and small-town China, it is incumbent upon us to be aware of the inadequacies of reigning theories, critical of the social effects of dominant knowledge systems, and participate in producing alternative theory and knowledge.
The categories of "the rural" or "the peasant" are not innocent, timeless, or natural domains of life or subjectivity. First, they derive meaning only in relation to the categories of "the urban" and "the modern" (against which they are opposed), and such subjectivities as "intellectual," "worker," and "urban resident." Although Chinese civilization has had urban concentrations since antiquity and urban development received a boost with the commercial and urban revolution of the Song Dynasty, it was not until the modern era of industrialization and semi-colonial penetration that "rural" and "urban" came to be drawn in stark relief and opposition. Before the 20th century, there was more of a rural-urban continuum, where the two domains were linked closely by strong networks of trade, ritual, kinship, and native-place ties. In the 20th century, with the complexity of the division of labor in industrialized production, the decline of kinship and ritual as principles of urban social organization, and the urban outward orientation towards the West and Japan, rural and urban came to be increasingly distinguished. Second, the category of "the rural" became increasingly caught up in modern discourses of power introduced from the West and perfected by the new Chinese intelligentsia, that positions anything "rural" in opposition to "progress", "the modern", "nationalism" and "science," while associating "the rural" with stagnation, "backwardness," "feudalism,"and "superstition." Third, although the Chinese Communists spoke of "liberating" rural people from landlords and feudal tradition, their very language and many of their policies had the effect of strengthening and crystallizing the inequities between rural and urban lives. In replacing the old indigenous language of farmer (nongfu, nongjia) with the modern category of "peasant" (nongmin), the Communists imported from a European discourse with its associations of peasantry with feudal serfdom, dependency, and subsistence economy (Cohen 1993). This discourse of "peasantry" was at odds with the actual situation in China (especially the south) of the highly commercialized nature of agriculture and handicrafts, the autonomy of farming households, the fluid social mobility, and the rural-urban continuum before the 20th century. The radical collectivization of the Great Leap Forward led to a disastrous famine that affected mainly rural people. The system of household registration which fixed the categories of urban and rural residents secured the unequal division of rural and urban privileges and created a caste-like system trapping rural people in the impoverished countryside. Thus, we see here that "the rural" in China is just as much a product of new knowledge and discourse, and the state manufacturing of subjects and state reconfiguring of space, as the result of economic development.
In recent years, the double digit economic growth in China that has astounded the world has been accompanied in the Western academic world by a radical rethinking of the comparative history of Europe and China. For so long the common wisdom was that, ever since the Renaissance, Europe catapulted itself out of the Middle Ages and has been on the ascendancy, and that the Industrial Revolution and European world domination in the 19th and 20th centuries were natural outcomes of this long historical process. Recent revisionist scholarship by Kenneth Pomeranz, Andre Gunder Frank, and Bin Wong, now question this early European domination thesis. They argue that in terms of commercialization, extensiveness of trading networks, material standards of living, production output, and complexity of division of labor and the economy, China equaled or surpassed Europe in every respect until only the beginning of the 19th century. For Pomeranz, what propelled Europe to overtake China in economic production was the discovery of coal on the one hand, that led to a resource-based rather than labor-intensive growth, and on the other hand, the New World and other colonies, that provided raw materials and slave labor to Europe. This thesis of a very late tilting of the balance between European and Chinese world systems then calls into question the whole Eurocentric evolutionary framework and later modernization theory approach to understanding the modern world, shared by several generations of Chinese intellectuals and governmental agents. It challenges the May Fourth, Guomindang and Communist convictions that the only way to modernize China and develop economically was to completely dismantle traditional institutions and cultures because intrinsically, they were obstacles to modernity. The significance of this revisionist thesis is that it shows that late imperial China, which was primarily rural, was entirely capable of sustaining a dynamic economic system with its own cultural institutions and practices, indeed, had produced a regional world system of its own. Therefore, we can surmise that, with the post-Mao reforms, there is a reconnecting with the internal dynamics that have fueled the Chinese economy since the Song commercial revolution, and that the revival and reconfiguration of these older dynamics are helping to fuel the current period of economic growth in China. The fact that the current Chinese economic growth stems mainly from the productivity of small household industries, town and village enterprises, and rural labor, rather than large state-owned urban enterprises, suggests that rural people and rural social institutions may not be as stagnant and ill-adaptable to modernity as various forms of modernist discourse, whether liberal, evolutionary, colonial, or Marxist, had assumed.
If this finding that what enabled Europe to forge ahead of China economically was a matter of historical contingency rather than the intrinsic nature of cultural institutions or practices is tenable, then we need to seriously rethink the current revival of Chinese economic power, and the portrayal of "the rural" in China that has been presented to us in the past century. Why are so many rural people so eager to resurrect and remake traditional cultural forms and institutions today in China? It is possible that such features of traditional Chinese rural cultural forms as family and kinship systems, religious and cosmological orders, political-economic organizations, and sex-gender systems all possess a resilience, self-correcting adaptability, and dynamism of their own that make them not only compatible with the modern order, but also necessary to its very production and maintenance. In time, they may even seek to reconstruct the modern urban-dominated order according to their own logics.
In the post-Mao era, rural and small-town people have experienced dramatic changes in one generation, and we would like to address some of these changes:
- The return of commercial life has produced both a geographic and social mobility that was unthinkable just over a decade before. Rural people are on the march across the country to urban areas as migrant laborers, and many entrepreneurial rural households have experienced upward social mobility.
- With the weakening of the household registration system, many rural people have become de facto urban residents, and the growth of small-towns and frequent travel between rural and urban areas have in many ways revived the rural-urban continuum.
- The commodification of labor has produced both the disturbing exploitation of cheap labor in domestic-run mines and factories and transnational capitalist operations, as well as the emigration of rural people and their kinship networks to far-off places around the world. There is a reconfiguration of class relations from the old Maoist political class-status order to a new economic class order more familiar to Marxist analysis. At the same time, Marxist theory cannot encompass all the current changes.
- Although the economic autonomy of rural household production returned in the 1980's with de-collectivization, it is once again threatened after two decades, not by the old state socialist administrative system, but by new capitalist developmentalist forces, as land is again being gathered up and concentrated in the hands of private and state agencies through market strategies.
- The rapidly changing rural societies have also shaped, and been shaped by the transformation of the state and the nature of local governance. Issues like the relationship between the emerging business class and local bureaucrats, the reconfiguration of village politics in the more diversified and fluid village, and the evolution of rural-urban linkage and divide, as well as the blurring boundaries between them, are crucial in our understanding of the dynamism of rural China.
- With the decline of state feminism, rural men and women now do not work side by side in the fields to the same extent as before. New gender divisions of labor have been introduced, where the men become migrant laborers or entrepreneurs in towns and cities, and women stay to manage and work the farms. Sometimes women themselves migrate to urban areas, working in urban factories, selling their domestic labor in the homes of the emerging urban middle-class, or even selling their bodies in the burgeoning sex industry.
- The revival and re-invention of popular religion and ritual practices (ancestor worship, deity temples, spirit mediums, geomancy, Daoist, Buddhist, and Christian ritual activities) have not only enriched the lives of rural people, but also introduced interesting new organizational forms to the countryside and small towns, where the state was the only form of social organization before. Now rural people form communities, associations, and charitable foundations on the basis of shared ritual and worship activities centered on lineages and ancestor halls, local gods and goddesses, and local temples or churches.
- Through increased travel, migration, trade, emigration, and mass media, rural and small-town people in China are increasingly connected to the larger world outside, whether within China, or outside of China. They are increasingly embedded in larger and more extensive informational, kinship, economic and ritual networks that stretch across China and even transnationally across the world.
How are we to theoretically frame these disparate historical developments in rural China? How do we conceptualize the global and theoretical significance of these changes? These are questions we hope to address at our conference.
Schedule
Friday, November 14, 2003
8:30-9:00 am — Introduction and Welcome
9:00 am-12:30 pm — Panel 1: Political Economy and Politics
"Unearthing the processes of change: Vibrant bottom-up processes in the fee-to-tax reform in contemporary rural China" — Linda Chelan Li 李芝蘭, City University of Hong Kong
"Creating Rural-Urban Boundaries: Rural Workers in Cities and Regimes of Re-rustication in China" — Lei Guang 光磊, Political Science, San Diego State University
"Politics of Privatization in Chinese Rural Industry" — Jianjun Zhang 張建君, Sociology, U.C. Berkeley
"The triple movement of farmland conversion in China" — You-tien Hsing 郉幼田, Geography, U.C. Berkeley
12:30-2:00 pm — Lunch Break
2:00-5:00 pm — Panel 2: New Institutional Structures and Social Formations
Chair & Discussant: Xin Liu 劉新, Anthropology, U.C. Berkeley
"Secular Sovereignty and the Re-sacralization of Rural Communities in Southeast China" — Mayfair Yang 楊美惠, Anthropology, U.C. Santa Barbara
"Anthropology and the Theorization of Citizenship" — Andrew Kipnis 任柯安, Contemporary China Centre, Australian National University, Canberra
"Participatory Practices and the International Agenda in Northwest Yunnan" — Ralph Litzinger 李瑞, Cultural Anthropology, Duke University
Saturday, November 15, 2003
8:30-10:30 am — Panel 3: Gender and Sexuality in Rural Transformation
Chair & Discussant: Lisa Rofel, Anthropology, U.C. Santa Cruz
"Making Waves Without Wind?: Modernity and Transactional Sex in Sipsong Panna" — Sandra Hyde 海桑黛, Anthropology, McGill University
"Gender, Mobility, Spatial Subjectivity: Emerging Miao Translocalities" — Louisa Schein 路易莎, Anthropology, Rutgers University
10:30 am-1:30 pm — Panel 4: Peasants in Movement: Migrant Laborers and Transnational Migration
Chair & Discussant: Li Zhang 張鸝, Anthropology, U.C. Davis
"The Labor Subject of the Chinese Transition" — Ching-kwan Lee 李静君, Sociology, University of Michigan
"Traditional Lineage and Transnational Social Practice" — Ping Song 宋平, Research Institute of Anthropology, Xiamen University
"The Economic Law and Liminal Subjects: An Analysis of Rural Migrant Women" — Hairong Yan 嚴海蓉, Society of Fellows, Princeton University
Abstracts
1. Creating Rural-Urban Boundaries: Rural Workers in Cities and Regimes of Re-rustication in China
Lei Guang 光磊
Department of Political Science
San Diego State University
The rural-urban distinction represents a most significant social divide in China. Yet the boundaries between the rural and urban spaces have shifted over time. This paper examines how the Chinese state has created and re-created rural-urban boundaries in the country from the 1950s to the 1990s through repeated campaigns to clean out rural workers in cities and to re-settle them in the countryside. I label such practices as "re-rustication" and employ the concept of "regimes of re-rustication" to describe the changing norms and practices directed by a variety of state actors toward the goal of forcibly returning peasant workers to the countryside. Specifically, I analyze three different "regimes of re-rustication" involved in the campaigns to repatriate rural workers in 1960-62, 1972-73 and the late 1990s. Such campaigns span three distinctive periods of China's political economy: the transition to state socialism in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the era of high state socialism in the late 1960s and 1970s; and transition away from state socialism in the 1980s and 1990s. They are predicated upon, and help to bring about, the changing boundaries between the city and the country in contemporary China.
2. Anthropology and the Theorization of Citizenship
Andrew Kipnis 任柯安
Contemporary China Centre
Research School of Pacific-Asia Studies
Australian National University, Canberra
The social effects of the PRC's household registration policy are well known to scholars working in rural China or among rural migrants in China's urban centers. As Dorothy Solinger suggests in Contesting Citizenship in Urban China, the policy can be seen as a mode of regulating access to citizenship rights that is especially disadvantageous for those who have been labeled "peasants." Building on Solinger, in this paper I argue the case for the importance of theorizing citizenship as an independent axis of social inequality in the contemporary world.
As I foil, I take two intertwined tendencies within anthropological writings on migration. First is the historical trend of anthropology as a discipline to theorize against the grain of the nation-state. Second is the tendency within anthropological studies of trans-nationalism and migration to theorize their subject in terms of Marxian understandings of class and exploitation or in terms of the intersecting dimensions of race, class and gender (but not citizenship). The result of these approaches is to elide the role of national boundaries and citizenship as significant theoretical objects in themselves. While the economic exploitation of migrant workers is common, I argue that the tendency to theorize citizenship in terms of Marxian understandings of class produces many blind spots. In the case of contemporary Chinese labor migration, such a strategy is especially counterproductive as the household registration policy itself has its ideological origins in Marxism.
To theorize citizenship, I begin with a brief contrast of the production of migrant "illegality" in three national contexts: the United States, China and Australia. Despite their differences, each of these cases provides grounds for conceptualizing citizenship as an independent axis of social differentiation and inequality. I conclude by moving to a broad consideration of the practical and political possibilities of global citizenship.
3. Gender, Mobility, Spatial Subjectivity: Emerging Miao Translocalities
Louisa Schein 路易莎
Anthropology Department
Rutgers University
The reform era, especially the 1990s, has seen an unprecedented movement of women out of the Miao highland villages that represent some of the most remote regions of China. Some are typical "dagong" laborers, but some occupy special niches as performers and entertainers, or as craftswomen, in work that exploits what are perceived as particular Miao skills. Others are highly successful professionals and entrepreneurs, most of whom got their starts much earlier with patronage by the Maoist state. An increasing number are brides of men in Han regions where the birth planning policy and economic upheavals have created a demand for "diligent" and more accessible women.
This paper presents such Miao women — whether those who are living outside or those who have returned to their villages — not as an aggregate under the rubric "internal migration" but rather in terms of the specific practices of translocality that their sojourning at a distance entails. Not only the presence of Miao people, especially young women, across all of China, but also the linkages and interconnections that they produce between regions, create the conditions for significant translocal networks and reconfigurations of space. How is space and belonging conceived among both migrants and those in home villages? Has the notion of "home" become plural or expanded, and how does "nation" figure? How does place, and/or the experience of being "out of place," get narrated in terms of bodies, cultures, languages, style? Concomitantly, what new forms of place-making are emerging as artifacts of such dislocations? And most importantly, how might spatial subjectivities be recast under translocal conditions? Could the transformative presence of Miao on the move stand to trouble that longstanding scale hierarchy in which minority regions signify the most diminutive of localities while Han and urban areas invariably are ranked above them?
4. "Making Waves Without Wind?: Modernity and Transactional Sex in Sipsong Panna"
Sandra Hyde 海桑黛
Department of Anthropology
McGill University
The current resurgence of Western theoretical interest in the concept of Chinese national identity embraces the question of how China's minority identities fit selectively into what Lucian Pye calls problem of identifying those who belong to the collective 'we' and those who are the 'they'. Rather than reifying the gap between the them, and the us, here I build on Pye?s work to interrogate the nested character of identity and gender among Han migrants, women from rural Sichuan and Guizhou, in Sipsong Panna (Xishuangbanna in Mandarin) in southern Yunnan. It is precisely the ramifications of Sipsong Panna?s status as a predominantly minority, Chinese-administered region, firmly linked to the economic and political regimes of Southeast Asia since the 13th century, that sets it apart from many other tourist sites in Southwest China. In this paper, I attempt to show that the Chinese project of modernization, and thus tourism, includes economic benefits, the rise in women?s status, and its downsides, the return to treating women as glorified concubines in a now global economic order. From an ethnographic standpoint, I examine the many layers of how the local moral and gender economies are asserted, maintained, and manipulated by these migrant women. The post-Mao resurgence in the ability of citizens to openly consume multiple lovers, pay for transactional sex, and adopt second wives, marks a shift in economic and sexual status, and ushers in new ways of theoretically understanding the meaning of modernity under the late socialist Chinese state.
5. Secular Sovereignty and the Re-sacralization of Rural Communities in Southeast China
Mayfair Yang 楊美惠
Anthropology Department
U.C. Santa Barbara
With the introduction of newly imported notions as "religion," "superstition," and linear evolutionism, modern Chinese state sovereignty was determined not only to become secular itself, but to cleanse the rural areas of such counter-modern beings as gods, goddesses, ancestors, ghosts and other divine forces. However, these forces will not so easily be dispatched. They insist on claiming their space in rural Chinese modernity, and since the 1980's in rural Wenzhou, they have quietly begun to reterritorialize sovereignty's rural domain. The rebuilding of rural identities and communities through the carving out of ritual territory, and the reconstruction of social memory through the biographies of gods, lineage genealogies, and temple histories, cannot be easily encapsulated by the liberal and secular concept of "civil society." Civil society is entirely compatible with nation-state: its national history and time, national identity, national economy, and national administrative territory. These rural communities and activities grounded in the sacred, however, loosen their subjects from the hold of national time, identity, and space, propelling them into a larger cosmos. Whereas Chinese modernity seeks a radical rupture with the past and the embrace of Western modernity, these grass-roots divine forces work to reconnect the present with the past and incorporate the outside into its own cosmological realm.
6. Politics of Privatization in Chinese Rural Industry
Jianjun Zhang 張建君
Department of Sociology
University of California at Berkeley
The once miraculous Chinese rural industry (so-called township-village enterprises) has undergone massive privatization in the late 1990s. However, very limited scholarly work so far has been done to analyze this phenomenon and its implications. This paper tries to fill this gap. By comparing two strikingly different approaches to privatization in Sunan and Wenzhou (manipulated versus transparent privatization), it shows how political constraints played important roles in deciding what privatization method was adopted, even though the primary purpose of privatization was to increase economic efficiency in both regions.
The paper first describes the different methods to privatization in the two regions. Then it scrutinizes why the privatization methods in the two regions were so different. While different fiscal, administrative, and informational constraints might explain some variance in privatization method, the fundamental reason, I argue, lies in the different political constraints the two regions faced. It is power structure that accounts for who were in and who were out, whose interest was considered, etc. And then the paper discusses the impact of different methods to privatization upon asset pricing. Whereas manipulated privatization in Sunan led to rampant asset erosion and serious underpricing, open bidding in Wenzhou somewhat prevented such results.
7. Participatory Practices and the International Agenda in Northwest Yunnan
Ralph Litzinger 李瑞
Department of Cultural Anthropology
Duke University
Throughout the reform period, anthropologists have gained unprecedented access to rural communities in China. As a result, detailed ethnographic studies, based predominantly on participant observation methodologies, have charted everything from the reemergence of traditional kinship systems, to the revival of popular religions, to rural-urban migrations, and the cultural politics of sexuality and gender. Yet, the reform period, especially since the mid-1990s, has seen the proliferation of international development activity in the countryside. Many of these nongovernmental organizations and multilateral institutions have been popularizing practices of participatory research and participatory development, with the aim of mapping the social and economic conditions of rural China and promoting new forms of community involvement in development agendas. If, as many commentators over the last two decades have suggested, the concept of culture has been thoroughly unleashed from the disciplinary control of anthropology, then so has the concept of participation.
This paper will examine participatory practices of knowledge production and their relation to the politics of development in northwest Yunnan. Specifically, I analyze two participatory research projects. The first is an Asian Development Bank - Global Environmental Forum (World Bank) project to study biodiversity and agro-biodiversity conservation initiatives in the Meili snow mountain region of Deqin County, Yunnan. The second, also based in Deqin County, is a study commissioned by The Nature Conservancy to assess impacts of the proposed Kawagebo Nature Reserve on local communities. I am interested, on the one hand, on what these studies tell us about social and economic conditions in northwest Yunnan, and, on the other, how we understand these studies, with their obsessive celebration of participatory development, in relation to theories of governmentality. Ultimately, this paper works toward a new conceptual and political conceptualization of the rural, as a space defined not only in opposition to the urban and the modern, but also a space crosscut by multiple movements of power, discourse, capital, and utopian promises of a better life.
8. The Economic Law and Liminal Subjects: An Analysis of Rural Migrant Women
Hairong Yan 嚴海蓉
Society of Fellows
Princeton University
This paper continues from my analysis of the spectralization of the rural elsewhere. I begin with discussions by migrants about why they are unwilling or unable to return to the countryside. The countryside is a refuge from the painful class positioning that many see themselves unable to transcend in the city. Yet many more are not willing to give up the struggle; as one migrant woman states her struggle for a value of the self, "I will struggle to live on to prove that I cannot possibly be just zero." If migration is analogized as a form of rites of passage, then migrants are liminal subjects in an open-ended process that does not guarantee any certainty of a ritual closure. While I analyze the dreams and grievances of migrants through their poems, letters and conversations on the one hand, I juxtapose their struggles with elite encouragements calling for migrants to fulfill their historical agency ordained by the law of economic development. Can the everyday experiences of the migrants be subsumed by the law of economic development? What kinds of self-representations are possible? How do some migrant women negotiate a self-representation in the hegemonic discourse of development when such a self-representation includes continued poverty, illness, and misery? How do other migrants critique such self-representation and refuse to participate in it? I will analyze these questions and end this chapter by discussing a politics of presence that turns the seemingly passive and unconscious presence of migrant labor being consumed and depleted into a conscious and political act of trying to be a presence that demands and pressures.
9. The Labor Subject of the Chinese Transition
Ching-kwan Lee 李静君
Department of Sociology
University of Michigan
As China becomes the world's workshop, two segments of the Chinese working class have turned increasingly restive in the past decade. Workers in both old industrial bases and new global export zones have registered rising trends of unrest, staging protests in front of government offices, blocking railways and city streets, carrying Mao's portraits and the constitution, chanting slogans of "legal rights" and "survival needs". Are these class struggles or citizens' mobilizations, gesturing potentials for class formation and demands for citizenship? This paper argues that both the labor subjects and the industrial society emerging in reform China depart from those under liberal-democratic capitalism, the historical reference for most theories on labor as a modern subject. Drawing on a comparative ethnographic study of rural migrant workers and urban state sector workers in two provinces, Guangdong and Liaoning, where two polar types of labor unrest are most salient, I argue that Chinese labor activism cannot be fully captured by conventional notions of "class" or "citizenship". It is because the Chinese workplace is marked by a conspicuous absence of both law and contract, and Chinese society allows little political space for civil society organizing. Instead, I propose a pragmatically radical "mass subject", cast in Chinese terms as the "masses" (qunzhong) and "weak and deprived groups" (ruoshi qunti), which is exerting pressures and putting limits to commodification and state domination. The paper analyzes the dynamic and organizational resources for the formation of such labor subjects and broaches the tendencies for their transformation.
10. The triple movement of farm land conversion in China
You-tien Hsing 郉幼田
Department of Geography
UC Berkeley
China's rapid urban expansion and its massive loss of the farmland has been a concern for environmentalists. The city government's expropriation of farmland and farmers' protests over compensation issues have also been reported. But most of the reports have been urban-biased. They treated the urban sector as the only driving force in urban expansion, while the rural population was victimized as a homogeneous body of peasants who were forced out of their land in the face of urban expansion. In this paper I will try to expand this observation by looking at the forces that come in multiple directions. I argue that the process of urbanization in today's China has been much accelerated by the triple forces from both the urban and the rural sectors. These three forces raced to harvest the increasing land rents from non-farm uses of land, especially in the rural-urban interface area in China's fast-growing regions.
The first force of farmland conversion was the city government (at the city, district and county levels) at the urban end. The city government had the legitimacy as the designated representative of the state-owned land, and was fortified by the doctrines of capitalist urban planning. The city government tried to incorporate farmland into the state land ownership and management system in order to consolidate the revenue bases and to discipline the rural segments within its jurisdiction. The second force came from the rural area. The village and township cadres took the advantage of their access to local information networks and raced to sell land rights and build commercial projects before the city did. Through the control over the farmland and development projects, these rural cadres informally expanded their limited administrative authority granted by the formal bureaucratic system. The third force was the villagers under the unbalanced power relationship with the cadres and the uncertain farmland tenure system. In order to ensure their rights over the land lots that were allocated to them under the household responsibility system, villagers stretched the boundary and fenced the site for family housing and occupied additional farmland for non-farm purposes. These three forces shared the concern of accumulation, yet they also had diverse goals in their competition to convert the farmland. For the city government the goal was to consolidate territorial governance; for rural cadres it was to expand the limited administrative authority. As for the villagers, converting the farmland for non-farm uses was a way to ensure their land rights and protect them from the local cadres. These three groups of actors, with their shared and diverse goals and strategies, have together contributed to the accelerated the pace of urban expansion in the rural-urban interface area in China's fast growing regions.
With this story of the triple forces of farmland conversion in today's China, I hope to contribute to the theoretical debate over the connection between property rights and economic development, and that of the mechanism of environmental degradation in rapidly urbanizing regions. The binary distinction between the public and private ownership system, and that between the "destructive force" and the "born guardian" of the environment will be re-examined.
11. Traditional Lineage and Transnational Social Practice
Ping Song 宋平
Research Institute of Anthropology
Xiamen University
Lineage in rural China has been regarded in the 20th century a typical traditional cultural form and institution. The Communists categorized kinship and religious system as feudal organizations and tried to uproot them from rural societies in China. In fact, since Ming dynasty, lineage or clan organization had shown dynamism of its own and a strong penetrative power when it encountered with modern factors. In the late 1980s, Scholars who have studied Chinese social history noticed the spectacular revival in rural areas of clan associations, which had been on the wane since the late 1950s. Their explanations of the phenomenon can be summed up in two main viewpoints. Firstly, although the reform programme of modern state power was designed to bring about the transformation of traditional and social primary organizations, in order to maintain stability, the state simultaneously had to make use of old and well-tried patterns of primary social organization. In this contradictory way, this allowed space for the persistence of clan organization and even for its further development. Second, clan organization itself has great vitality which stems from the positive functions it performs: such as promotion of mutual help, emphasizing service for the public good and co-ordinating and channeling the energy of the human resources within the community to achieve a common goal. However, both these explanations have tended to focus on the mainland factors and what is neglected is the influence from Chinese overseas. In fact, Chinese overseas have devoted highly visible efforts to restoring lineage organizations in their hometowns since China opened its doors. Consequently, the transnational ties facilitated by these kinds of institutions are forged. It is remarkable that in the process of constituting these transnational connections, the clan identity plays an important role as the Zheng lineage case has shown.
The perspective used here, is to see a lineage not as a static, fixed entity, based upon the natural phenomenon of kinship, but as a dynamic, historically embedded phenomenon, based as much on cultural imagination (fictive kinship) as on biological natural ties. In the positive reception of Benedict Anderson's idea that the nation is an imagined community, it is often forgotten that lineage and locality are just as much 'imagined communities' as the nation. The method used here to approach lineage, locality, and region is that of network study. The questions discussed here are that: How this traditional institution has been activated by transnational social practice of migrants in the context of modernization of China. And why they possess great vitality even in the global age.
Changing Security Relations in East Asia: New Challenges for Japan
Donald Emmerson, Stanford University
Lowell Dittmer, UC Berkeley
Yoshihide Soeya, Keio University
Matake Kamiya, Japanese Defense Academy
Akiko Fukushima, Tokyo University
November 18, 2003
Institute of East Asian Studies, Japan Society of Northern California, Asia Foundation
Join UC Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), the Japan Society of Northern California and the Asia Foundation for an in-depth look at Japan's changing role in the international security arena. Professors Donald Emmerson (Stanford University) and Lowell Dittmer (UC Berkeley) will join Professors Yoshihide Soeya (Keio University), Matake Kamiya (Japanese Defense Academy) and Akiko Fukushima (Tokyo University) to discuss the major challenges facing Japan including: Japan's status as a 'normal' nation with regard to its security, its ability to maintain strong bi-lateral ties with the United States while developing multilateral relations with its neighbors, asserting its own foreign policy agenda, and participating in peacekeeping missions and providing military support for collective security in spite of Japan's traditionally non-interventionist foreign policy.
For more information, please contact the Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley at 510/642-2809 or the Japan Society at 415/986-4383.
One Thousand Bodies of Impotence: Social Restratification in Post-socialist China
Everett Zhang, Postdoctoral Fellow, Social Medicine, Harvard
November 19, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Imaging War: Japanese Media Printed between 1931 and 1948
David Earhart, Museum of Art & Culture, University of Montana
November 20, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies
World War II in the Pacific (1937-1945) left much of Japan devastated and most Japanese demoralized. From the outset, Japan's military and political leaders defined the war as an ideological struggle, drawing deeply on cultural reserves and radically redefining national identity. By the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the semi-military government controlled nearly every facet of civilian life, including the mass media that, especially in print form, became an indispensable tool in directing the population. Under the strict supervision of the Japanese government's Information Bureau, wartime publications propagated the government's messages of solidarity, spiritual superiority, military invincibility, self-sacrifice, and the determination to fight to the death.
By war's end, between 2.1 and 2.7 million Japanese (representing 3 to 4 percent of the total population) were dead, over 60% of Japan's urban areas lay in ruins, and 17 million other inhabitants of greater East Asia had lost their lives in the conflict. Even now, the tension between history and memory of the war is particularly acute in Japan and wartime publications are painful reminders of a time of great suffering and monumental failure. Understandably, most Japanese want to consign these reminders to the rubbish heap of history. Besides, the Japanese wartime press has been dismissed by scholars on both sides of the Pacific as monolithic, propagandistic, and rife with inaccuracies.
Even so, the daily newspaper or weekly newsmagazine was at the time a lifeline for people on the home front, often serving as the only source of information about an overseas war that directly involved relatives, neighbors, and friends. To see the war through the eyes of contemporary Japanese, without the benefit of hindsight, is not only a key to understanding how the war was experienced on the Japanese home front, it is helpful in comparing how members of modern societies evaluate media-moderated reality. Americans today who are confused by the seeming inconsistencies and nearly instantaneous revisionism of the reportage of events in Afghanistan and Iraq will find interesting parallels in the Japanese media's presentation of the events surrounding World War II in Asia.
This presentation includes some 100 slides, all of them made directly from contemporary Japanese wartime publications in the collection of the presenter. The slides are arranged diachronically to show a cross-section of wartime society and chronologically to show how a reportorial narrative emerged over the course of the war. The emperor was the titular and spiritual head of wartime Japan. In his name the entire war was prosecuted, and so the discussion begins with him. The soldiers and sailors were the arms and legs of the emperor, carrying out his will. They were always fearless, loyal, and ready to selflessly give their lives for the glory of the empire. Thanks to these valiant men, Japan had never lost a war and never been occupied by a foreign invader. During the war, the ideal Japanese woman could be characterized as a "national defense wife." Women played many roles. In addition to being wives, mothers, and homemakers, they were also responsible for boosting morale, performing volunteer war work, and filling roles left vacant by conscripts. The burden of defending the homeland against air raids and invasion often fell largely upon women. Children were often referred to as "little citizens" in war publications, which showed them directly participating in the war effort as the tide turned against Japan. By war's end, children were often pictured taking on many adult responsibilities, including that of combatant. Conspicuously absent from these wartime publications are civilian men, since able-bodied men were expected to be at the front.
The reportorial narrative of the war begins in the late 1920s, when Japanese society basked in the glow of Taisho democracy, internationalism, and the jazz age. The mood grew somber after the Japanese military became enmired in Manchuria and later China, following a string of "incidents." With all-out war erupting in China in 1937, the Japanese government launched its own weekly newsmagazine and the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement. Despite the international debacle following the Lytton Report and Japan's stormy withdrawal from the League of Nations, the Japanese government continued to court international favor. The Japanese media and the Japanese people were tired of the war in China, which was still inconclusive after three years. In 1940, the Japanese government staged a large-scale celebration for the 2,600th anniversary of the legendary foundation of the Japanese nation. There was a major effort to draw tourists to Japan to witness these events, which were planned to coincide with the 1940 Olympics, scheduled to be held in Tokyo but cancelled due to the outbreak of World War II in Europe. In the same year, 1940, the fascist-inspired New Structure was installed. This endless stream of restrictions and directives spelled the beginning of the end of civilian life in Japan. By the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the slogan was "the one hundred million of one mind" (ichioku isshin).The stunning victories of the first six months of the war seemed to prove that this one mind of the one hundred million was superior to western powers. In 1942 and 1943, the Japanese on the home front were treated to a flurry of pictures and articles describing the many parts of Asia liberated by the Japanese military. Photos of exotic places and smiling faces, new members of the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, filled the magazines. In 1943 and 1944, one common slogan seen on posters, billboards, magazine covers and even trinkets was "Continue to Shoot, Until they Desist." The idea was to push on through, now that victory was close at hand. However, in 1943 came the first report of a military "gyokusai" (a euphemism for a "banzai" suicide charge), followed in 1944 by a civilian "gyokusai" on Saipan. The catch phrase became "fight to the finish" (kessen, literally, "blood-battle"). The final year of the war saw massive air raids on the Japanese home islands, and magazines often showed images of downed American B-29s and kamikaze pilots, with exhortations that all Japanese embody the kamikaze spirit and fight to the death.
Taken as a whole, these images from contemporary publications convey something of the "look" and "feel" of the war. They were carefully orchestrated by the Information Bureau to give home-front Japanese the chance to experience the war vicariously, to put themselves in the "picture." By turns these images provoke empathy, revulsion, dismay, and bewilderment, begging a number of questions: How much information did ordinary Japanese citizens have? Did all Japanese believe the misinformation seen everywhere? Why would a government lead its people into a maelstrom of death and destruction? And why did so many people allow themselves to be consumed by it?
There are no simple answers, of course. The culpability of Japan's wartime leaders seems clear enough, the complicity of the mass media is surely blameworthy, and the soldier in the field can be judged by a military code of conduct. But what of the wives, mothers, and children pictured in these publications, those who, willingly or not, served as cogs in the machinery of war and died by the thousands in air raids? Ultimately, in assigning responsibility to other human beings and their social institutions, we arrive at choices about how we lead our own lives and the social institutions to which we belong. In judging others, we judge ourselves. We live by what we choose to remember — and to forget.
Translating Early Chinese Song-Drama circa 1829: Print Culture and the Formation of Sinology
Patricia Sieber, Associate Professor, East Asian Languages and Literatures, Ohio State University
November 21, 2003
Center for Chinese Studies
Changing Security Relations in East Asia: New Challenges for China
Panelists:
Zhang Yijun, former Chinese Ambassador to Canada, Special Consultant to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Tao Wenzhao, Deputy Director-General, Institute of American Affairs, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Yuan Jian, Deputy Director-General, Institute of International Relations
Lowell Dittmer, Professor, Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley
T.J. Pempel, Professor, Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley and Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley
November 25, 2003
Institute of East Asian Studies
Join us for the second event in a series of conversations on changing security relations in East Asia. Professors Lowell Dittmer (UC Berkeley) and T.J. Pempel (UC Berkeley will join four experts from the People's Republic of China to discuss key issues concerning China's security and defense policy, economic and trade policy, relations with the United States, Japan, Taiwan and other countries in Southeast Asia.
Coffee and cookies will be provided.
For more information, please contact the Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley at 510/642-2809, ieas@berkeley.edu.
Kanze Nobumitsu and Furyû Noh: an Examination of Late Muromachi Noh
Beng Choo LIM, Japanese Drama, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UCB
Monday, December 1, 2003
12:00 noon - 2:00 p.m.
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton St., 6th Floor
Colloquium
Center for Japanese Studies
Kanze Kojirô Nobumitsu (1435–1516) was an important noh practitioner in the late Muromachi period (1392–1573). Included in Nobumitsu's repertoire are plays such as Funabenkei (Benkei on Board), Momijigari (Winter Excursion) and Rashômon (Rashômon Gate). These plays, famous for their dramatic plots and spectacular stage presentations, are categorized as furyû noh by modern scholars, often with a subtle implication that they are not as good as the yûgen style plays advocated by Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443). But what exactly are furyû noh plays? Are they plays with a rowdy presentation but lacking in depth as some scholars suggested? Is it a coincidence that other late Muromachi noh practitioners such as Konparu Zenpô (1454–?) and Kanze Nagatoshi (1488 - 1541) also wrote furyû style noh plays and the late Muromachi period is sometimes called the "Period of furyû plays"? What does the existence of this "sub-category" of noh play say about the genre, the performers and the audience, as well as the time? Using Nobumitsu and his works as illustrations, I will present a reading of furyû style plays and examine their significance in the discourse of the noh theater.
This event is free and open to the public.
The Reality within Literature
Hua Yu, Novelist
December 4, 2003
12:00-1:00 p.m.
3401 Dwinelle Hall
Brown-Bag Lunch Lecture, Conducted in Chinese
Center for Chinese Studies