China's Labor Policies: In Transition
January 20, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education
A seminar featuring presentations by three labor scholars from China. Economic and social transitions in China during the past 30 years have changed conditions for workers greatly. The Chinese government has made some changes in labor policies, however as the research by these scholars shows, much more needs to be done. Please join us for a discussion with responses from American labor experts.
Agenda
Wang Zhiyong, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, "Preparing Rural Migrant Workers for New Jobs amid Crisis"
Bu Changli, Professor of Sociology, Changchun University of Science and Technology, "Restructuring State-Owned Enterprises and Preserving the Rights and Interests of Workers"
Shi Zhenlei, Associate Professor, Employment Relations and Labor Policies, Beijing Jiaotong University, "Changes in Employment Systems in China from 1949 to the Present"
Practicescape at Bao shan
Wendi Adamek, Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center
January 21, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies
The site known as Bao shan (Treasure Mountain) in Henan reveals a rich web of complex relationships: gender relations, lay and ordained relations, successive reshapings of the environment, human and non-human relations, and images and texts of various kinds. Dr. Adamek illustrates these relationships with slides and selected inscriptions from the site's treasures. Drawing from Tim Ingold's notion of a given environment as a rhizomatic "taskscape," she will discuss her current work on Bao shan in terms of "practicescape," a multi-directional reinscription of the landscape in Buddhist terms. The notion of "practicescape" allows us to examine the relationships noted above within the context of key co-dependent representations of practice space: empty peaks and caves with images, mountain and city temples, sites of ascetic "escape" and socioeconomic networks.
Colloquia in the Musicologies
Ian Condry
January 21, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Department of Music
"New Directions in Japanese Hip-Hop: Rethinking the Cultural Politics of Popular Music in the 21st Century"
Ian Condry, Associate Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; author of Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization
Tickets not required.
Role Ethics: A Confucian Moral Vision for the 21st Century
Henry Rosemont, Jr., Visiting Professor of Religious Studies
January 22, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
Although over 160 nations have ratified the U.N. International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, the United States has not. In significant measure this is due to grounding the concept of human rights in a view of human beings as essentially free, autonomous individuals. In this way civil and political rights may be straightforwardly championed and legally defended, but so can a "blame the victim" view for explaining stark social and economic injustice despite its manifest falsity. Social, economic and cultural rights will have little place in a conceptual framework based on foundational individualism in a capitalist society. Grounding the concept of human beings in their interrelatedness, however, Confucians can easily champion both sets of rights, giving their role ethics – as distinguished from Western theories of deontological, consequentialist, or virtue ethics – a claim on our attention today as the gap between the super-rich and the impoverished continues to widen both at home and abroad.
From Ritual Hegemony to Religious Freedom in Korea: How Religious Organizations
Don Baker, Professor of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia Erected Barriers to State Power and Paved the Way for Democracy
January 22, 2010
Center for Korean Studies, Religion, Politics and Globalization Program
Korea, ruled by monarchs for centuries and then by dictators for most of the 20th century, is today a vibrant democracy. The roots of Korea's late 20th-century democratization lie not in the 20th century, however, but in the last quarter of the 18th century. That was when a small group of Korean converts to Catholicism began trying to carve out an autonomous realm within society by claiming that there were certain areas of society, such as religious ritual, over which the government had no legitimate authority. That call for religious freedom was picked up in the 2nd half of the 19th century by Korea's first indigenous organized religion, known then as Tonghak.
In the first half of the 20th century, a Korean Protestant community emerged and, during 35 years of Japanese colonial rule, it too argued for religious freedom as it tried to maintain the right to educate its members as best it saw fit as well as decide for itself which rituals it members would perform. Also fighting for limits on the reach of the state power over religious behavior were three new indigenous Korean religions: Ch'ondogyo (which had emerged out of Tonghak), Taejonggyo, and Poch'ongyo, all of which the colonial government labeled "pseudo-religions" and tried to eradicate.
Korea appeared to gain religious freedom, in the south at least, after liberation from Japanese rule in 1945. However, in the 1970s Christian religious leaders began arguing for greater limits on the power of the state, claiming that religious freedom included not only the right to worship without government interference but also the right of religious believers to criticize government actions they deemed immoral. Christians took the lead in that battle because, unlike the Buddhists or the followers of new religions, Christians could call on foreign support to protect them from extreme government repression. As a result, Christian condemnations of dictatorial rule could not be silenced. Others joined in the Christian-led protests and, by the end of the 1980s, South Korea had given in to the demand for freely-contested elections. Thanks at least partially to the battle for religious freedom Koreans had begun to wage two centuries earlier, a battle which had introduced to Koreans the notion of limits on state power, Koreans were able at last to enjoy democracy for the first time in their long history.
Don Baker studies the cultural and religious history of Korea. He received his Ph.D. in Korean history from the University of Washington and has taught at the University of British Columbia since 1987. His most recent book is Korean Spirituality (University of Hawaii Press, 2008). In 2008, he was awarded the Tasan prize for his research on Tasan Chong Yagyong, a writer and philosopher in Korea in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China
David Johnson, Professor, History Department, UC Berkeley
January 27, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
In the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China, temple festivals, with their giant processions, elaborate rituals, and operas, were the most important influence on the symbolic universe of ordinary villagers and demonstrate their remarkable capacity for religious and artistic creation. UC Berkeley History Professor David Johnson's new book describes the great festivals as their supreme collective achievements, carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay.
Chinese culture was a performance culture, and ritual was the highest form of performance. Village ritual life everywhere in pre-revolutionary China was complex, conservative, and extraordinarily diverse. Festivals and their associated rituals and operas provided the emotional and intellectual materials out of which ordinary people constructed their ideas about the world of men and the realm of the gods. It is, David Johnson argues, impossible to form an adequate idea of traditional Chinese society without a thorough understanding of village ritual. Newly discovered liturgical manuscripts allow him to reconstruct North Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based communal rituals of South China.
Introduced and moderated by Wen-hsin Yeh, Richard H. and Laurie C. Morrison Professor of History, and Director, Institute of East Asian Studies.
Government, Universities and Higher Education Reform in Japan: How Does the Relationship Work?
Shinichi Yamamoto, Director and Professor of the Research Institute of Higher Education, Hiroshima University, Japan
January 27, 2010
Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Studies in Higher Education
Since the early 1990s Japan has experienced a big reform of higher education. We have found some specific features in terms of the relations between universities and government that we had never seen before. The key words are deregulation under the careful control of the government, competition among universities and colleges for limited public and private resources, and shrinking higher education market by the 18-year population decline. I will analyze the reasons and realities of the higher education reform in Japan using the new relationship of the two sectors (universities and government).
Dr. Shinichi Yamamoto is Professor and Director of the Research Institute for Higher Education, Hiroshima University in Japan. His main concern is analysis of various functions of higher education system, including university research, administration, and management. After graduation from the University of Tokyo in 1972, Dr. Yamamoto served for the Ministry of Education (Monbusho) for 17 years, where he gained rich administrative experiences in school education, university and research management, and international affairs. He stayed at the National Science Foundation of the United States as a research fellow in 1988–89; was involved in OECD's activities, including research training, university funding and so on, at CSTP (Committee on Science and Technology Policy) in 1992–2003; and was a member of the Overall Review Committee for Program II and Program III of UNESCO in 2006–2007.
Buddhist Seal Manuals and the Nature of Dunhuang Buddhism: The Case of P. 3835v.#9
Paul Copp, Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
January 28, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies
Chinese Buddhist uses of fu-talismans 符 and talisman-bearing seals (fuyin 符印) are among the most characteristic practices of the form of medieval Chinese religiosity known lately as "Buddho-Daoism." Yet aside from being a rather vague label, "Buddho-Daoism," as Christine Mollier has recently pointed out, implies a non-sectarian orientation on the part of the sources that is not always present. In the case of the text that will be the focus of this talk, "Dharani Methods of the Great Wheel Vajra" (Foshuo dalun jin'gang zongchi tuoluoni fa 佛說大輪金剛總持陀羅尼法), found as the ninth text on the verso of the Dunhuang manuscript Pelliot # 3835, seals are presented unmistakably as Buddhist – in fact, as forms of Buddhist incantation known as dharani (tuoluoni 陀羅尼, zongchi 總持, etc). I will thus take this text's seals as straightforwardly Buddhist and ask what close analyses of dharani-seal manuals may tell us about the deep doctrinal and practical natures of the forms of Buddhism practiced at Dunhuang in the ninth and tenth centuries. I will pay special attention to P. 3835v. #9's invocations of Manibhadra (Monibatuo 摩尼跋陀; often a protector of travelers) and Great Wheel Vajra (Dalun jin'gang 大輪金剛), a deity featured in such native Chinese Buddhist productions as the Pseudo-Suragama Scripture (Lengyan jing 楞嚴經) and the esoteric imagery found in Song Dynasty Sichuan.
China's First Panda Reserve: A Person, a People, and a National Cause
E. Elena Songster, Kiriyama Research Fellow, Center for the Pacific Rim, University of San Francisco; History Department, St. Mary's College of California
January 29, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
During the early 1960s China's State Council called upon the provinces to set aside land for the sake of protecting China's wildlife. Sichuan responded quickly with a plan to create reserves to protect giant pandas and other precious animals. The actual work of creating a panda reserve, however, became a local project. A single man led the effort through a tremendous amount of difficult labor and a process that was as much about the local people as it was about the pandas in their vicinity. The panda reserve became the first space demarcated for their preservation and thus the first experiment site in engaging local people in the national cause of panda protection. This paper examines the roles of the government, individuals, and Baima ethnic community in defining nature and the nation and the ways that such local efforts reflect issues surrounding species protection beyond China.
Recent Changes in Politics: A Yomiuri Special Lecture
Taro Kono, Director-General of the International Bureau, Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)
February 2, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, The Yomiuri Program, Graduate School of Journalism
Taro Kono is an ex-candidate of the LDP presidential election in 2009. He is one of the most famous and influential young politicians. His father is Yohei Kono, ex-president of the LDP and ex-Speaker of the House of Representatives.Taro Kono will talk about recent "regime changes" from the LDP to the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the future of Japan's politics and other newsworthy topics.
This talk is a special lecture for the Yomiuri Program at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, "Reporting on Japan: Society, Science and Okinawa" course taught by Prof. Kyoichi Sasazawa.
Remarks by Steven Vogel, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley.
Below the Storm: 60 Years of Cross-Strait Connections
February 5–6, 2010
Institute of East Asian Studies, The Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica
Cross-Straits relationships between the Mainland and Taiwan are among the most critical issues in today's East Asia. Despite much journalistic coverage and editorial commentary, in-depth scholarly examinations of the many facets of related issues are yet to be undertaken in North American academia. While recent decades have seen many periods of tense political relations between Taiwan and China, extensive contacts between the two exist at many other levels. Below the stormy diplomatic conflicts, a broad and complex network of connections has developed. This conference looks not only at political relations, but many other spheres, in an effort to open up new vistas in public understanding of contemporary China, Taiwan, and East Asia.
This conference is part of a larger multi-year program on relations between Taiwan and China. Panels bring together project participants and Taiwan colleagues working on similar issues. Based at UC Berkeley under the direction of History Professor Wen-hsin Yeh, the project will culminate in the production of a manuscript that will describe and evaluate substantive Cross-Straits relationships — political, economic, cultural, social — as they have been developing since the early 1990s despite the absence of mutually acceptable resolution of issues of statehood and sovereignty between the Mainland and Taiwan and the emerging East Asian regional order.
This conference is organized by Yu-Shan Wu, Research Fellow and Director, Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica; and Wen-hsin Yeh, Richard H. and Laurie C. Morrison Professor of History and Director of the Institute of East Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
The Tale of Heike: A Biwa Lecture-Recital
Yoko Hiraoka, Senior master performer of Biwa
February 8, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Department of Music
The Biwa is an historical Japanese lute that has been used for centuries to recount stories from medieval times with themes of love, hardship, epic battles and the evanescence of life. Many of these stories are collected together in The Tale of Heike, an account of the amours, battles and tragedies suffered by two warring clans, the Minamoto and Taira clans of 12th-century Japan. The influence of these stories on Japanese culture can be seen even today, in contemporary anime themes.
Yoko performs four of the classic biwa compositions, with projected images of scenes from The Tale of Heike.
Free and open to the public
1903: Racism, Revenge, and Ressentiment
Peter C. Perdue, History Department, Yale University
Colleen Lye, Discussant, Department of English, UC Berkeley
February 9, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
In 1903, a pamphlet entitled The Revolutionary Army (Gemingjun), with essays by the young radical nationalist Zou Rong and the scholar Zhang Taiyan, advocated a violent anti-Manchu nationalist ideology to a broad audience of students in Japan and China. In the same year, W.E.B. Dubois published The Souls of Black Folk, in which he stated that "the twentieth century will be the century of the color line." In this period, racial nationalism, radical movements, and advocacy of violence converged in a series of global movements linking Asia, Europe, and the United States. This talk examines the international discourse of racial nationalism in the first decade of the twentieth century.
The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters
B.R. Myers, Assistant Professor/Director, Department of International Studies, Dongseo University
February 10, 2010
Center for Korean Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
B.R. Myers presents a startling new take on North Korea. He questions many of the assumptions that have guided foreign assessments of Kim Jong Il's motives and capabilities. Myers argues that we know more of the North's nuclear program than of the motivation behind it, more about Kim Jong Il's potential successors than about the unique worldview that all of them share. Drawing from decades of research in North Korea's ideology and propaganda, Myers disproves the common fallacy that it's a "last bastion of Stalinism," demonstrating that the Kim Jong Il regime is instead guided by a paranoid, race-based nationalism with roots in Japanese fascism.
Looking at public monuments, canonical texts of invented history, romance novels, films, and poster art, Myers presents a new and revealing understanding of today's North Korea.
B.R. Myers, currently Assistant Professor and Director of the Department of International Studies at Dongseo University, is the author of A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose. His commentaries about Korean politics have recently appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and The Atlantic Monthly, where he is a contributing editor.
Introduced by Jiwon Shin, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley.
The Gupta Connection: The Buddha Image in India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and China
Robert Brown, Professor, History of Art, UCLA
February 11, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies
In the second half of the fifth century a new type of Buddha image was invented at Sarnath. This image type interested Buddhist worshippers across Asia, and was used by artists to create local versions of the Gupta Buddha image type. The talk traces the timing of the relationships among images from India to Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and China. It argues that the impact of the new Sarnath style image in Asia was rapid, by the mid-sixth century. It also suggests that the Buddha image in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia begins only in the sixth century, a radically later dating than has been accepted by scholars up until now. Possible reasons for the popularity of the Gupta style of Buddha image are proposed.
The New Ethnic Identity for Sustainable Citizenship in Japan: Searching for the Meaning of "Belonging"
February 11, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Center for Global Studies, Shizuoka Prefectural University, Asian American Studies Program, Center for Race and Gender
Keiko Yamanaka, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley — Moderator
Duncan Williams, Chair, Center for Japanese Studies, UC Berkeley — Opening Remarks
Keiko Nakayama, Chair, Center for Global Studies, University of Shizuoka — Introduction to Center for Global Studies, University of Shizuoka
Mitsuhiro Fujimaki, Center for Global Studies, University of Shizuoka — Positing an Interpretive Form of Repatriation and Ownership of Knowledge of Indigenous Peoples (the Ainu): A Case Study of Asahikawa City Museum's Renewed Exhibition
Hwaji Shin, Sociology, University of San Francisco (Currently Visiting Professor at Stanford University) — Colonial Legacy of Ethno-racial Inequality in Japan, with an Emphasis on Zainichi (Permanent Resident) Koreans
Wesley Ueunten, Asian American Studies, San Francisco State University — Okinawan Music, Performing Arts and Diasporic Identities: Weathering the Global Storm
Takahito Sawada, Center for Global Studies, University of Shizuoka — Economic Participation and Transforming Identity of Japanese Latino Immigrants after the Late-2000s Recession
Stephen Small, African American Studies, UC Berkeley — Discussant
Discussion with the Audience
Screening of Campaign (選挙)
Kazuhiro Soda, Director of "Senkyo"
February 11, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Department of Film Studies
Screening of the film "Senko (選挙)," or in English, "Campaign," will be followed by a special audience Q&A with the director, Kazuhiro Soda.
SENKYO is a cinema-verite documentary that closely follows a heated election campaign in Kawasaki, Japan, revealing the true nature of "democracy." In the fall of 2005, 40 year-old, self-employed Kazuhiko "Yama-san" Yamauchi's peaceful, humdrum life was turned upside-down. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has suddenly chosen him as its official candidate to run for a vacant seat on the Kawasaki city council. Yama-san had zero experience in politics, no charisma, no supporters, no constituency, and no time to prepare for the impending election. Can a candidate with no political experience and no charisma win an election if he is backed by the political giant Prime Minister Koizumi and his Liberal Democratic Party?
KAZUHIRO SODA was born and raised in Japan and has lived in New York since 1993. He has directed numerous fiction films and TV documentaries, but CAMPAIGN (SENKYO) is his first feature documentary. It was invited to many film festivals around the world including Berlin Film Festival, and it won the prestigious Peabody Award in 2009.
Gender and Historical Memory in Early Qing Yangzhou
Waiyee Li, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Harvard University
February 12, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
In this talk the author will explore how the praise and blame of Yangzhou women throw light on the memory and judgment of the Ming-Qing transition, especially the 1645 massacre in Yangzhou.
Lost Strands of Japan's Long Sixteenth Century
Kazuhiro Soda, Director of "Senkyo"
February 13, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Department of History
Over a quarter century has now passed since the publication of the last of the seminal collaborative projects on the sixteenth century. Notwithstanding the appearance of a number of remarkable works by individual scholars, the field as a whole has moved little since then, and over the years that pioneering work appears to have turned into a definitive statement of sorts. The longstanding preoccupation with the process of "unification" has led scholars to examine the sixteenth century in terms of its outcomes. Instead, this conference is part of an effort to give new impetus to the study of the period by turning attention to the daily practices and events that preceded the Edo settlement, and to foster scholarly inquiries that do not rely on heroic grand narratives or the justification of incipient modernity. Indeed, the "lost strands" of the title refer to practices and processes that did not survive into later periods. To emphasize them is to underscore the need to recover alternative narratives and call into question what deserves to be recovered.
This approach is not meant to marginalize the concerns of political and institutional historians, which ultimately must be central to any serious attempt to understand a society, but rather to call attention to the richness of themes that the important volumes of the seventies and eighties left out of the tapestry of published history. We are convinced that there is a need to move beyond the objectives of previous collaborative efforts by redirecting scholarly attention to themes that have more recently gained currency in history (and the humanities) at large — themes like the body and gender, the everyday and material culture, the "other," and memory (to name but a few possibilities). A new approach would allow scholarship to explore the codes and practices that made up the fabric of sixteenth-century society in ways that transcend the competition for military and political hegemony that has, understandably, attracted the lion's share of scholarly interest.
Eric Rath, University of Kansas — "Food Cultures of Momoyama Japan"
Morgan Pitelka, Occidental College — "Absent Actors: Falconry In and Out of the Long Sixteenth Century"
David Eason, University at Albany — "A Sound Policy: Restrictions on Slander and the Redefinition of Permissible Violence circa 1600"
David Spafford, University of Washington — "No Longer the Age for Camping"
Peter Shapinsky, University of Illinois at Springfield — "Recovering the History of 'Large Ships' in Japan's Long Sixteenth Century"
Maria Grazia Petrucci, University of British Columbia — "Economic Development, Political Control, and Piracy in the Coastal Cities of Late Medieval Japan"
Suzanne Gay, Oberlin College — "Risk and Opportunity: Entrepreneurs in the Long Sixteenth Century"
Brian Goldsmith, Lenoir-Rhyne University — "Early Modern Infrastructure: Quiet Commercial Booms in the Long Sixteenth Century"
Mary Elizabeth Berry, University of California, Berkeley
Alliance: From a Theoretical Perspective
Zhang Jingquan, Northeast Asian Studies Academy, Jilin University, China
February 16, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
In some sense, the history of international relationships is the history of alliance. Alliance is the hardest part of international regimes. CCS Visiting Scholar Zhang Jingquan will provide an outline of alliance formation, structure, dilemmas, and function. In English
Relocating Ozu: The Question of an Asian Cinematic Aesthetic
February 19–20, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Korean Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
Jointly organized by the Centers for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, this meeting will bring together a dynamic group of international scholars on February 19–20, 2010 to reassess Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu's work in its wider relation to inter- and postwar colonial and urban modernities in East Asia. Rather than replicate auteurist approaches to Ozu's legacy, we seek to situate his work — as well the afterlife of his style in contemporary East Asian cinema — within a global circuit, one that encompasses Hollywood as well as the cinemas of Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, and mainland China. Clearly, what we might call an "Ozu-like" aesthetic — most readily identified with a long take, deep focus realism, non-180 degree editing, and a distinctive handling of cinematic time — has had an abiding presence in East Asian art cinema within and outside of Japan, particularly since the 1980s. What this conference aims to explore are the ways in which this phenomenon is not merely reducible to questions of influence. Nor can it be viewed simply in terms of a presentist history of global art-house cinema. Instead, this conference will attempt to place Ozu's work, and the emergence of an "Ozu-like" aesthetic, within the context of the early emergence of a genre-based commercial cinema in urban centers such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei and Seoul.
This re-examination of Ozu's work entails a number of questions. In what ways were these various cinematic vernaculars in dialogue with one another, and how did they emerge from out of the crucible of colonial commerce and imperial violence that linked these urban centers? How might the most distinctly "Ozu-like" genre — the family melodrama — encode these histories? How, finally, might we reassess the question of Ozu's formalism? Yoshida Kiju has suggested that in Ozu's "anti-cinema," objects observe people, rather than the other way around. In what sense might this close attention to the world of things be a product of, as well as a creative response to, the reifications of urban modernity? How, in other words, can we open Ozu's aesthetics, and his continuing relevance to contemporary East Asian cinema, to historical question?
That Night's Wife
February 19, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Korean Studies, Center for Japanese Studies
The showing of the film, "That Night's Wife" (1930), by director Yasujiro Ozu, is part of the conference, "Relocating Ozu, The Question of an Asian Cinematic Aesthetic."
"Crime Unique to Korea": Gynecology, "Racial Disease" and Tradition in Colonial Korea, 1926–1932
Jin Kyung Park, University of Toronto
February 19, 2010
Center for Korean Studies
In recent years, scholars have been paying increasing attention to issues of Japanese colonial governance and medicine in Korea. In this presentation, I focus on a colonial medical framing of a Korean social pathology related to female criminal behaviour in 1920s and 1930s Korea. I do so by exploring a gynecological study of Korean female inmates who had murdered their husbands. This research was conducted by the Japanese obstetrician-gynecologist Kudō Takeshiro (1874–?) under the auspices of the Government-General of Korea. While drawing on theories from a wide range of fields including criminology, gynecology, eugenics, statistics, as well as codes of law from the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910), Kudō attempted to provide a scientific diagnosis and remedy for the high rate of husband murderers in colonial Korea. Through a careful examination of Kudō's medical endeavour, I shed light on a Japanese orientalist medical gaze over colonized women's bodies and the colonial practices involved in the classification and production Korean bodies and diseases. I also analyze the ways in which Korean women's sexual, conjugal practices became the locus for the maintenance of colonial stability, as well of the boundaries between colonizer and colonized in a unique Asian imperial context of racial ambiguity and proximity.
Jin-kyung Park (Ph.D., University of Illinois,Urbana-Champaign) is an assistant professor in Global Asia Studies and the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on gender, colonialism, biopolitics, biomedicine, and technology in modern Korea. She is currently working on a book manuscript about a cultural history of puinbyŏng (women's disease) in colonial Korea.
A City of Sadness
February 20, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Center for Korean Studies
The showing of the film, "A City of Sadness" (1989) by director Hou Hsiao-hsien is part of the conference, "Relocating Ozu, The Question of an Asian Cinematic Aesthetic." This is a new print of the film.
Popular Accountability and Regime Resilience in Reform-Era China
Martin Dimitrov, Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Kevin O'Brien, Discussant, Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley
February 26, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
Communist autocracies have proven to be the longest-lived type of non-democratic regime. What accounts for this remarkable resilience? Traditionally, explanations have focused either on repression or on the cooptation of elites. This talk argues that the key to understanding the longevity of communist regimes is provided by examining their systems of popular accountability. In particular, the talk analyzes one specific channel for popular accountability: the citizen complaints system (letters and visits system or xinfang). Documents from the secret Eastern European communist party archives and neibu materials from China are used to analyze how citizen complaints created a channel for popular accountability that prolonged the lifespan of both the Eastern European and the Chinese communist regimes. The talk concludes by examining recent changes in the xinfang system in China and their implications for regime stability.
Architectural Heritage Buildings on the Steppe Road: Tibetan, Islamic, and Chinese Cultural Diffusion
Bao Muping, University of Tokyo
March 1, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
Besides the traditional notion of the Silk Road, other types of linear connection can be detected, for example: the Steppe Road, which lies between the Mongolian Plateau and Ural Mountains; the Horse and Tea Road between Yunnan Province and Tibetan Highland. These types of linear roads raise the idea of a multi-cultural society as well as cultural and technological transfer by inter-regional communication and transportation.
This talk will focus on the Steppe Road, the northern line from the gate of the Great Wall to Moscow, and the western line from the gate of the Great Wall to Xinjiang and Central Asia. The speaker will discuss the Tibetan, Islamic, and Chinese cultural diffusion along the Steppe Road, what kinds of buildings were created, and how to manage these architectural heritage buildings in the 21st century.
CCS visiting scholar talk, in English
Spirits of the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture
John Holt, Department of Religion, Bowdoin College
March 3, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Southeast Asia Studies
A major aim of this study is to ascertain the manner in which Buddhist thought and practice have been construed through the prisms of the indigenous ontology of Lao spirit cults. To illustrate this pattern, Holt will examine the legacy of paradigmatic ritual actions attributed to pivotal 16th century Lan Xang king, Photisarat, a king profiled in the Luang Phrabang Chronicle and in his own inscriptions as unabashedly orthodox in his Theravada Buddhist empathies and inimical to the indigenous substratum of Lao religious culture (the spirit cults). Specifically, Holt will discuss the unintended persistence of ancestor and phi (spirit) veneration in Photisarat's ostensibly Buddhist practices of merit transfer and worship of the Buddha respectively, practices that clearly reflect how power was understood in relation to the sacred space of the monastic vat and to Buddha images per se, especially in relation to the Phra Bang, the legitimating Buddha image for Lao royalty from which the capital city of Lan Xang, Luang Phrabang, ultimately derives its name.
John C. Holt teaches Asian religious traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and theoretical approaches to the study of religion at Bowdoin College. Holt has an A.B. (cum laude) in history from Gustavus Adolphus, an A.M. in history and phenomenology of religions from the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley) with distinction, and a Ph.D. in history of religions from the University of Chicago. His publications include Discipline: the Canonical Buddhism of the Vinayapitaka (1981), A Guide to the Buddhist Religion (1981), Buddha in the Crown (1991), The Anagatavamsa Desana (Dehli: Motilal Banarsidass, 1993), The Religious World of Kirti Sri: Buddhism, Art and Politics in Late Medieval Sri Lanka (1996), and The Buddhist Visnu (2004).
Introduced by Penny Edwards, Chair, Center for Southeast Asia Studies.
China's Policy on Afghanistan/Pakistan and China-Central Asia Relations
Pan Guang, Director, Shanghai Center for International Studies
March 3, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for South Asia Studies, Center for Race and Gender Studies, Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies
Since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1978, American involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan has steadily escalated. The policies of the United States have been a constant feature of violence in the region ever since. Since the US invasion of 2001, all regional powers, including India, Iran, China and Russia have come involved in the conflict in both overt and covert ways. The war in "Af-Pak" has become a testing ground for new weapons, a site for the creation of new organizational forms of war, and the central node of a radical shift in global economic and political power. It is also a worrisome example of how the US has sought to engage with the world through the Bush and Obama administrations. Does the "Af-Pak" war represent the future of military engagement in the 21st century? What are the goals of various overt and covert participants in the "Af-Pak" war?
Dr. PAN Guang is the Director and Professor of Shanghai Center for International Studies and the Academic Director of Institute of Eurasian Studies at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Dean of Center of Jewish Studies Shanghai (CJSS) and Vice Chairman of Chinese Society of Middle East Studies.
He has published books and articles on a variety of topics such as "The Jews in China", "2003: US War on Iraq", "Contemporary International Crises", "China's Success in the Middle East", "China's Anti-terror Strategy", "Islam and Confucianism: the Development of Chinese Islam", "China's Energy Strategy", "China's Policy on AF/PAK" and more.
This presentation is part of af-\pä-ki-`stän\: The Violent Birth of an Acronym, a colloquium that brings together scholars, students and interested members of the community to explore the myriad dimensions of the war, including the economic and the political, the national, regional and international aspects of the conflict.
For more information contact chaudhry@berkeley.edu.
Social Memory and Public Production of History: The T'aebaek Mountains (T'aebaek Sanmaek) and the Politics of Remembering the Korean War
Namhee Lee, UCLA
March 5, 2010
Center for Korean Studies
Cho Chŏng-nae's monumental ten-volume The T'aebaek Mountains, set in a small town in South Chŏlla Province, chronicles the politically volatile period between the 1948 Yŏsu-Sunch'ŏn Rebellion and the 1953 Armistice agreement ending the Korean War. By documenting the "original trauma" of the South Korean psyche, the post-1945 ideological confrontation, and the consolidation of the division through the Korean War, the novel brings to the fore the crucial absence in contemporary South Korean memory, its "stagnant" understanding of history, and the "usable past" of the post-war period that cast South Koreans mostly as victims of the ideological division. This presentation explores the novel as a way to examine the structure of contemporary public memory, its presence and absences, and meaning-making in contemporary South Korea.
Namhee Lee is an associate professor of modern Korean history at UCLA. Her publications include The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (Cornell University Press, 2007). She is currently working on a book project entitled "Social Memory and Public Production of History in South Korea," which explores production of historical knowledge outside established academic institutions in the last three decades, examining the debates, tensions, and exchanges generated from historical novels, films exhibitions, festivals, historical restorations (or destructions), and civic historical movements.
Moderne and Modernity: Visual Narratives of Interwar Shanghai
Wen-hsin Yeh, Director, Institute of East Asian Studies
Jay Xu and Michael Knight, Asian Art Museum
Kuiyi Shen, UC San Diego
Jeff Wasserstrom, UC Irvine
Renee Chow, UC Berkeley
Catherine Yeh, Boston University
Lisa Claypool, Reed College
Nancy Berliner, Peabody Essex Musuem
Ellen Johnston Laing, University of Michegan
Joan Judge, York University
Pat Berger, UC Berkeley
Alex Cook, UC Berkeley
Andrew Jones, UC Berkeley
March 6, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Berkeley Art Museum
For an awakening China just emerging from the Qing dynasty, Shanghai came to embody the promise of modernity. Its new architecture, the Style Moderne, or Art Deco as it is now known, was the emblem what was new and foreign, in ideas as well as form. This conference explores the visual forms and images current in Shanghai in the first third of the twentieth century, and what these reveal, suggest, or obscure. The city's architecture and urban spaces; the economic underpinnings in foreign trade, commerce, labor, and leisure; the words and images Shanghai's populace consumed; and the new roles for women, youth, the family, and the citizen the city enabled; all contributed to create the ideal and the reality that was Shanghai.
Organized by Wen-hisn Yeh, Director, Institute of East Asian Studies. Speakers include Jay Xu and Michael Knight (Asian Art Museum), Kuiyi Shen (UC San Diego), Jeff Wasserstrom (UC Irvine), Renee Chow (UC Berkeley), Catherine Yeh (Boston University), Lisa Claypool (Reed College), Nancy Berliner (Peabody Essex Museum), Ellen Johnston Laing (University of Michigan), and Joan Judge (York University).
Japanese Buddhist Culture and Monzeki Temples
March 6, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Ryukoku University Berkeley Center
9:30AM–12:00PM
Chair: Donald Drummond (Institute of Buddhist Studies)
Panelist: Yukio Kusaka (Ryukoku University) on the Shôgo'in Monzeki (in Japanese)
Tesshin Michimoto (Ryukoku University) on Mt. Hiei and the Gochi Hôkan Buddha (in Japanese)
Fujimoto Kô'ichi (Ryukoku University) on the Byôdô'in as a case study of Buddhist temples and aristocratic society (in Japanese)
2:00–4:00PM
Chair: Yukio Kusaka (Ryukoku University)
Panelists: Donald Drummond (Institute of Buddhist Studies) on Omuro Ninnaji's Kakuhô Hosshinnô
4:10–5:10PM
Discussion with commentator Lori Meeks (University of Southern California)
A documentary by Huang Weikai: Disorder
Huang Weikai, Director
March 8, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
Screening of the film, "Disorder" (58 minutes) followed by the director, Huang Weikai, in conversation with Professor Andrew Jones.
"Disorder," consisting of footage from a dozen filmmakers, weaves together over twenty bizarre incidents in daily life in Guangzhou, including a lunatic dancing ecstatically in the middle of the street, pigs running wildly on a highway, a fight over counterfeit money, an escaped alligator, and more.
Huang Weikai graduated from the Chinese Art Department, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. and has been directing independent films since 2002.
Lord It's the Samurai: Socially Engaged Art and the Cultural Production of Orientalist Hysteria
Majime Sugiru, Communications Director, Asians Art Museum
March 9, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies
Majime Sugiru serves as communications director for the Asians Art Museum, a guerrilla art collective that creates public and online 'cultural interventions' as a means of challenging dominant (mis)representations of Japanese visual culture in the Bay Area. Their latest project integrates Japanese Studies scholarship with art in a parody of last summer's blockbuster "Lords of the Samurai" exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Generating joyful laughter and impassioned debate across a broad spectrum of constituent communities while garnering media attention, critical acclaim and wide-ranging scholarly approval, this deft cultural counterpunch succeeded at raising awareness of the retrograde cultural politics that continue to play out in the exhibition of Japanese art in this country today.
"I'm always pleased to learn that what we have written within gated academic enclosures manages, sometime, to creep out to have an effect on thinking in the wider world. I couldn't agree more with the intent and execution of the 'intervention.'"
—Harry Harootunian, Professor Emeritus of History and East Asian Studies, NYU
Majime Sugiru is a Berkeley-born, Cal-educated contemporary artist based in San Francisco. His provocative art has been shown in New York and San Francisco, most recently at the de Young Museum where much of his work was ordered taken down shortly before the exhibition was about to open.
More information at http://www.asiansart.org/.
Qiao Zhou and the Intellectual Traditions of Early Medieval Shu
J. Michael Farmer, History, University of Texas at Dallas
March 10, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
An introduction to the Shu intellectual traditions, Qiao Zhou's continuation of older local traditions and his scholastic innovations, and the relationship between the study of regional traditions and the writing of a comprehensive intellectual history of early medieval China.
2nd Annual Khyentse Foundation Lecture in Tibetan Buddhism
Analyzing Lineages in Early Tibetan Paintings: Taklung Portraits as a Test Case
David Jackson, Curator, Rubin Museum of Art
March 11, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies, Khyentse Foundation
Though the analysis of guru lineages has opened up new possibilities of dating in Tibetan art, how useful is this tool in practice? As a test case Professor Jackson will apply the approach to a number of early Tibetan paintings from the so-called 'Taklung' corpus, mainly portraits of founding masters of the Taklung Kagyü tradition. That tradition was one of the most influential branches of the Dakpo Kagyü during the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries; its main seat, Taklung, was founded in 1185 by Taklung Thangpa Tashi Pal (1142–1210), a chief disciple of Phagmotrupa (Phag mo gru pa,1110–1170). At its branch of Riwoche in Kham province a large cache of early and later Pala-style thangkas survived the cultural revolution and were in recent years dispersed outside Tibet. Jackson will also investigate, if time permits, a few portraits from the related Kagyu traditions. He will begin by ordering each group chronologically following structural criteria, according to the number of generations of gurus before the generation of the patron. (In most cases the speaker has worked from photographs; he could not directly consult the painting or use the inscriptions.) Here observable structure and iconography will guide a preliminary analysis, and inscriptions will need to be taken into account later. He will also systematically chart the structure of each painting by giving a complete diagram. This may seem troublesome at first, but it has great advantages, compelling us to deal with unusual features that might otherwise be overlooked.
Background reading (articles by D. Jackson): "Lineages and Structure in Tibetan Buddhist Painting: Principles and Practice of an Ancient Sacred Choreography," Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (October 2005). http://www.thdl.org?id=T1220. "The Dating of Tibetan Paintings is Perfectly Possible — Though Not Always Perfectly Exact." In I. Kreide-Damani, ed. 2003, Dating Tibetan Art: Essays on the Possibilities and Impossibilities of Chronology from the Lempertz Symposium, Cologne. Contributions to Tibetan Studies 3 (Wiesbaden, Dr. Ludwig Reicher Verlag), pp. 91–112.
The Great Socialist Transformation: Capitalism without Democracy in China
Kellee Tsai, Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
Peter Lorentzen, Discussant, Political Science, UC Berkeley
March 12, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
The stunning expansion of China's private sector growth has led observers to assume that its growing ranks of capitalists represent a force for democratization. Tsai's research in ten provinces finds little evidence for this belief, but shows that private entrepreneurs have nonetheless had a structural impact on Chinese politics through a variety of "adaptive informal institutions."
The Long-term Health Effects of China's Great Famine 1959–1961
Maoyong Fan, Ball State University
March 12, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Agricultural and Resource Economics
"Pilgrims in Red Mecca": Chinese Students in Soviet Russia in the 1920s
Wang Qianming
March 15, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
At the very beginning of the 1920s, dozens of Chinese students took an adventurous journey to "The Red Mecca" — Moscow. More than two thousand Chinese students attended different Russian schools and universities throughout the 1920s. Why did that happen? How successful was it for the Chinese students and what kind of influence did it have?
Living and Learning: Sharing Memories of the Great Tokyo Air Raid in the US
Katsumoto Saotome, Director, Center of the Tokyo Air Raid & War Damages Resource
Haruko Nihei, Oral History Reciter, Center of the Tokyo Air Raid
Tadahito Yamamoto, Staff Researcher, Center of the Tokyo Air Raid
Cary Karacas, College of Staten Island, CUNY
March 16, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Department of History
3:00 pm: Opening Remarks by Andrew Barshay, History, UC Berkeley
3:15 pm–3:30 pm: "Introduction: Memorializing the Tokyo Air Raids"
Cary Karacas, Assistant Professor of Human Geography, College of Staten Island, CUNY
3:30 pm–4:00 pm: "The Mission of the Center of the Tokyo Air Raid and War Damages"
Tadahito Yamamoto, Staff Researcher, the Center of the Tokyo Raid and War Damages
4:00 pm–4:40 pm: "My Story: Passing Memories of the Great Tokyo Air Raid"
Haruyo Nihei, Tokyo Air Raid Survivor and Oral History Recitor
4:40–5:00 pm: Coffee Break
5:00 pm–6:00 pm: "Living and Learning: Sharing Memories of the Great Tokyo Air Raid in the US"
Katsumoto Saotome, Director, Center of the Tokyo Air Raid & War Damages Resource Center
6:00 pm–6:30 pm: Q & A
Light Reception to follow
Writer Saotome Katsumoto is the author of numerous works of nonfiction and fiction, many of which center on the indiscriminate firebombing of Tokyo during the final months of World War II. As a youth he experienced firsthand the air raids carried out on March 10, 1945 by American B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers on Tokyo's Shitamachi region, which killed approximately 100,000 people. Informed by that catastrophic event, Saotome has endeavored for decades to ensure that the air raids are not forgotten and that societies seek a peaceful means of conflict resolution. In addition to his prolific body of written work, Saotome wrote the screenplay for "War and Youth", director IMAI Tadashi's final film, and is currently the director of the Tokyo Air Raid and War Damages Resource Center in Koto Ward, Tokyo. In this talk Saotome will discuss how citizens can become informed about and further understand the meaning of the Tokyo air raids.
Tokyo Air Raid and War Damages Resource Center — A small museum devoted to the attack, the Tokyo Air Raid and War Damages Resource Center opened near the center of the disaster zone in 2002, and has been renovated for the 60th anniversary. The museum has expanded its timeline display to include Tokyo's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and examples of Japanese pro-war propaganda to show Japan's role in starting the fighting, said Haruyo Nihei, a 73-year-old survivor and Center volunteer. Tadahito Yamamoto, Staff Researcher at the Center will speak of the mission of the Center and introduce its collections, exhibit, research activities, and publications.
Free and open to the public.
Everything I Ever Needed to Know in Life I Learned from the Yakuza or the Cops
Jake Adelstein, Investigative Journalist
March 17, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
Jake Adelstein is the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, and with Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan we have his firsthand, revelatory look at Japanese culture from the underbelly up.
At nineteen, Jake went to Japan in search of peace and tranquility. But he quickly worked his way from student to crime reporter for the prestigious Japanese-language Yomiuri Shinbun. For twelve years of 80-hour work weeks, he covered the seedy side of Japan, where extortion, murder, human trafficking, and corruption are more prevalent than we would imagine, given that Japan is one of the safest countries in the world to live. When his final scoop brought him face to face with one of Japan's most infamous yazuka bosses—and with it the threat of death for him and his family—Adelstein decided to step down from the newspaper. But he did fight back, and got that story told.
Tokyo Vice tells a riveting, often humorous tale of Adelstein's journey from an inexperienced cub reporter to a daring, investigative journalist with a price on his head. With its vivid, visceral descriptions of crime in Japan and an exploration of the world of modern-day yakuza that even few Japanese ever see, Tokyo Vice is a fascination, and an education, from first to last.
Jake Adelstein was a reporter for the Yomiuri Shinbun, Japan's largest newspaper, from 1993 to 2005. From 2006 to 2007, he was the chief investigator for a U.S. State Department-sponsored study of human trafficking in Japan. Considered one of the foremost experts on organized crime in Japan, he works as a writer and consultant in Japan and the U.S.
Introduced by Duncan Ryuken Williams, Chair, Center for Japanese Studies.
Alone at the Summit: Career Success and Failure among Top-ranking Chosŏn Period Munkwa Examination Passers
Milan Hejtmanek, Seoul National University
March 19, 2010
Center for Korean Studies
The munkwa or High State Civil Examination was the central institution for recruiting elite government officials during the Chosŏn dynasty. Over the 741 times it was given between 1393 and 1894, out of millions of aspirants 14,607 men passed. While these few passers may have comprised the fortunate elite among the members of the yangban class, a munkwa degree was far from a guarantee of success within the complex hierarchies of the central government bureaucracy, an uncertainty that extended to the culturally exalted ranks of the 741 top passers, the changwŏn kŭpche.
This talk makes use of a rich subset of the comprehensive database compiled by Edward Wagner and Song June-ho to examine the career success paths of successful candidates both across provinces and within provinces, paying special attention to those officials who attained ministerial (tangsang) status within the bureaucracy. Central government records, along with information from private literary collections as well as local gazetteers are used to illumine specific cases, focusing in particular on the top passers.
Milan Hejtmanek is Associate Professor of History in the Department of Korean History, Seoul National University, where he is the first non-Korean ever to hold a standing faculty position in any field of Korean Studies. He holds a B.A. degree from Stanford University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University, and studied at Seoul National University and the Mandarin Center of Taiwan National Normal University, as well as serving in South Korea as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer for three years. He has previously taught at Yonsei University, the University of Kansas, the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Sungkyunkwan University. The subjects of his papers and publications on Chosŏn-period Korean history range widely from slavery, to gender, to local Confucian ritual, to education, to the state examination system. He is the author of a forthcoming study of Korean Confucian academies, The Elusive Path to Sagehood.
Writing China's Modern History in Contemporary Greater China
Wen-hsin Yeh, History, UC Berkeley
Wang Chaoguang, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Zhang Qing, Fudan University
Jin Chongji, Party History Archives
Jin Yilin, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
March 30, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
This event will be in Chinese and English, with partial interpretation.
The past two decades have witnessed unprecedented openings of historical archives in China, accompanied by a heightened level of scholarly exchanges between Chinese and Western scholars. The writing of China's modern history in China nonetheless remains a matter of high political sensitivity. Historians who publish in Chinese have found liberation by approaching China's modern history with new questions that re-conceptualize contested issues concerning Chinese political legitimacy. Western scholars, on the other hand, tend to focus on broader issues of socio-economic trends — privileging evaluative and genealogical questions, for example, concerning Chinese modernity.
In what way can we speak of meaningful exchanges between Chinese and American scholars on the subject of China's modern history? To what extent have the richness of new sources, the changes in political dynamics, and the openness of scholarly exchanges helped to fashion an international field of modern Chinese historical studies both in and outside of China?
This roundtable presents contributions by leading historians of modern China. These scholars offer their distinct considerations of an emerging Chinese narrative on China's 20th century.
We invite all students interested in modern and contemporary Chinese history to take part in this discussion.
Remembering Hakuin in Contemporary Japan: Forgotten Memories of Rinzai Zen Master and Political Protest Use of Paintings
Dr. Masaki Matsubara, Visiting Scholar in Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley
April 1, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies
Contemporary Japanese Zen is often regarded as a tradition unconcerned with moral formulations and contemporary social events and focused solely on the quest for deep religious experience (kenshō or satori). Hakuin Ekaku (1686–1769) is widely regarded as the leading figure of contemporary Japanese Rinzai Zen, much like Dōgen of the Sōtō Zen school. Hakuin's major writings and considerable production of artwork (paintings and calligraphy) are held up as examples of a highly developed capacity for religious experience in the Zen tradition. Previous studies, almost exclusively emphasizing his hard practice, decisive enlightenment experience, and tireless teaching activities in hagiographical manners, have been locked into a perspective which regards Hakuin only as the reviver/de facto founder of the tradition, an ardent meditation master, or/and a versatile artist. Yet this very same process of "remembrance" ignores and even represses his strong anti-elite social critiques, which in their day were very controversial and forthright.
In this talk, Dr. Matsubara will problematize this tendency to privilege this "experiential Hakuin" at the risk of ignoring his equally present and cogent moral voice. He will examine the neglected aspects of Hakuin's considerable role as a social critic, by focusing on both his writings, with a particular emphasis on one of his most influential political treatises, Hebiichigo (lit., "Snake Strawberries"), and his unique paintings that reinforce its views. All of these writings and paintings introduced here have remained largely unknown. Remarking that Hakuin as a social critic is not simply an isolated example, but is in fact part of a dominant theme evident in both his writings and artwork, the speaker will argue that Hakuin was a fearless fighter for social justice whose campaign on behalf of farmers or the lower classes resulted in his condemnation of the luxurious lifestyle of political elites, including that of the imperial household. He even criticized sankin kōtai, or "daimyō processions," the Tokugawa shogunate's economic policy to control the country. Matsubara will also argue how the art of one of Japan's most illustrious religious figures can in fact be seen as effective political protest. Rehabilitating these forgotten memories of Hakuin, he suggests that the selective data of religious figures often represent the "best" a given tradition had to offer its deceased and, used alone, are potentially misleading indicators in cultural historical reconstructions. Matsubara's ongoing research on "cultural memory" as a tradition's shared sense of its own past and identity which is socially determined focuses on the issues of tradition development (production, reproduction, and maintenance) in modern Rinzai Zen and its effects on the identity creation that elevates Hakuin to his present position of prominence. He proposes the possibility that the Hakuin we remember as the tradition's reviver today is a fairly recent innovation, or, more specifically, a twentieth-century or Meiji-Taishō product, in the history of Hakuin remembrances.
Writing the Infinite: Tendai Buddhist Calligraphy as the Bodhisattva Path
April 1, 2010 – June 10, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
A spiritual awakening awaits both creator and viewer in the highest forms of Tendai calligraphy. "Boundless" and "infinite" are favored characters, as monks and lay followers seek heightened awareness in the act of writing. Drawing upon a lifetime of rigorous training and meditative concentration, the calligrapher touches brush to paper in a moment of personal realization of Buddhist teachings.
"Writing the Infinite: Tendai Buddhist Calligraphy as the Bodhisattva Path" opens at the IEAS Gallery at the University of California, Berkeley on April 1, 2010. The calligraphy on display represents some of the most accomplished and highly placed members of the sect. On loan from Enryakuji temple on Mount Hiei in Kyoto as well as other temples in Japan and the United States, this exhibit is an opportunity to experience directly the sacred texts of Tendai.
For all Tendai priests, training in calligraphy is central not only to their own spiritual growth, but the everyday practice of religious duties. Monks need to write temple signs, funeral tablets, certificates, inscriptions, as well as the copy sutras. Some priests make calligraphy their primary religious practice. But for all, calligraphy is central to one's spiritual journey, and the painted words serve as an inspiration for others seeking guidance. Just as Bodhisattvas forego nirvana to assist others in achieving enlightenment, Tendai priests, through calligraphy, seek to help others to greater understanding.
Those who find calligraphy a less accessible form than other arts, or who wish to learn more about Tendai Buddhism, are invited attend a symposium "Tendai Studies and Art" on April 23, 2010, at the Institute of East Asian Studies (2223 Fulton Street in Berkeley, 6th Floor Conference Room, 9 am to 6 pm). Priests, scholars, and practitioners of calligraphy will speak about Tendai practice in the morning and writing in the afternoon, culminating in a demonstration by one of the major figures in Tendai calligraphy.
The Dragon's Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa
Deborah Brautigam, Author and Associate Professor, International Development, American University
April 1, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for African Studies
Is China a rogue donor? Media reports about huge aid packages, support for pariah regimes, regiments of Chinese labor, and the ruthless exploitation of workers and natural resources in some of the poorest countries in the world have sparked fierce debates. China's tradition of secrecy fuels rumors and speculation, making it difficult to gauge the risks and opportunities in China's growing embrace. This well-timed new book, by one of the world's leading experts, tackles the myths and the sometimes surprising realities. It explains what the Chinese are doing, how they do it, and why this engagement has a chance of working better for Africa's development than decades of efforts from the West.
Indigenous Knowledge?: The Politics of Traditional Chinese Medicine
Judith Farquhar, Anthropology, University of Chicago
Xin Liu, Anthropology, UC Berkeley, discussant
April 2, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
The classical tradition of medicine in China has been deeply altered by its engagements with Western science and nation-state development over the last 150 years. This presentation characterizes contemporary Chinese medicine as a weave of local historical constraints, global economic and epistemological pressures, and clinical and pedagogical pragmatics. When considered in relation to the global movement for the recognition and re-deployment of indigenous knowledges, Chinese medicine's emergence in the late 20th century as an influential — yet always challenged — "non-western science" is instructive. Several case studies of Chinese medical theory and practice under global challenge, reflecting a constitutive politics of scientific knowledge, will be explored.
When Village Meets Financial Tsunami: Reconfiguring Urban Space and Cultural Belonging in South China
Helen Siu, Anthropology, Yale
Lan-chih Po, Discussant, International and Area Studies Teaching Program, UC Berkeley
April 5, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
This presentation focuses on village life in a district of Guangzhou that is being developed into a new Central Business District (CBD). Villagers in the district are absorbed by the city while tied to collective property ownership and "rural" statuses left from a Maoist era. The penetrating power of the late socialist state, the intensely volatile global market, and modernist landmark schemes are intertwined to dominate the residents' predicaments and sentiments. Their lives are suspended in a political past and a cultural vacuum that they are ambivalent with, and an economic future they have little control. The paper engages with theoretical literature on post-socialisms, global-local interface, history, power, and displacement.
Tsinghua Week at Berkeley
April 5–7, 2010
The University of California, Berkeley, welcomes faculty, administrators, and students from Tsinghua University to campus for "Tsinghua Week at Berkeley 2010". Tsinghua University, a top tier comprehensive research university in Beijing, China, will be sending a delegation of 130 faculty, administrators, staff and students to Berkeley to participate in events and activities designed to promote research and learning drawing on the resources of UC Berkeley and Tsinghua. Areas of exchanges range from science and engineering to architecture, philosophy, history, public policies, social welfare, and higher education. During the three day event, departments, schools, and research units on the Berkeley campus will serve as sites of synergy and discussion designed to bridge research and learning across the Pacific and to strengthen ties between the two universities. Student events will highlight university life at both campuses and encourage cultural exchange.
Tsinghua Week events are hosted by the Office of the Chancellor and organized and staffed by the Institute of East Asian Studies. Co-Organizers include: Banatao Institute @ CITRIS Berkeley, Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), College of Engineering, Department of Architecture, Department of Physics, Department of Psychology, Goldman School of Public Policy, Institute of East Asian Studies, Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH).
All academic panels are free and open to the public. Join us for three days of stimulating discussion and activities.
Surviving the Dragon: A Tibetan Lama's Life Under Chinese Rule
Arjia Rinpoche, former Abbot of Kumbum Monastery in Amdo, Tibet
April 7, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, History of Art Department, Center for South Asia Studies
Arjia Rinpoche's memoir is a story of Buddhism in Tibet, and of a man caught between politics and faith. Arjia Rinpoche grew up in Kumbum, one of Tibet's six great monasteries. Identified as a child to be the tenth reincarnation of the father of Lama Tsong Kha Pa, the founder of the Gelukpa school of Tibetan Buddhism (to which His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama belongs), he was treated as a living Buddha. With the Chinese takeover of Tibet his life became one of repression and hardship. Yet unlike many stories from Tibet, his memories are not those of torture and suffering under the Chinese. After Mao's death, he rose to prominence within the Chinese Buddhist bureaucracy. He became Vice-chairman of the Buddhist Association of China and was slated to become its Chairman when he was finally forced to choose exile rather than compromise.
Introduced by Pat Berger, History of Art.
Punctuations: Taiwan in 1989, 1999, and 2009
Ping-hui Liao, Department of Literature, UC San Diego
Andrew F. Jones, Discussant, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley
April 7, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
This talk will cover three small but timely events: the publication of "Eiren's Fan: An Elegy on February 28" by Nishikawa Mitsuru; the opening of a "Secret Garden," an underground art project by Mali Wu; and the genesis of secret narratives that Dingnan Chen was starved to death. "Eiren's Fan" reflects on Taiwan's difficult transition from the Japanese period to the KMT era. The piece was written in 1947, but the author decided to release it in 1989, the year he considered Taiwan to be entering its postcolonial phase. "Secret Garden" is an eco-feminist landscape art that aims to undermine Chinese nationalism and identity politics. Finally, the defeat of the MKT in the most recent Yilan election may have something to do with gossips. All three deal with untold stories and unnatural catastrophes.
Remembering the Past Bitterness to Salve Present Injuries: Rural Women and New Uses for China's Collective Past
Gail Hershatter, History, UC Santa Cruz
April 7, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
In rural China today, aging women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of a present in which their longevity, self-understanding, and economic vulnerability are shaped by gender, just as their laboring lives were during the collective period. They highlight what they feel to be their enduring virtues, their important achievements, and their most deeply harbored grievances. In talking about their current situations as elderly (often widowed) women with grown children, these women point to the ironies and contradictions of the reform-era countryside. Their stories about the 1950s remonstrate with individual family members and with a wider socius that depended on, expected, yet generally failed to recognize much of their labor, and that now increasingly regards them as a burden. These stories remind us that rural socialist construction depended on women's heroic work in the cotton fields and their systematically occluded domestic labor as well. They suggest that just as socialism was profoundly gendered, so is the memory and understanding of its layered transformations, its difficulties, and its meanings.
This talk is drawn from the final chapter of Hershatter's book The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past (University of California Press, forthcoming).
'Still Life' (2006): a film by director Jia Zhangke
April 8, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Department of Rhetoric
See listing for Monday, April 19 for master class by Dai Jinhua on this film.
The Korean War in U.S. and South Korean Art and Film: Militarism, Death, and Adoption in the 1950s
Theodore Hughes, Columbia University
April 9, 2010
Center for Korean Studies
In this paper, I examine the ways in which U.S. and South Korean combat films and art from the 1950s and early 1960s negotiate the violence associated with memories of the Korean War, particularly scenes of massacre, dying, and death. The combat film, as a genre, stages death in a way that summons the spectator as survivor and witness: the film ends and the spectator remains, alive and possessing a memory of the images he/she has just viewed. Combat films thus involve a visual touching, one that often takes the form of memory and trauma, the repetition of the image. Combat films implicate spectators in this trauma even as they often work to seal violence up safely as elsewhere, away from the spectator. One is "touched" by violence insofar as one can re-imagine the image one has seen. My discussion of violence and touching (in its two senses, emotive and corporeal) will move on to other forms of intimacy, particularly the Cold War discourse of adoption, one that informs all three films I will examine, The Marines Who Do Not Return (Yi Man-hŭi, 1963), Steel Helmet (Samuel Fuller, 1951), and War Hunt (Denis Sanders, 1962). In Yi Man-hŭi's film, the voice-over narration of the adoptee intersects with the portrayal of the Korean War as fratricidal, associated at once with the natural and the unnatural. In U.S. films, the birth of an international family is accompanied by a "touching," affective Cold War masculinity. In both cases, the figure of the adoptee stands at the center of the unstable regime of life and death that makes up the early Korean War combat film.
Theodore Hughes received his Ph.D. in modern Korean literature from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002. His current research interests include coloniality; proletarian literature and art; cultures of national division; visuality and the global Cold War. Recent publications include "Return to the Colonial Present: Ch'oe In-hun's Cold War Pan-Asianism" (forthcoming in positions: east asia cultures critique); "Dongducheon: Everyday Life, Violence, and the State of Exception" (BOL, 2008); '"North Koreans' and other Virtual Subjects: Kim Yŏng-ha, Hwang Suk-young, and National Division in the Age of Posthumanism" (The Review of Korean Studies, 2008); "Korean Memories of the Vietnam and Korean Wars: A Counter-History" (Japan Focus, 2007); "Korean Visual Modernity and the Developmental Imagination" (SAI, 2006); "Development as Devolution: Nam Chŏng-hyŏn and the 'Land of Excrement' Incident" (Journal of Korean Studies, 2005); "Producing Sovereign Spaces in the Emerging Cold War World Order: Immediate Postliberation 'North' and 'South' Korean Literature" (Han'guk Munhak Yŏn'gu, 2005); Panmunjom and Other Stories by Lee Ho-Chul (Norwalk: EastBridge, 2005).
"Assembly" (2007): A film by director Feng Xiaogang
April 12, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Department of Rhetoric
Feng Xiaogang's Assembly is a war drama made in 2007, about the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949) in which the Communists and Nationalists battled for control of China. The film is based on a real account of a veteran army captain upholding his company honor. Produced by a state-run film studio, the film was a big hit in China. After almost twenty years of not making such films, the theme of "revolutionary struggle" is once again returning to China's silver screen.
This film runs 124 minutes.
See also Monday, April 26, for master class by Dai Jinhua about this film.
"Lust, Caution" (2007): A film by Ang Lee
April 15, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Department of Rhetoric
Madame White, The Book of Change, and Eileen Chang: On A Poetics of Involution
David Der-wei Wang, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
April 16, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
In the studies of Eileen Chang (1920–1995) one aspect yet to be explored is her penchant for rewriting existing works in multiple iterations and languages. This lecture discusses Chang's aesthetic of revision and bilingualism by examining her two English novels, The Fall of the Pagoda and The Book of Change, which were discovered in 2009 and will be published in 2010. These two novels were written in the late fifties, when Chang had just settled in the United States. In many ways, they provide a missing link in Chang's (re)writing of her own life story, from English to Chinese and vice versa, from lecture to fiction and photo album, and from autobiographical "whispers" to dramatized exposé. The titles of these two novels, one referring to the Leifeng Pagoda of the White Snake legend, and the other the esoteric classic The Book of Change, suggest Chang's effort to integrate her writings into a broader cycle of Chinese discourses and temporalities. Through a comparative reading of the two novels and other texts, the lecture seeks to make the following observations: 1. Insofar as mimetic realism was the canonical form of modern Chinese literature, the way in which Chang repeats herself by traversing rhetorical, generic, and linguistic boundaries has given rise to a peculiar poetics, one that highlights not revelation but derivation, not revolution but involution. 2. Through the multiple versions of her story, Chang tries to challenge the master plot of her family romance by proliferating it, and dispel her past by continually revisiting it. More provocatively, to write is to translate memory into art, an effort to remember pieces of the past in a mediated form. 3. The circular, derivative inclination in Chang's writing also points to a unique view of (literary) history. It has at least two models, Haishang hualiezhuan (Singsong girls from Shanghai, 1894) and Hongloumeng (Dream of the red chamber, 1792). When she was rewriting her own life story in various formats in the last four decades of her career, Chang was at the same time engaged in two parallel projects: translating Singsong Girls from Shanghai from the Wu dialect first into Mandarin Chinese, and then into English; annotating The Dream of Red Chamber by means of textual analysis, philological verification, and biographical research. Writers and critics of the revolutionary discourse would not welcome Chang's vision. But insofar as her writing entertains a negative dialectic of history and progress, Chang has provided a sobering view from which to detect Chinese literary modernity at its most convoluted.
Berkeley-Stanford Graduate Student Conference in Modern Chinese Humanities
April 16–17, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Stanford University Center for East Asian Studies
This is the inaugural session of the Berkeley-Stanford Graduate Student Conference in Modern Chinese Humanities. This will be an annual event, to be held in alternate years at U.C. Berkeley and Stanford.
Each year, the conference will bring together a keynote speaker and approximately twelve graduate students to present innovative research on any aspect of modern Chinese cultural production in any humanistic discipline. We encourage interdisciplinary scholarship within and between literary and cultural studies, cultural history, art history, film and media studies, musicology and sound studies, as well as the interpretative social sciences.
This year the keynote speaker is David Der-wei Wang, of Harvard University.
Conference agenda
Friday, April 16, 3:00–5:00 p.m.
Panel 1: Media Matters: Visual and Aural Expressions of Chinese Modernity
Jessica K.Y. Chan, "Translating 'Montage: the Discreet Attractions of Soviet Revolutionary Aesthetics for Chinese Revolutionary Cinema (1932–1966)"
Tiffany Lee, "One, and the Same: Photography and the Figure of the Double in Chinese Visual Modernity"
Kristina Kleutghen, "Out From Behind the Curtain: Modernizing the Face of Imperial China?"
Jing Wang, "Freedom in Listening: Depiction of Sound Art in Beijing"
Friday, April 16, 5:00–7:00 p.m.
Keynote speech: David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University: "Madame White, The Book of Change, and Eileen Chang: On a Poetics of Involution"
Saturday, April 17, 10:00 a.m.
Panel 2: Embodiments of Modernity: Chinese Representations of Gender and Body
Howard Chiang, "The Demise of Chinese Eunuchism"
Emily Wilcox, "The Cultivation of Yunwei in Contemporary Chinese Classical Dance"
Shing-ting Lin, "Hygienic Menstruation: Popularization and the Commodification of Female Hygiene in Republican China, 1910s–1930s"
Gary Wang, "Making 'Opposite-sex' Love in Print"
Saturday, April 17, 1:30 p.m.
Panel 3: "People's Arts:" Art production and performance in Post-1950s Mao-era
Daisy Yan Du, "From Politicized Tadpoles to Idealized Herd Boy"
Agnes Liu Zhuo, "Fanshen Folk Songs and the Mass Literary Movement in the Chinese Civil War period (1945–1949)"
Margaret Greene, "A Ghostly Bodhisattva and the Price of Vengeance"
Saturday, April 17, 3:30 p.m.
Panel 4: Border Crossings: The Construction of National and Transnational Identities
Xin Chen, "Female Protestant Missionaries in Modern China and Japan (1880s–1940s)"
Ke Ren, "The Boulevardier from Fuzhou: The Making of a Chinese Celebrity in Fin-de-Siècle Paris"
Master class on Jia Zhangke's film 'Still Life'
Dai Jinhua, Director, Center for Film and Cultural Studies, Beijing University
April 19, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Department of Rhetoric
This seminar, led by Dai Jinhua, will examine the film text of Still Life in order to discuss the realist paradoxes of China's destruction and construction, submersion and emergence, in the midst of rapid economic development. It will also address the main theme of the quest, as found in the film, to further address the immediate predicaments that reappear in Chinese culture.
Requires registration: email ccs@berkeley.edu
Note: Film will be screened on Thursday, April 8 at the Townsend Center.
Dai Jinhua is the director of the Center for Film Studies and Cultural Studies at Beijing University, and the foremost feminist, "New Left" cultural critic in China. Her publications include Gendering China (Xingbie hongguo) (2006). This spring she is the Townsend Resident Fellow based in the Rhetoric Department.
Inconceivably Remote Future Accessible Now: The Bodhisattva and Future Buddha Maitreya during the Kusana Period
Dr. Christian Luczanits, Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhist Studies
April 20, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies
As both Bodhisattva and future Buddha in our world Maitreya occupies a unique position in the history of Buddhism and Buddhist art. Besides Śākyamuni, it is this Bodhisattva who first receives cultic attention. Such a cult can first be grasped within the realm of the Kuṣāṇa rulers and in particular in the cultural region of Gandhāra, where his imagery is extremely frequent. Although the importance of Maitreya during that period is frequently mentioned and several studies are dedicated to the depictions of Maitreya as such, no study has as yet attempted to provide more detailed information on the possible religious context and meaning of this imagery. Although precise information is scarce, a consideration of the available imagery in the light of the development of Buddhism in general and ideas related to and characteristic for what is later to become Mahāyāna Buddhism in particular, allows for the development of a much more complex picture of what Maitreya may have meant for a number of types of believers within the Kuṣāṇa realm. While some imagery can clearly be associated with the establishment of new ideas concerning the nature of a Buddha and of a Bodhisattva, the conservative nature of iconography makes differentiation practically impossible in other cases. The more developed cults of Maitreya in Central Asia and China, roughly contemporary with later Kuṣāṇa art or slightly later, provide further clues for possible roles of Maitreya in Northwest India during the Kuṣāṇa period. While Maitreya clearly has been the most prominent Bodhisattva during the Kuṣāṇa reign, Avalokiteśvara takes the more prominent position in fully developed Mahāyāna Buddhism. The lecture sets the upcoming of Maitreya imagery into context, explains his iconography, and relates different types of imagery to legends and believes associated with him and also to changing ideas about the nature and qualities of a Bodhisattva in general. In conclusion, it reflects on those changes that were instrumental in reducing the importance of Maitreya in fully developed Mahāyāna Buddhism.
China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Professor of History, UC Irvine
April 21, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
China's dramatic return to global centrality, symbolized by everything from the omnipresence of Chinese-made goods in big box stores to the Beijing Games, is one of the great stories of the new millennium. This book, organized around an expert's simple but sometimes surprising answers to commonly asked questions, provides an invaluable window onto China's past, present, and future for anyone who seeks to better understand this complex tale.
China in the 21st Century addresses common sources of misunderstanding that bedevil Western and particularly American thinking about the world's most populous country. It also shows how things that have happened during the last two decades and at times the last two millennia influence contemporary events.
It presents a China that is complex and more diverse than Westerners often imagine it to be, yet is by no means "inscrutable" (as the cliché would have it). Understanding today's China is far from impossible, but it does require a willingness to cast aside ideas that fill much soundbite driven commentary, and to think about things that the PRC has in common with—as well as things that differentiate it from—other large nations, such as India that stands across the Himalayas from it in one direction and the United States that stands across the Pacific from it in the other.
The author, a Professor of History at UC Irvine who hold's a master's degree from Harvard and a doctorate from Berkeley, has written three previous books on China and edited or co-edited several others. He has been traveling to the PRC regularly for more than two decades, is the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, has been interviewed about China for NPR's "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered," and has contributed to many newspapers, magazines, and blogs, including the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Time, and Newsweek.
Introduced by Andrew F. Jones, Chair, Center for Chinese Studies.
In Vogue: National Ethnicity and Cultural Politics: Lust, Caution and China's Lust, Caution Phenomenon
Dai Jinhua, Director, Center for Film Studies and Cultural Studies, Beijing University
Wendy Brown, Political Science, UCB
Linda Williams, Film Studies and Rhetoric, UCB
Lisa Rofel, Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz"
Pheng Cheah, Moderator, Rhetoric, UCB
April 21, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Townsend Center, Department of Film and Rhetoric
Dai Jinhua is the foremost feminist, "New Left" cultural critic in China. She is currently director of the Center for Film Studies and Cultural Studies at Beijing University. Dai Jinhua's lecture will approach the interpretations and reception of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, along with the acclaim and denunciations of the film, as a cluster of socio-cultural symptoms. She will excavate the social, cultural and psychoanalytic traces of both the era of the Cold War/post-Cold War and the era of globalization within contemporary mainland China through a study of these reactions to the film.
Responses by: Wendy Brown (Political Science, UC Berkeley), Linda Williams (Film Studies and Rhetoric, UC Berkeley), Lisa Rofel (Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz). Introduction & moderation by Pheng Cheah (Rhetoric, UC Berkeley).
Dai Jinhua will be hosted by the Department of Rhetoric during her residence at Berkeley.
The Inscription of Death in Early Medieval China: The Caos of the Wei
Robert Joe Cutter, Department of Languages and Literatures, Arizona State University
Mark Czikszentmihalyi, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, UCB, discussant
April 22, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
This paper stems from a larger project involving a study of literary responses to death and the prospect of death in early medieval China. It is an examination of the very different texts and circumstances surrounding the deaths of two members of the Cao family, Cao Cao (155–220) and Cao Zhang (d. 223), and the construction and remediation of the relevant accounts.
Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India
Pranab K. Bardhan, Professor, Department of Economics, UC Berkeley
April 22, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for South Asia Studies, Center for Evaluation for Global Action, Institute of International Studies, Department of Economics
The lecture will be followed by a book sale/signing and a reception.
The recent economic rise of China and India has attracted a great deal of attention—and justifiably so. Together, the two countries account or one-fifth of the global economy and are projected to represent a full third of the world's income by 2025. Yet, many of the views regarding China and India's market reforms and high growth have been tendentious, exaggerated, or oversimplified. Published by Princeton University Press, Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay scrutinizes the phenomenal rise of both nations, and demolishes the myths that have accumulated around the economic achievements of these two giants in the last quarter century. Exploring the challenges that both countries must overcome to become true leaders in the international economy, Pranab Bardhan looks beyond short-run macroeconomic issues to examine and compare China and India's major policy changes, political and economic structures, and current general performance. Bardhan investigates the two countries' economic reforms, each nation's pattern and composition of growth, and the problems afflicting their agricultural, industrial, infrastructural, and financial sectors. He considers how these factors affect China and India's poverty, inequality, and environment, how political factors shape each country's pattern of burgeoning capitalism, and how significant poverty reduction in both countries is mainly due to domestic factors—not global integration, as most would believe. He shows how authoritarianism has distorted Chinese development while democratic governance in India has been marred by severe accountability failures.
Pranab Bardhan is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has done theoretical and field studies research on rural institutions in poor countries, on political economy of development policies, and on international trade. A part of his work is in the interdisciplinary area of economics, political science, and social anthropology. He was Chief Editor of the Journal of Development Economics for 1985–2003. He was the co-chair of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance for 1996–2007. He will be the BP Centennial Professor at London School of Economics for 2010 and 2011.
Tendai Studies and Art Symposium
April 23, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, California Tendai Monastery
Symposium: 9:00AM – 12:00PM
9:00–9:15AM: Introduction by Prof. Duncan Williams (UC Berkeley)
9:15–9:45AM: Keynote Lecture by Prof. Shoshin Ichishima (Taisho University) — "The Integration of Sutra & Tantra at Mount Hiei"
9:45–10:00AM: Q & A
10:00–10:30AM: Lecture by Prof. Paul Groner (University of Virginia — "The Training and Education of Tendai Monks"
10:30–10:45AM: Q & A
10:45–11:30AM: Lecture by Prof. Hodo Shioiri (Taisho University) — with interpreter — "Syncretism of Kami and Buddha in Terms of Sanno Shinto"
11:30–11:45AM: Q & A 11:45–1:30PM: Lunch Break
Tendai Calligraphy Panel: 1:30PM – 6:00PM
1:30–1:35PM: Introduction by Monshin Paul Naamon (Tendai Buddhist Institute) 1:35–2:15PM: Lecture by Prof. John Stevens (Tohoku Fukushi University) — "An Illustrated History of Tendai Calligraphy"
2:15–2:30PM: Q & A
2:30–3:00PM: Lecture by Prof. Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis (Boston University) — canceled
"Entering the Pure Land at a Tendai Temple — Seigantoji at Nachi"
3:00–3:15PM: Q & A
3:15–3:30PM: Coffee Break
3:30–4:30PM: Ven. Senkei Shibayama (Calligrapher and author of Saicho no Sho)
Demonstration of Tendai Calligraphy — with interpreter
4:30–6:00PM: Reception
Sovereignty and Korean Historiography in the Early Twentieth Century
Henry Em, New York University
April 23, 2010
Center for Korean Studies
** Please note the location change for this event, which will not be held at IEAS.**
In the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, narratives about individual and national sovereignty proliferated in Korea. It was a creative moment, but one which was made possible by the [unavoidable] accommodation to Western law and semantic innovation. What constituted the material and discursive conditions that promoted the articulation of sovereignty, especially in language and historiography?
Henry Em is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. He has taught previously at Korea University, University of Michigan, and UCLA. His book, Sovereignty and Modern Korean Historiography, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. His chapter on modern Korean historiography will be published this year in volume 5 of the Oxford History of Historical Writing from Oxford University Press.
Master class on Feng Xiaogang's film "Assembly"
Dai Jinhua, Director, Center for Film and Cultural Studies, Beijing University
April 26, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Department of Rhetoric
Feng Xiaogang's Assembly is a war drama made in 2007, about the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949) in which the Communists and Nationalists battled for control of China. Produced by a state-run film studio, the film is based on a real account of a veteran army captain upholding his company honor. After almost twenty years of not making such films, the theme of "revolutionary struggle" is once again returning to China's movie screens. This seminar uses this film text to discuss one of the most important cultural developments in China at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the reconfiguration of both scholarly and popular consciousness about modern and contemporary Chinese history.
Registration not required.
Film showing: Monday, April 12, 4:00 p.m.
Dai Jinhua is the director of the Center for Film Studies and Cultural Studies at Beijing University, and the foremost feminist, "New Left" cultural critic in China. Her publications include Gendering China (Xingbie hongguo) (2006.) This spring she is the Townsend Resident Fellow based in the Rhetoric Department.
Breaking the News: Assessing the Impact of Foreign Media in North Korea
Peter M. Beck, 2009–10 Pantech Fellow, Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University
April 28, 2010
Center for Korean Studies
Just how easy (or difficult) is it for North Koreans to watch banned American movies or listen to Korean-language news broadcasts that Pyongyang spends a great deal of time condemning and resources trying to block? The North Korean border has become increasingly porous, with news reports suggesting that American and South Korean films have become so popular that the North Korean authorities have been forced to issue edicts on the length of men's hair, for example. At the same time, several American, South Korean and Japanese radio stations are targeting North Korea through short and medium-wave broadcasts. A growing number of defectors report having tasted such forbidden fruit before leaving North Korea. To what extent is banned media undermining the regime's control of the flow of information? Do such broadcasts encourage North Koreans to defect?
Peter M. Beck is the 2009–10 Pantech Fellow at Stanford University's Asia Pacific Research Center. He also teaches at American University in Washington, D.C. and Ewha Woman's University in Seoul. He also writes a monthly column for Weekly Chosun and The Korea Herald. Previously, he was the executive director of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and directed the International Crisis Group's Northeast Asia Project in Seoul. He was also the Director of Research and Academic Affairs at the Korea Economic Institute in Washington. He has published over 100 academic and short articles and testified before Congress.
The Bamiyan Stupas
Professor Zemaryalai Tarzi, Professor of Eastern Archaeology, Strasbourg University, France
April 29, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies
Professor Tarzi will discuss his excavations of Bamiyan stupas, as well as his comparative studies of stupas represented on murals in the Bamiyan region and in the north of Pakistan, particularly in the mountainous region of Gilgit. He will also take into account diverse stupas from a vast region ranging from India to Gandhara and the Central Asia region of Afghanistan, the ex-Soviet Union, and China.
Leaping Tigers, Hidden Dragons: A Wide Angle on India-China
Gerard Roland, Chair of Economics, UC Berkeley
Xiao Qiang, Adjunct Professor, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, founder and editor-in-chief of the China Digital Times
Maureen Fan, China Correspondent, The Washington Post
Ashok Deo Bardhan, Senior Research Associate, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
Ben A. Oppenheim, Research Fellow, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Todd Carrel, Visiting Lecturer, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
April 29, 2010
Institute of East Asian Studies, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
Measuring Up, or Why It's Good to be Tall in Modern China
Jia-Chen Fu, CCS Postdoctoral Fellow
April 30, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
This presentation examines the convergence of a medical sub-speciality and the nationalist project of uplift that identified the physical dimensions of China's children as benchmarks for modern advancement during the first half of the twentieth century. Chinese anthropometric research of the 1920s and 1930s opened intellectual paths for the abstraction and normalization of the Chinese body. By permitting the direct synthesis of the physical and physiological body's various aspects into numerical patterns of general types, anthropometric research shifted the intellectual landscape of medical practice and public health and encouraged the development of a culture of quantification.
The Korean Economy: Going Forward, or Falling Behind?
Dr. Chong Kook Park, Professor in the Department of Economics at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea
May 3, 2010
Center for Korean Studies
Korea became the 15th largest economy in the world, and annual income per capita reached $19,296 in 2008. It holds a competitive edge in several industries such as shipbuilding, semiconductors, LCD, and steel production. Despite its strength, Korea has financial vulnerabilities. It experienced financial crises in 1997 and 2008. I would like to talk about the reasons why the Korean economy is so vulnerable to the world economy. Introducing macroeconomic data, I point out structural weaknesses of the Korean economy as well as its strengths, and suggest policy options.
Dr. PARK, Chong Kook is Professor in the Department of Economics at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. He received a B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. in Economics all from Iowa State University. He teaches industrial organization, and is interested in the strategy of firms, information technology, and patents. He wrote a book titled A Study on the Information Technology Industry (in Korean), and has published many academic papers. He has been Chair of the Economics Department, Dean of the College of Politics and Economics, and Dean of Academic Affairs at Kyung Hee University. He is visiting the Center for Korean Studies for 2009–2010.
How Was the Pure Land Painted in Dunhuang?: Rethinking the Connection between the Amitayus Visualization Sutra and the Transformation Tableaux
Professor Nobuyoshi Yamabe, Tokyo University of Agriculture
May 4, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies
The Guanjing bianxiang 觀經變相, "Transformation Tableau based on the Amitāyus Visualization Sūtra," (Transformation Tableau) was very popular in Dunhuang. Even today, we can see many mural and silk paintings on this subject in or from Dunhuang. One of the interesting points of these paintings is that they give step-by-step depictions of the visualization process described in the the Guan wuliangshou jing 觀無量壽經, "Amitāyus Visalization Sūtra" (Visualization Sūtra). Thus, it is often assumed that these paintings were used as visual aides for the practice of visualization. However, these Transformation Tableaux are also highly problematic as they often show significant deviations from the Visualization Sūtra. In his talk, Yamabe will closely compare these paintings with sketches, manuscripts, inscriptions, and relevant texts to explain how these deviations were brought about. In so doing, he will show some aspects of artists' practice in Dunhuang. His discussion will also make clear that these Transformation Tableaux (at least those from later periods) were not meant to be a guide for visualization.
The Mongols and Global History
Morris Rossabi, Professor of Inner Asian History, Columbia University
May 4, 2010
Institute of East Asian Studies
Over the past decade, much has been written about the Mongol influence on global history, and some books have exaggerated by claiming that Chinggis Khan had an influence on the modern world. This illustrated lecture attempts to offer a balanced view on the importance of the Mongol empire in the histories of the civilizations the Mongols subjugated, including China, Iran and West Asia, and Russia.
Introduced by Patricia Berger, History of Art, UC Berkeley.
中国当代文化中的城市想象 (提要)
Gao Xiaokang, Chinese Department, Sun Yat-sen University
May 5, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
中国当代社会发展中，城市的发展具有越来越重要的意义。城市的发展不仅在于物质形态，更重要的是城市形象所产生的影响力。城市形象是社会想象的构造物，并且通过想象的发展而影响整个社会。
世纪中期以来，中国的城市想象通过各种叙事方式显现出来，表现出不同时期的意识形态和公众心理对生存环境的认知和评价，由此而形成了中国当代城市的个性和文化认同特征。进入 21 世纪后，各种城市想象所呈现的文化认同和冲突造成了城市文化发展中的种种矛盾—现代化与传统，乌托邦与多元文化等方面的关系已成为中国的社会文化发展所面临的重大问题
Esotericism in the Late Ming: Early Qing Buddhist Revival
Professor Robert Gimello, Research Professor, Departments of Theology and East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Notre Dame
May 6, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies
The goddess Cundī (准提, a.k.a. Saptakoṭi Buddhabhagavatī 七俱胝佛母) — held in Japan and in modern (but not pre-modern) China to be a form of Avalokiteśvara (觀音) — came to be a, if not the, central focus of esoteric Buddhist practice in late traditional Chinese Buddhism. She is still a significant presence in Chinese Buddhism today. The textual and iconographical foundations of her cult were established in the late 7th and early 8th centuries with multiple Chinese translations of the Cundīdevīdhāraṇī (e.g., 佛說七俱胝佛母心大准提陀羅尼經, T1077) and attendant ritual manuals (e.g., 七俱胝佛母心大准提陀羅尼法, T1078). Late in the 8th century, or early in the 9th, she was assigned a prominent place in the configuration of the Mahākaruṇāgarbhôdbhava maṇḍala (大悲胎藏生大漫荼羅王) — in the "Chamber of Pervasive Knowledge" (遍知院) and, especially in that latter capacity, she then made her way to Japan where her career would develop, in tandem with that of Cintāmaṇicakra (如意輪), in distinctively Japanese directions. The corpus of Cundī scripture in Chinese was expanded in the early Song with translations of the Kāraṇḍavyūha sūtra (大乘莊嚴寶王經, T1050), the Māyājāla tantra (佛說瑜伽大教王經, T890), and a fully fledged Cundī (Cundā) tantra (佛說持明藏瑜伽大教尊那菩薩大明成就儀軌經, T1169), but it was not until the late 11th century, in the Buddhism of the Liao 遼 dynasty, that her cult came truly into prominence and was given its classical formulation. That accomplishment may be credited especially to the monk Daoshen (道蝗) and his Xianmi yuantong chengfo xinyao ji (顯密圓通成佛心要集 Collection of Essentials for the Attainment of Buddhahood by Total [Inter-]Penetration of the Esoteric and the Exoteric, T1955), which treatise also served to "locate" Cundī in the broader Chinese Buddhist tradition by arguing for the deep mutual complementarity of Cundī practice (especially dhāraṇī recitation and visualization) with Huayan (華嚴) Buddhist thought. Daoshen's work was the mainstay of what came to be called "Cundī Esotericism" (准提密教) down to the 21st century. It is particularly noteworthy, however, that the development of the Cundī cult was not a steady and gradual process. There was an intriguing period of especially rapid acceleration in its growth, in southern China, at the very end of the Ming and the beginning of the Qing dynasty, that is to say, in the 17th century. From that one period and region there survive today, in the addenda to the Jiaxing Canon (嘉興大藏經) and in the Supplement to the [Kyoto] Buddhist Canon (續藏經), no fewer than six substantial texts devoted entirely to the exposition and interpretation of Cundī practice (弘贊。七俱胝佛母所說準提陀羅尼經會釋, SSZZ 446, 謝于教。准提淨業, SSZZ 1077, 施堯挺。準提心要, SSZZ 1078, 弘贊。持誦準提真言法要, SSZZ 1079, 受登 (a.k.a. 景淳)。天溪准提三昧行法, SSZZ 1481, 夏道人 (a.k.a. 埽道人默)。佛母淮提焚修悉地懺悔玄文, SSZZ 1482). Some of these texts include prefaces rich in pertinent historical information. Moreover, the extracanonical literature of the same period (e.g., 澹歸。遍行堂集, 袁黄。了凡四訓, etc.) also abounds in references to Cundī, and we have numerous examples of painted and cast images of the deity that appear to date from the same era. It is especially noteworthy that many of the figures revealed in this literature to have been most engaged in Cundī practice were also affiliated with the better known leaders of the late Ming Buddhist revival, i.e. with figures like Yunqi Zhuhong (雲棲祩宏 1532–1612), Hanshan Deqiing (憨山德清 1546–1623), Ouyi Zhixu (蕅益智旭 1599–1655), and their progeny. This talk will survey the Cundī literature and iconography of 17th century southern China and will draw attention to the fact that esoteric Buddhism — as well as Chan, Tiantai, and the challenges of Confucianism and Christianity — was an important part of 16th–17th century efflorescence of Chinese Buddhism.
Producing Knowledge about China: Social Science Perspectives
May 7–8, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Berkeley China Initiative
Over the past thirty years China has undergone an unprecedented transformation. Recently, many conferences have explored the various salient dimensions of this transformation, including industrialization, urbanization, migration, mobility, media and communication, urban architecture, energy consumption, the environment, public health, food security, law, legal and public culture and practices, global connections, regional and ethnic politics, the changing forms and norms of everyday Chinese life and so forth.
Building upon ongoing research and discussions, this conference aims to evaluate how China's recent transformation might have necessitated a parallel transformation of the multi-faceted ways in which we produce knowledge and represent understanding about China's past, present, and future. Participants will examine this production of knowledge in a multidisciplinary way, with cross-fertilization across disciplines and times, and drawing on substantive empirical work to engage the broader issue of how we produce knowledge about China. The conference seeks to serve as a forum for inter-disciplinary dialogue and evaluative examination on the question of how China studies has been placed and pursued in North America and beyond in recent decades.
Music of Sooran Jeong
Brady Anderson, cello
Sarah Carsman, viola
Gene Chang, clarinet
Heesoo Kim, flute
Diana Lee, cello
Aaron Miller, piano
Quelani Penland, violin
Jiyon Son, soprano
June 4, 2010
Center for Korean Studies
Program
An Old Melody for Solo Flute
Two Lyric Songs
Mechanism for Solo Piano
Amen for Strings
Song of the Blue Bird
Performers
Brady Anderson, cello
Sarah Carsman, viola
Gene Chang, clarinet
Heesoo Kim, flute
Diana Lee, cello
Aaron Miller, piano
Quelani Penland, violin
Jiyon Son, soprano
Sooran Jeong is an Associate Professor of Music at Pusan National University in South Korea, a position she has held since 2002. She is also a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Korean Studies during the 2009–10 academic year. Professor Jeong graduated with a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University at Buffalo (State University of New York). Among her awards are an honorable mention at the Gaudeamus International Music Composition Competition and a prize at the Tokyo International Piano Duo Composition Competition. Her works have been performed in Hong Kong, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.
The Center for Korean Studies would like to thank the Department of Music for generously allowing use of their space.
Stakeholders in the Supply of Public Goods in Rural China
Chen Dong, School of Economics, Shandong University
June 9, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
In recent years, the willingness and ability to supply public goods by multilevel governments, village cadres and farmers in rural China has been decreasing by various degrees. This speech attempts to focus on the behavioral characteristics of stakeholders as well as the game among them, thus to explain the fundamental reasons why there is a shortage in the supply of public goods in the rural area.
农村公共品供给意愿、利益群体与行为博弈
所谓农村公共品，泛指那些外部收益特征明显，惠及农村居民的产品或服务。包括农村公共设施、公益事业、公共福利、公共服务等各个领域，既有农业生产方面的内容，又与农民生活和农村社会发展密切相关。 – 近年来，我国各级政府、村干部和村民等相关利益群体对农村公共品的供给意愿与能力都存在不同程度的下降。 – 深层次原因是什么? 对各利益群体的行为及其相互博弈的分析，有助于解释这个问题。
Two Great Alphabets: "Hangeul" and "Visible Speech"
Chung-Kon Shi, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
June 11, 2010
Center for Korean Studies
The goal of this presentation is to compare King Sejong's 'Hangeul' with Bell's 'Visible Speech.' The Korean alphabet Hangeul was still largely unknown in Western countries until the middle of the twentieth century. In those days, many Western scholars believed that 'Visible Speech' was the first alphabet that was invented based on the actions of the vocal organs. These two alphabets have much in common. For example: 1) They are not only simple and logical, but have been constructed in a purely scientific way. 2) They are recognized internationally as feature writing systems. 3) Their inventors were recorded clearly in history. 4) They use hieroglyphic symbols for vocal organs. 5) They were invented for illiterate adults and defects of speech. 6) They were both used as phonetic symbols. These two alphabets have some differences too: 1) Hangeul anticipates by over 400 years the idea of Bell's Visible Speech. 2) In the case of Hangeul, only the consonants were modeled after the vocal organs, while both the consonants and vowels of Visible Speech resemble the shapes of the vocal organs.
Chung-Kon Shi is a professor at the KAIST Graduate School of Culture and Technology. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Korea University (Department of Korean Language and Literature), and has been a visiting fellow at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
Taiwanese Poster Design: An Engagement with Indigenous Arts
June 15–16, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan, Council for Cultural Affairs
Taiwan's "Yuanzhumin," or aborigines, inspire a selection of award-winning posters by Taiwanese design students. Motifs, myths, and the dilemmas of modern life are among the themes of the exhibit, on loan from the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines. The beauty and vigor of traditional arts are explored through the sensibility and creativity of Taiwan's young artists. An opening reception follows a talk on Taiwan's "Yuanzhumin" at 5 pm on Thursday, June 17. In conjunction with the North America Taiwan Studies Association Conference (NASTA), extended viewing hours in the IEAS lobby will be offered Thursday, June 17, 5 to 8 pm; Saturday, June 19, 9 am to 5 pm; and Sunday, June 20, 9 am to noon.
Human Rights and the Place of Aborigines/Yuanzhumin in Taiwanese Society
Joel Fetzer, Political Science, Pepperdine University
June 17, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
Beyond Taiwan debating its destiny vis-à-vis the mainland, or the legacy of colonialism and martial law, or its place in a globalized economy, another Taiwan struggles with issues of identity and human rights. Taiwan's "Yuanzhumin," or aborigines, confront the highly industrialized society of modern Taiwan with dilemmas common to indigenous groups elsewhere, but uniquely nuanced as well. This talk will trace the likely origins of Taiwan's indigenous people, summarize their geographical distribution, and outline the socio-economic conditions of today's "Yuanzhumin." The discussion will then turn to the ways in which Taiwanese aborigines have struggled for their rights since the late Qing dynasty and evaluate the success or failure of various efforts. Finally, we will look at several of the current policy goals which Yuanzhumin advocate and compare the status quo situation for Taiwanese aborigines with international human rights norms.
Following this talk, there will be a reception celebrating the opening of an exhibition of posters inspired by Yuanzhumin themes, "Taiwanese Poster Design: An Engagement with Indigenous Arts."
Climate Change and Subsistence in Prehistoric Japan
June 19–20, 2010
The impact of climate change on past peoples' lives is a topic of debate in the archaeology of different parts of the world. It is no exception in the study of the Jomon culture in Japan. Many Japanese scholars have suggested that the cooling climate at around 4300–4000 years ago resulted in a significant population decrease and a decline of large settlements at the end of the Middle Jomon period. Was climate change really the cause, or was it simply a trigger? How were the other factors, such as subsistence intensification, plant domestication and social stratification, related to the culture change? In addition to the climate change, should we also consider human impacts on the environment as a major factor for understanding human-environment interaction during the prehistoric period? Answering these questions is beneficial not only for the study of ancient societies but also to think about environmental issues with a long time scale. In this two day public event, scientists and archaeologists will discuss climate and subsistence change from such data as marine cores, pollen analyses, palaeoethnobotany, isotope studies, bioarchaeology, micromorphology and residue analyses. Results of our Institutional Project "Understanding Lifeways and Biocultural Diversity in Prehistoric Japan" will be used as a case study to link these lines of evidence with archaeological data. Comparative case studies will be discussed from other parts of Asia and the Pacific Rim.
Guided Tour of exhibition Taiwanese Poster Design: An Engagement with Indigenous Arts
David Blundell, International Doctoral Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, National Chengchi University
June 21, 2010
Institute of East Asian Studies
Anthropologist David Blundell, who worked with the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines to organize Taiwanese Poster Design: An Engagement with Indigenous Arts, will offer a guided tour of the exhibit. Meet in the IEAS lobby, 6th Floor.
Key Issues in Chinese Trade: Intellectual Property Rights, Exchange Rates, Environmental Protection, and Human Rights
Dong Lili, International Business School, Beijing Foreign Studies University
June 23, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
Professor Dong will discuss some of the latest issues that relate to trade with China; trying to see these issues from a Chinese and Western perspective. China has long been criticized for its lax enforcement in many of these areas. Western countries have been pressing and lobbying for reforms but the outcome is far from satisfying. Yet from China's perspective, its policy choices are very reasonable based on their development path, culture, and economic situation. This informal discussion will try to find areas of mutual benefit and understanding.
A Reading and Conversation with Jung Young Moon
Jung Young Moon, Daesan Foundation Writer-in-Residence, Center for Korean Studies
June 25, 2010
Center for Korean Studies, Daesan Foundation
Readings will be in both English and Korean.
Jung Young Moon was born in the countryside of southern Korea. After graduating from Seoul National University with a degree in psychology, he went to France and spent a year traveling throughout Europe. Inspired by his reading of European writers, he began to write. His first novel, A Man who Barely Exists (겨우 존재하는 인간), was published in 1996. It depicts a man who feels the utmost ennui and in this state of inertia, contemplates the meaning of life. Black Chain Stories (검은 이야기 사슬, 1998) is a collection of Kafkaesque short stories which probe into the issue of being and nothingness. The book was translated into French in 2007 and published by XYZ Editeur, a notable publisher in Quebec, where it was well received.
Mr. Jung's body of work includes five novels and five collections of short stories. In Korea, he is seen as a successor to the tradition of avant-garde writers of the twentieth century such as Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. He has furthered their experiments both in subject and in style. He writes of his work, "I have always been interested in the play of language and ideas rather than in the well-woven narrative. For me a novel is something that explores the possibility of ideas by means of language."
Mr. Jung received the Dongseo Literary prize for Black Chain Stories in 1999, and received a grant from the National Theater of Korea in 2002 for a play titled Donkeys, which was presented on stage there the following year. He has translated more than fifty English titles into Korean, including Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, John Fowles' Magus, and Germaine Greer's The Boy. He participated in the residency program at the University of Iowa in 2005. Two of his books have been translated into English and are awaiting publication, and another is also being translated into German.
This program is funded by a generous grant from the Daesan Foundation.
Inter-Korean and Cross-Strait Relations Compared through the Window of Regional Integration Theories: Realism, Federalism, (Neo)-Functionalism, and Constructivism
Hyug Baeg Im, Korea University
Yu-Jeong Choi, Korea University
July 2, 2010
Center for Korean Studies
During the Cold War era, there was no space for exchanges between North and South Korea, and between China and Taiwan. Thawing of this inflexible and confrontational security structure took place on the Korean peninsula and across the Taiwan Strait with the end of the Cold War. Since the mid 1970s, South Korea has consistently claimed functionalism with its economic superiority over the North, while North Korea shifted its unification policy and strategy from federalism to con-federalism or "lower stage federalism," emphasizing decentralization and survival of the weaker subunit. In Cross-Strait relations, China found functionalism to attract trade, business investment, and tourists from Taiwan. Taiwan rejected Chinese offers for more functionalist exchanges without recognizing Taiwanese sovereignty, and responded with non-functionalist policies such as "Three Nos policy." Despite the lack of government-level talks, trade, tourist visits, and family reunions grew remarkably. Both China and Taiwan have the wisdom to find a depoliticized pragmatist solution in their relations, while the two Koreas have been sticking to Cold War ideologies.
Inter-Korean and Cross-Strait relations are significantly different in the amount of trade and personal exchanges between the two states involved. Inter-Korean relations have been characterized by NATO — no action talks only — while Cross-Strait relations are an example of NTMA — no talk many actions. In Cross-Strait relations, functionalism has worked well, but Chinese functionalism has failed to advance toward neo-functionalism because the issue of Taiwan sovereignty is still unresolved. In Inter-Korean relations, the failure of the Sunshine policy was regarded as the failure of functionalism. Though agreements and summit meetings in the past two decades indicated some promise for functionalism to develop into neo-functionalism, the current Lee Myung Bak administration in South Korea turned the clock of reunification back by resurrecting the realism of the Cold War era, especially in the disengagement following the recent sinking of the Cheonan. China experienced a similar moment of anti-unification policies during Taiwan's Chen Shui-bian presidency, which brought issues of independence and ethnic identity to the forefront.
We conclude that in East Asia two key elements have decided the pattern of integration: balance of power (symmetrical vs. asymmetrical) and ethnic identity (homogeneous vs. heterogeneous). These factors in various combinations can describe Inter-Korean and Cross-Strait relations in different periods. We draw a tentative conclusion that the combination of homogenous ethnic identity and asymmetrical balance of power between divided countries is the most propitious for reintegration of divided countries. The current configuration of Inter-Korean relations and Cross-Strait relations share many characteristics of this combination and, therefore, we are cautiously optimistic for the prospects of reunification of Korea and China.
Hyug Baeg Im is Dean of the Graduate School of Policy Studies and Professor of Political Science at Korea University.
Chen Yuan: Christian Faith, Cultural Concern, and the Pursuit of Modern Academic Research
Liu Xian, Institute of Qing History, Renmin University
July 7, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
Chen Yuan (1880–1971, 陈垣) was a historian well-known in China and abroad during the Republican Period. Chen was regarded by Chinese scholars as one of the "Two Great Historians" (alongside Chen Yinque 陈寅恪) and by European scholars such as Paul Pelliot (1878–1945, 伯希和) as one of only two "world scholars in modern China." Chen's contributions range from historical philology, chronology, Yuan history to Qing history, however his greatest work is on the history of religion in China. Today, he is regarded as the founder of Chinese academic research on the history of religion due to his groundbreaking work, breadth of topics covered, and research depth. Chen Yuan was the first scholar to conduct original, academic research on religion, including Chinese religions such as Daoism and Sinicized Buddhism and western Christianity and Islam. This lecture will examine Chen Yuan and his study of religion from the perspective of his Christian faith, cultural concern, and pursuit of modern academic research on religion.
Negotiating Commercial Treaties in the Last Years of Qing Dynasty (1901–1911): A turning point in Chinese treaty history
Li Yongsheng, History School of Nankai University, Tianjin, China
July 14, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
To carry out the stipulations of article XI of 1901's Final Protocol, the Qing Government negotiated revisions to existing commercial treaties and signed new commercial treaties with the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan, to name a few. Negotiations for the revision of commercial treaties during the last years of the Qing dynasty were an important step in China's struggle to abolish the unequal treaties. Many requests raised by the Powers were declined in the treaties and many articles which were beneficial to China's sovereignty and interests were included. The new commercial treaties signed during this period as result of these negotiations represent a turning point in China's treaty history and provided legal foundation for China's further fight for fair treaties.
In English and Chinese.
The Impact of Entrepreneurship on Employment: An Investigation of Chinese Entrepreneurs
Li Bo, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China
July 21, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
This talk will examine the effects of entrepreneurship in driving employment (EEDE) in China by looking at how entrepreneurship creates jobs, and which entrepreneurial policies are effective in promoting employment. This talk introduces the differences of educational background on the impact of EEDE. The outcomes show that enterprises founded by college graduates often have a larger scale of employees. These enterprises also pay larger salaries and provide employees greater chances for advancement. Finally, they give jobs to people with not only low educational status, but also high educational status.
Therefore, key employment policies should guide and support people with high educational background to develop entrepreneurial activities, and strengthen re-education opportunities for entrepreneurs with low educational background. These policies should be carried out consistently in the near future and beyond.
An Afternoon of Tibetan Culture
Robert W. Clark, Stanford University
Techung (Tashi Dhondup), Tibetan musician
August 8, 2010
Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
In conjunction with the current exhibit of Himalayan art at the Berkeley Art Museum ("Realm of Enlightenment: Masters and Teachers from the Land of Snows"), an art history lecture and Tibetan musical performance will be held at the Museum.
Techung will perform traditional and sacred Tibetan songs accompanied by the damnyen, a Tibetan stringed instrument, and the lingbu, the Tibetan bamboo flute. He will also perform his own compositions. As part of the program, Techung will discuss music as a way of life for Tibetans and as a deep expression of Himalayan culture. Among his several recordings, Techung has recently released Semshae-Heart Songs, an album of Tibetan children's music that he hopes will "help preserve the Tibetan language and compassionate culture through children's music."
Following the performance, at 3 pm in the Museum Theater, renowned scholar of Tibetan culture and language Robert W. Clark will discuss the history of Buddhism as it spread from India across the Himalaya and into Tibet, using the significant cultural and religious objects in Himalayan Pilgrimage as illustrations. Dr. Clark, who is on the faculty at Stanford University, is program director of Tardo Ling, a center for translation of Tibetan literature. He has published extensively on Tibetan, Nepalese, and Indian Buddhist art, history, and culture, and curated numerous exhibitions of Tibetan and Buddhist art. Dr. Clark has served as translator in the Private Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and is currently working on a major study of Buddhist culture in Tibet and India in the twentieth century.
Free with museum admission.
Shanghai Art Now
Qiu Ruimin, Acting President of Shanghai University College of Fine Arts
Jay Xu, Director, Asian Art Museum
August 14, 2010
Asian Art Museum, Institute of East Asian Studies
Professor Qiu Ruimin, the acting president of Shanghai University College of Fine Arts in China, discusses the new growing art scene of Shanghai and the changes in contemporary art in China. The Asian Art Museum's director, Jay Xu, moderates the talk.
Prof. Qiu Ruimin graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Shanghai Fine Arts School in 1965. At the same year, he started his career at the Shanghai Institute of Oil Painting and Sculpture. During 1986–1987 and 1988–1990, he was a visiting scholar at the Pratt Institute, New York. He received the title of National Level Artist in 1988, and served as the president of Shanghai Institute of Oil Painting and Sculpture, and is currently the dean of College of Fine Arts, Shanghai University and the director of the doctoral program.
Lecture will be in Chinese with English translation.
C. V. Starr East Asian Library Orientation
Bruce C. Williams
August 24-27, 2010
East Asian Library
Library orientation and tour. Meet at the Circulation Desk.
How Early Tibetan Visitors to Nepal Made Sense of Swayambhu
Hubert Decleer, Senior Faculty Advisor, School for International Training (SIT) Nepal: Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Program
August 26, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies
The earliest (1413) extant Tibetan pilgrimage guide to the Swayambhu hill shrine of the Kathmandu Valley names two scriptural sources, (1) the "Prophesy of Mt. Oxhorn in 'the Land of Li,'" for the theme of draining the lake and the Self-born stupa becoming manifest, and (2) the Mañjushrī Root Tantra for the origin of the underground temple of Shāntipur. The explanatory title of the guide refers to the monument as 'Phags pa shing kun,' after an incident in the life of Nāgārjuna: a title which, accordingly, ought to be understood as "Trees (shing) of every (kun) single kind, miraculously produced by the Ārya ('Phags pa') [Nāgārjuna]." Other 'Nāgārjuniana' are referred to in the guide: a ruby that was once part of his mālā (and is now part of a temple treasure in Bhutan), the meditation cave on Mt. Jamacho where he taught buffalo herdsman Shingkhipa Mahāmudrā meditation. No Nepal visit is mentioned in any of the Nāgārjuna biographies. And yet ...
Hubert Decleer received his B.A. in history and European literature from the Regent School in Ghent, Belgium, and his M.A. in oriental philosophy and history from the University of Louvain, where he studied with Étienne Lamotte. He has pursued classical Tibetan and Buddhist studies under a number of tutors in Kathmandu. Mr. Decleer has worked as a fine arts apprentice, art critic, language instructor, and translator and has lectured for the SIT Nepal program. He was the academic director for the Tibetan and Himalayan Studies program from its inception in the fall of 1987 until the spring of 2001.
How Early Tibetan Visitors to Nepal Made Sense of Swayambhu
Hubert Decleer, Senior Faculty Advisor, School for International Training (SIT) Nepal: Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Program
August 26, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies
The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China
You-tien Hsing, Associate Professor, Geography, UC Berkeley
September 1, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies: Institute of East Asian Studies
In The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China, Hsing emphasizes the centrality of cities in China's ongoing transformation. Based on fieldwork in 24 Chinese cities between 1996 and 2007, she forwards an analysis of the relations between the city, the state and society through two concepts: urbanization of the local state and civic territoriality. Urbanization of the local state is a process of state power building entailing an accumulation regime based on the commodification of state-owned land, the consolidation and legitimation of territorial authority through construction projects, and a policy discourse dominated by notions of urban modernity. Civic territoriality encompasses the politics of distribution engendered by urban expansionism, and social actors' territorial strategies toward self-protection. Findings are based on observations in three types of places. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized; their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined.
You-tien Hsing is Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. She is also the author of Making Capitalism in China: The Taiwan Connection (Oxford U Press, 1998), and co-editor (with Ching Kwan Lee) of Reclaiming Chinese Society: The New Social Activism (Routledge, 2009).
This event is part of the IEAS Book Series "New Perspectives on Asia."
Financing Health Care for All: The Taiwan Experience: SPH Dean's Colloquium
The Honorable Chih-Liang Yaung, Minister of Health, Department of Health, Taiwan, R.O.C.
September 2, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, School of Public Health, School of, Institute of East Asian Studies
As Minister of Health at Taiwan's Department of Health, Dr. Yaung leads the Taiwan Department of Health and its subsidiary agencies in working toward serving as a catalyst in improving the health of the people, educating the people about having a healthy lifestyle, paving the road for the health industry, and participating in international health affairs. The department also promotes health care management and disease prevention, food and drug safety, and health insurance affairs.
Dr. Yaung is one of the most renowned academic and field experts in public health, and health care administration in Taiwan. He has been notably recognized for his contributions to health care and health insurance policy, his prominent career of public service and health policy development, and his academic appointments over the past 30 years.
Prior to this cabinet appointment, Dr. Yaung was the vice president of the Asia University in Taiwan, at which he remains a chaired professor. As an academic, Dr. Yaung has educated myriad public health professionals and leaders for the past three decades. He has published several textbooks about health insurance and biostatistics, more than 100 academic and conference papers, and presided or participated in a vast number of research programs and projects. Dr. Yaung's research interests include public health, health policy and management, health insurance, and health information.
Japanese Politics One Year After the Deluge
Ethan Scheiner, UC Davis; Robert Weiner, Naval Postgraduate School; T.J. Pempel, UC Berkeley
Moderator: Steve Vogel, UC Berkeley
September 8, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies
Ethan Scheiner (UC Davis) and Robert Weiner (Naval Postgraduate School) will analyze how Japanese politics has changed since the dramatic August 2009 Lower House elections that brought Japan a change in power, as the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) trounced the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had dominated Japanese politics for more than five decades. Has the DPJ permanently altered the dynamics of Japanese politics? Can the government address Japan's most pressing policy issues? Will this administration last? Scheiner and Weiner will also update us on the July 2010 Upper House elections and the latest developments ahead of the September elections for DPJ president. T. J. Pempel and Steven Vogel will serve as discussants.
Flowers in Japanese Art and Culture
Elaine Sedlack, UCBG Horticulturist
September 8, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Botanical Garden, Berkeley Art Museum
In collaboration with the Berkeley Art Museum's exhibit "Flowers of the Four Seasons," the Garden is offering a special tour of Japanese plants with Horticulturist Elaine Sedlack.
Registration required: $10, Free UCBG/BAM members
Registration info: Limit 20 people.
Chinese Higher Education: Recent Developments and Future Prospects
Li Yong, Associate Professor and Executive Deputy Director, Institute of Higher Education, Beijing Forestry University
September 9, 2010
Center for Chinese, Center for Studies in Higher Education, Institute of East Asian Studies
Over the past decade or so, with rapid economic and social transformations in China, dramatic changes have taken place in Chinese higher education, such as, massive enrollment expansion, massive restructuring of the higher education system, and massive spending on the national key universities, especially on the "985 project" which are intending to build a few world-class research universities. These are All Historic in Chinese higher education history.
The main purpose of this talk is to offer a more recent picture of Chinese HE and what has happened exactly in Chinese higher education over the past decade or so, using the latest data available. Second, Dr. Li will offer personal observations and views about the problems and challenges CHE is facing, and also solutions to address these issues.
Group in Asian Studies Fall Welcome
Dr. Bonnie C. Wade, Professor of Music and Chair, Group in Asian Studies; Sharmila Shinde, Student Services Advisor, Group in Asian Studies
September 9, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Korean Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Center for Buddhist Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
All prospective and current majors and minors are invited to our Fall Welcome event. There will be an information session on major requirements, a meet and greet with the Faculty Chair and staff adviser, a current student panel, and a presentation on our student association followed by a pizza party social.
Please RSVP to asianst@berkeley.edu by September 7th.
Corporeal Nationalisms: Dance and the State in East Asia
September 10-11, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Korean Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Anthropology, Theater, Dance & Performance Studies, East Asian Languages & Cultures
This is a transnational and interdisciplinary conference including movement workshops, dance-on-film screenings, and themed panels aimed at developing a community of scholars to engage critically with questions concerning contemporary East Asian nation-states and their performance of danced corporealities. The Corporeal Nationalisms conference will convene, for the first time, a community of scholars who research, dance, analyze, advocate, choreograph and/or write about the significance and power of dance and the nation state in twentieth and twenty-first century East Asia.
This conference begins Friday, September 10 in Dwinelle Annex 126, and continues through Sunday.
Film screening at PFA on Saturday at 6:30 p.m.
See full agenda attached.
The Young, the Tainted, and the Specialized: Powerless Elite and Political Stability in the Chinese Communist Regime
Victor Shih, Political Science, Northwestern University
Peter Lorentzen, Political Science, UC Berkeley
September 10, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
Even in relatively institutionalized dictatorships such as communist ones, the top leader faces constant threat of dethronement from opponents from within the regime. To reduce the chance of a sudden coup, dictators can manipulate the composition of the selectorate to enhance their own chance of survival and to obtain information on the relative distribution of power. A simple choice theoretical model shows that appointing weak selectorate members produces gains for the other members of the selectorate. In this paper, the author tests whether placing inexperienced, tainted, or specialist cadres in the Politburo indeed reduced political turmoil in the Chinese Communist Party. Time series analysis suggests that rising composition of young, tainted, or specialized cadres indeed brought down the chance of political instability.
Taiwan Cross-roads: Economic Outlook and the Effects of ECFA
Shelley Rigger, Brown Professor of Political Science, Davidson College
Panelist/Discussants: David Roland-Holst, Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, Department of Economics, University of California at Berkeley; Terrance Odean, Rudd Family Foundation Professor of Finance, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley; TsoYu Calvin Lin, Department of Land Economics, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan and Visiting Professor, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley; Wen-hsin Yeh, History, and Director, IEAS, UC Berkeley
September 10, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
A landmark agreement between Taiwan and China, the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, heralds a new age in cross-Strait relations. UC Berkeley faculty and guests debate the current situation in Taiwan, potential short and long-term effects of the agreement, and explore possible future developments. Dr. Shelley Rigger will open the program with a talk on "The Political Challenges of ECFA, Inside and Outside Taiwan."
House of Bamboo; Samuel Fuller (U.S., 1952): Swoon: Great Leading Men in Gorgeous 35mm Prints
September 10, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Berkeley Art Museum
Restored Print!
Aided by the double-lock-jawed presences of the Roberts, Ryan and Stack, Samuel Fuller combines two favorite topics, crime and GIs, with this gangster film involving crooked ex-soldiers organizing a syndicate in occupied Japan. Surly military cop Robert Stack goes undercover to infiltrate the cartel, led by the suavely psychotic Robert Ryan, and falls for the Japanese widow of a slain gangster. In the first postwar Hollywood film shot in Japan, astonishing CinemaScope images of Tokyo street life illuminate the backdrop for a new war, one between violent mobsters and vicious cops, with both sides displaying amazing lows in Ugly Americanism. The narrative quickly eliminates any moral ascendancy of cops over robbers, as generalized American thuggery runs riot amid a landscape of racial and cultural difference. "The police are much more violent and disagreeable than the criminals," Fuller explained, a point proven in the infamous ending: a blazing gunfight set in, of all places, a children's amusement park. —Jason Sanders
Written by Harry Kleiner. Photographed by Joe MacDonald. With Robert Ryan, Robert Stack, Shirley Yamaguchi, Sessue Hayakawa. (102 mins, Color, 35mm, Scope, From 20th Century Fox, permission Criterion)
Beginning of Edo Period: L@TE: Friday Nights at BAM/PFA
Bahama Kangaroos, Artists; Shoko Hikage and Kanoko Nishi, Koto Performers
September 10, 2010
Center for Japanese Studiesm Berkeley Art Museum
(Doors 5 p.m., DJ 6:30 p.m.)
The sound of the koto, a traditional Japanese stringed instrument, provides the "soundtrack" for a live painting — a work of visual art completed as a public performance — by the duo the Bahama Kangaroos (artists Naoki Onodera and Yukako Ezoe Onodera). Shoko Hikage and Kanoko Nishi perform traditional works for koto ranging from the beginning of the Edo period to contemporary compositions. Beginning of the Edo Period is programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Flowers of the Four Seasons.
International Symposium on Healthy Aging: Perspectives from the United States, Sweden, and Japan
Gerdt Sundstrom, Ph.D., Professor, Jonkoping University; Takayuki Sasaki, Ph.D., Research Associate, Osaka University of Commerce, Winston Tseng, Ph.D., Research Sociologist, School of Public Health; Kazumi Hoshino, Ph.D., Visitng Scholar, School of Public Health; William Satariano, Ph.D., Professor, School of Public Health, S. Leonard Syme, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, School of Public Health; Andrew Scharlach, Ph.D., Kleiner Professor of Aging, School of Social Welfare
Panelist/Discussants: S. Leonard Syme, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, School of Public Health; Andrew Scharlach, Ph.D., Kleiner Professor of Aging, School of Social Welfare
September 13, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, International Symposium Planning Committee
Featured Speakers: Gerdt Sundstrom, Ph.D., Professor, Jonkoping University; Takayuki Sasaki, Ph.D., Research Associate, Osaka University of Commerce International Symposium on Healthy Aging will address three issues. The first is to examine healthy aging among older adults in the United States, Sweden, and Japan. The second is to clarify healthy aging among older immigrants in the United States, Sweden, and Japan. Eventually we will propose recommendations for health care policies for diverse older adults.
Jefferson Memorial Lectures: Japanese American Incarceration Reconsidered: 1970-2010
Roger Daniels, University of Cincinnati
September 14, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Graduate Division
Roger Daniels, Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emeritus of History, University of Cincinnati, will present the Jefferson lecture on Tuesday, September 14, 2010 titled "Japanese American Incarceration Reconsidered: 1970-2010."
Autumn Gem: A Documentary on China's First Feminist: Free Screening and Q&A Discussion with Filmmakers Rae Chang and Adam Tow (filmmakers), Asian Cultural Studies Townsend Working Group
September 14, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Asian Cultural Studies Townsend Working Group
Autumn Gem explores the extraordinary life of Qiu Jin (1875-1907). A radical women's rights activist and leader of a revolutionary army, Qiu Jin boldly challenged traditional gender roles and demanded equal rights and opportunities for women. She was the first woman to lead an armed uprising against the corrupt Qing Dynasty, for which she was captured and executed. Compared to a "Chinese Joan of Arc," she emerged as a national heroine who redefined what it meant to be a woman in early 20th-century China.
Japanese Koto Music in the Grove
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto; Brian Mitsuhiro Wong
September 16, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Botanical Garden
Listen to the beautiful sounds of the Japanese Koto, a long, stringed instrument made from the Empress Tree (Paulownia tomentosa), with mother and son duo Shirley Muramoto and Brian Wong.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto's koto music has its roots in the American concentration camps of World War II. Her grandparents felt it was important for their daughter (Shirley's mother) to learn the koto while incarcerated at Topaz and Tule Lake. Shirley started learning koto from about the age of five. Raised in Oakland, California, her musical training reflected not only koto music, but violin, voice, and guitar. The multicultural influences she experienced growing up in the Bay Area gave her the inspiration for creativity in her koto playing. In 1976, Shirley travelled to Japan to take her "Shihan" teaching exams. Passing with high scores, she achieved the honor of "Yushusho" from the Chikushi Koto School in Fukuoka, Japan. In 2000, she received her "DaiShihan" master's degree from the same school for her dedication and teaching. Throughout her childhood, Shirley's major influence in koto music came from Katsuko Chikushi, one of the few women composers of the koto. She was also inspired greatly by the blind koto master Kimio Eto. She has performed in numerous recordings, performances, and collaborations. Shirley has produced CDs with the Murasaki Ensemble, a world jazz fusion group which she founded, and contemporary recordings with shakuhachi, violin, flute, and guitar. For over 30 years, she has given private lessons and classes on the koto, and continues to teach students of every age. She has also been active in researching the Japanese traditional arts in the concentration camps during World War II.
Brian Mitsuhiro Wong began playing koto when he was four years old and saxophone when he was ten years old. He studied koto with his mother and grandmother, and learned saxophone under Steve Parker. Brian has a Koshi degree with "Grand Prix" honors from the Sawai Koto Conservatory in Tokyo where he studied under Kazue Sawai and Hikaru Sawai. He also received his bachelor of arts degree from California State University, East Bay in music composition, and studied with Dr. Frank LaRocca, Dr. Jeffrey Miller, and Dr. Rafael Hernandez. He learned jazz with the Oaktown Jazz Workshop led by Khalil Shaheed and with the California State University at Hayward Jazz Ensembles under Dave Eshelman and Dann Zinn. He has performed jazz koto with the CSUEB jazz band at the Vienne, Umbria and Montreaux jazz festivals in Europe, and appeared on NHK TV in Japan. Brian performs and records around the Bay Area and teaches koto, saxophone, and general music studies. He has been teaching koto classes this year at UC Berkeley.
Tickets required: $15, $12 UCBG members, UC faculty, students and staff
The Location of "Korean" Culture: Ch'oe Chaeso and Korean Literature in a Time of Transition
Serk-Bae Suh, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Literatures, UC Irvine
September 17, 2010
Center for Korean Studies
This talk focuses on critical essays on literature, culture, and politics written in the early 1940s by Ch'oe Chaeso, a leading Korean intellectual, active translator of English literary criticism, and editor in chief of Kokumin Bungaku (National Literature), a prominent Japanese-language journal published in colonial Korea. Ch'oe asserted that the unfolding of history in the twentieth century demanded a paradigmatic transition from liberalism to state-centered nationalism in culture. He also privileged everyday life as allowing people to live as members of communities that are ultimately integrated into the state. By positioning Koreans firmly as subjects of the Japanese state, his argument implied that the colonized should be treated on a par with the colonizers. Further, Ch'oe advocated Koreans' cultural autonomy as an ethnic group within the Japanese empire.
By comparing Ch'oe's critical essays with his own Japanese translations of the essays, I analyze the way in which the originals and the translations addressed a slightly different readership. I argue that such a miniscule difference in the assumed readership between the Korean originals and the Japanese translations however interrupts the univocal signification of such concepts as tradition, culture, Japan, and Korea on which Ch'oe's essays pivoted. The difference reveals that the meanings of such concepts are undecidable in Derrida's sense. The undecidability embedded in the significations of the concepts ultimately disrupts Ch'oe's discursive strategy that aimed to simultaneously include Koreans in the category of the Japanese nation and establish an autonomous space for Korean culture within the empire of Japan.
Impressions: A Selection of Contemporary Japanese Prints
September 20 – November 10, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
Prints, specifically woodblock prints, are an art form particularly associated with Japan. While artists in Japan continue to work in the woodblock print tradition, in recent decades Japanese artists have utilized a wide range of printmaking technologies. Like their print-making contemporaries elsewhere, they have experimented with new expressive effects. Some artists prefer themes and styles traditional in Japanese art; others engage global artistic trends in abstract art.
The works on display include a number of woodblock prints, but also lithographs, aquatints, etchings, mezzotints, and stencil.
This exhibit is but a small sample of the range of artistic creativity in Japanese printmaking. A guide available for use in the gallery contains brief comments highlighting aspects of the prints on display. The comments are but a suggestion of the many possible threads, associations, and references that link the works on display to Japanese artistic tradition. These comments are intended to suggest rather than affirm, and to spur the viewer to further exploration and examination.
The prints on display are on loan from SCRIPTUM Gallery in Berkeley, a gallery that specializes in Japanese prints. For further information on the prints on display, or to see additional examples of contemporary Japanese prints, visit www.scriptum.com.
An opening reception on October 11 will feature artist Shinji Ando, in conversation with Archana Horsting and Mayumi Hamanaka from the Kala Art Institute.
The Highway Safety Manual and Its Potential Application in China
Ma Yanli, School of Traffic Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology
September 20, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
The Highway Safety Manual (HSM) is a resource that provides safety knowledge and tools in a useful form to facilitate improved decision making based on safety performance. It presents tools and methodologies for consideration of 'safety' across the range of highway activities: planning, programming, project development, construction, operations, and maintenance. Study of the HSM can provide quantitative information for decision making. This talk will convey the present knowledge regarding highway safety information for use by a broad array of transportation professionals and the important theoretical and practical significance for improving road traffic safety situation in China.
In Chinese and English with no interpretation
Documentary Film: [Senkyo] Campaign: Can a Candidate with No Political Experience and No Charisma Win an Election?
September 20, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies
Free film screening of "[Senkyo] Campaign" by Kazuhiro Soda (2007).
Synopsis: Can a candidate with no political experience and no charisma win an election if he is backed by the political giant Prime Minister Koizumi and his Liberal Democratic Party? This cinema-verite documentary closely follows a heated election campaign in Kawasaki, Japan, revealing the true nature of "democracy."
The film follows the inexperienced candidate, Kazuhiko Yamauchi's 2005 campaign to fight for a seat on the Kawasaki city council.
Free and open to the public.
Contact the Center for Japanese Studies (cjs@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3415) for more information.
Different Incentives, Similar Choices: Farmer Autonomy and Targeting in China's Sloping Land Conversion Program
Peter Kelley, ARE, UC Berkeley
September 22, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Agricultural and Resource Economics
China, the Developing World, and the New Global Dynamic
Lowell, Dittmer, Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley; George T. Yu, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Illinois
September 22, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies: Institute of East Asian Studies
With China's rise as a major player in international affairs, how have its policies toward developing countries changed? And how do those policies now fit with its overall foreign policy goals? This timely new book explores the complexities of China's evolving relationship with the developing world.
The authors first examine the political and economic implications of China's efforts to be seen as a responsible great power. A series of comprehensive regional chapters then showcase a quid pro quo relationship — variously involving crucial raw materials, energy, and consumers on the one hand and infrastructure development, aid, and security on the other. The concluding chapter illuminates China's search for national identity in the context of widespread suspicions of its strategic motives. The result is a thorough, yet accessible, view of an increasingly important topic in global affairs. Introduced by Kevin O'Brien, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley.
Lowell Dittmer is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His numerous publications include South Asia's Nuclear Security Dilemma: India, Pakistan, and China and China's Deep Reform: Domestic Politics in Transition. George T. Yu is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Illinois. Among his recent publications are The Emerging East Community and Mongolia and Northeast Asia Economic Development and Regional Cooperation.
This event is part of the IEAS Book Series "New Perspectives on Asia."
Between Carmen and Camille: Tracing the Songstress in Postwar Hong Kong Film
Jean Ma, Art and Art History, Stanford University
September 29, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
A tradition of songstress performance spans the entire history of Chinese cinema, from early sound films such as Street Angel to contemporary works like Lust, Caution. This talk unpacks the significance of the songstress in the films of postwar Hong Kong through the example of The Wild, Wild Rose (1960), an adaptation featuring the singer-actress Grace Chang.
Open to all audiences.
Contact the Center for Chinese Studies (ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321) for more information.
Improving the Quality of Chinese Universities: The Next Steps for Constructing a Quality Assurance Framework
Dr. Xu Dan, Assistant Professor, Institute for Educational Research, Hunan University
September 30, 2010
Center for Studies in Higher Education, Insitute of East Asian Studies
The last decade has witnessed the massification of Chinese higher education and the beginnings of a shift in priorities from scale expansion to quality improvement. My talk will provide an overview on the major strategies of the Chinese government concerning the quality aspect in the overall massification of higher education, including government directed programs to gauge and improve the quality of undergraduate teaching at Chinese universities and the goal-oriented top-down quality evaluation. These government-induced efforts are having some beneficial effects, but they are in need of adjustments that I will explain to promote the long-term development of China's higher education system.
Storage Practices and Social Changes in Mumun Period Korea, 2903-2450 Calibrated Years B.P.
Martin T. Bale, Research Fellow, Early Korea Project, Harvard University
October 1, 2010
Center for Korean Studies
Storage is an important but problematic part of the background in a number archaeological studies on the origins of incipient socio-political complexity because the social significance and role of storage is often assumed rather than demonstrated. I examine the practice of storage in three regions of prehistoric Korea and its relationship with changes in the structure of socio-political complexity. I analyze the distribution of storage artifacts and features such as pits, large-capacity pottery, and raised-floor structures in the context of their spatial relationships with other archaeological features and elite precincts at the micro (household) and macro (settlement, region) levels.
Archaeological artifacts and features used in storage strategies in the Mumun Period (2903-2450 calibrated years B.P.) changed in form and number over time. Underground pit storage was consistently present during the period and clandestine storage was not completely replaced by above-ground visible storage. Elite actors had some influence on storage in two central settlements but appear to have been unable to exert much control of stored agricultural surplus at the micro or macro levels. These results indicate the persistence of bottom-up organizational strategies of agriculture despite the appearance of some socio-politically complex correlates of an incipient nature in Mumun society.
Martin T. Bale is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He is scheduled to defend his thesis in early April 2011. Bale is currently a Research Fellow at the Early Korea Project, Harvard University. His research area is Northeast Asia and his research interests encompass the social changes that accompanied the origins and early development of intensive agriculture and incipient socio-political complexity in the Mumun (sometimes called 'Bronze Age Korea') and Yayoi Periods. Bale has published a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Early Korea, Journal of the Korean Bronze Age Society, Asian Perspectives, and Arctic Anthropology. Bale's most recent archaeological research has been on storage practices and social changes in the Mumun. He is involved in editing two book projects the Early Korea Project at Harvard and is also planning the first international joint archaeological excavations in more than 40 years in South Korea for the 2011 field season.
Open to all audiences.
Contact the Center for Korean Studies (cks@berkeley.edu, 510-642-5674) for more information.
Willa and George Tanabe on Japanese Religious Art: Conversation in Conjunction with Flowers of the Four Seasons Exhibition
Willa Tanabe, Professor Emerita, Dept of Art and Art History, University of Hawai'i; George Tanabe, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Religion, University of Hawai'i
October 3, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Berkeley Art Museum
Two noted scholars will examine significant pieces of Japanese Buddhist art featured in the exhibition through the lens of both religious studies and art history. Engaging each other in discussion about diverse works — including painted and sculptural images of the bodhisattva Jizo, a humorous Zen monk in a tree, and an exquisite Nyoirin Kannon — George and Willa Tanabe plan a complementary, occasionally contentious, disquisition on the backgrounds, styles, and meanings of Japanese religious art.
George Tanabe is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Religion at the University of Hawai'i. He has written widely on Japanese religion, including co-authoring, with Ian Reader, Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan. He also edits several important series on Japanese tradition and Buddhism.
Willa Tanabe, former Dean of the School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies, is Professor Emerita in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawai'i. She has published extensively on images connected to the Lotus Sutra and has also curated exhibitions of woodblock prints, Japanese embroidery, and the sacred art of Mt. Koya. The Tanabes are currently working on a guidebook to all of the Japanese Buddhist temples in Hawai'i.
Tickets required: Free UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff; BAM/PFA members; Children (12 & under), $10 Adults (18-64), $7 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, young adults (13-17)
Ticket info: Conversation included with museum admission. Purchase tickets at the museum's front desk same-day.
A Reflection on the "China Model": A Politico-Economic Critique
Fang Min, School of Economics, Peking University
October 4, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
The "China Model" was proposed to capture the apparent uniqueness of China's experience in economic transition, namely piecemeal economic reform without political restructuring. Such experience is in sharp contrast to doctrines of the neoclassical economic thoughts on transition. This study analyzes the politico-economic foundations underlying the "China Model" as well as the crisis of such a model that has grown from the very same foundations. Dr. Fang will discuss two of his conclusions.
First, the "China Model" does not have general theoretical significance. The apparent uniqueness of China's experience was due to its unique initial conditions. China's growth can be largely explained by the existing theoretical framework.
Second, the authoritarian political regime played a positive role in promoting economic growth at the early stage of the transition to the extent that the involvement of the government in economic activities and the decentralization and competition among local governments led to more liberal and market-oriented economic policies. However, when a market-based economy took shape at the latter stage of the transition, the same political system started to become an obstacle to further economic and social development. With the favorable conditions to China's economic growth diminishing, the "China Model" will not be sustainable in the future.
In English with Chinese discussion (no interpretation)
Oedipal God: The Legend and Cult of Nezha (Nalakūbara)
Meir Shahar, Professor, Tel Aviv University, Israel
October 5, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies
Filial piety, we are told, was one of the cornerstones of traditional Chinese civilization. It is striking, therefore, that the Chinese pantheon features a patricidal deity. Celebrated in fiction and drama for over a millennium, the myth of Nezha has its protagonist rebel against paternal authority from the moment of his birth. Culminating in suicide, followed by rebirth and attempted murder, the myth is widely known, and its protagonist commonly worshipped, to this day. Why was Nezha driven to attempted patricide? Which tensions in the Chinese family structure did his myth reflect? How did the legend negotiate these tensions in diverse historical settings? These questions will be briefly addressed from psychological, sociological, and historical perspectives. The speaker will suggest that the oedipal god survived in the Chinese cultural environment by the pretense of filial piety. He will further trace his cult from China back to ancient India, for Nezha was originally an Indian deity named Nalakubara, whose figure had been likely influenced by that of the great child god Krsna. It is possible, therefore, that two of the greatest Asian story cycles — of the child-god Nezha and of the infant Krsna — are related.
After receiving his undergraduate degree from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Meir Shahar studied Chinese in Taipei. He went on to pursue graduate studies in the U.S. and received a PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992. Professor Shahar has taught at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and is currently Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of East Asian Studies, Tel Aviv University. He is also the director of the Tel Aviv University Confucius Institute. Professor Shahar's research focuses on the interplay of Chinese religion, Chinese literature, and — in his most recent publications — the Chinese martial arts. In (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies [1992]), he offered a novel hypothesis on the origins of the Journey to the West's simian protagonist, and in Crazy Ji: Chinese Religion and Popular Literature (Harvard University Asia Center, 1998) he examined the role of fiction and drama in spreading the cult of one of the most colorful Chinese deities: Jigong. In The Shaolin Monastery; History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008) he analyzed the history of the Shaolin fighting-tradition, the evolution of the Chinese martial arts, and the martial arts' interplay with China's diverse religious traditions (Buddhism, Daoism, and the Popular Religion). Professor Shahar's growing interest in the impact of Indian mythology on the Chinese supernatural is reflected in a forthcoming conference volume coedited with John Kieschnick and tilted "Under the Spell of India: Buddhism and the Formation of Medieval Chinese Culture." The speaker is currently engaged in two research projects: one on the legend and cult of the Chinese oedipal deity Nezha (Nalakubara); the other on the history and lore of the Southern Shaolin Temple in Fujian. The former project is supported by the Israel Science Foundation, the latter benefits from a Chiang Ching-Kuo Fellowship.
Language and Migration: Lecture and Poetry Reading by Judy Halebsky
October 7, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Canadian Studies Program (CAN)
Judy Halebsky is a poet who grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her book, Sky=Empty, won the 2009 New Issues Poetry Prize (New Issues, 2010). She has also published a chapbook Japanese for Daydreamers (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and in journals such as Grain Magazine, Antigonish Review and Eleven Eleven. Recently, she spent three years in Tokyo studying Japanese literature at Hosei University on a MEXT fellowship. With a collective of Tokyo poets, she edits and translates the bilingual poetry journal Eki Mae.
Dialogue on Korean Poetry with Robert Hass and David McCann
Robert Hass, UC Berkeley; David McCann, Harvard University
October 7, 2010
Center for Korean Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Department of English
This combination lecture and poetry reading, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the Center for Korean Studies, features two eminent scholar-poets: Berkeley's own Robert Hass (Professor of English, former Poet Laureate of the United States, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award) and David McCann (Professor of Korean Literature, Harvard University). They will discuss the influence of Korean poetry on their work and their interactions and collaborations with Korean poets. Professor McCann will perform traditional Korean sijo and read from his new collection of English-language poems, Urban Temple: Sijo, Twisted & Straight (Bo-Leaf Books).
Robert Hass is, first of all, a poet of great eloquence, clarity, and force, whose work is rooted in the landscapes of his native Northern California. Widely read and much honored, he has brought the kind of energy in his poetry to his work as an essayist, translator, and activist on behalf of poetry, literacy, and the environment. Most notably, in his tenure as United States Poet Laureate (1995–1997) Robert Hass spent two years battling American illiteracy, armed with the mantra, "imagination makes communities." Hass also works to promote awareness about the environment. He has published many books of poetry, including Time and Materials (winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize) and his most recent volume, entitled The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems (Ecco, 2010). Awarded the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, twice the National Book Critics' Circle Award (in 1984 and 1997), and the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1973, Robert Hass is a professor of English at UC Berkeley. He has collaborated with the Center for Korean Studies several times, most recently in a series of events last year featuring five prominent Korean poets.
David R. McCann is the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and director of the Korea Institute at Harvard University. He is the recipient of numerous prizes, grants, and fellowships, including the Order of Cultural Merit award (2006), one of the highest decorations by the Korean government, and the Manhae Prize in Arts and Sciences (2004). His books include Azaleas (Columbia University Press, 2007), Enough to Say It's Far (Princeton University Press, Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation, 2006), Traveler Maps: Poems by Ko Un (Tamal Vista Press, 2004), The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry (2004), Early Korean Literature: Selections and Introductions (2001), and several co-edited volumes. Not only a renowned translator of major Korean poets but also a recognized poet, he has published his own poems in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, Descant, and Runes. His poem "David" was included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology III. His book of poems The Way I Wait For You was released by Codhill Press in 2007, and he has a new collection of sijo poems, a Korean verse form, entitled Urban Temple (Bo-Leaf Press, 2010).
Open to all audiences.
Contact the Center for Korean Studies (cks@berkeley.edu, 510-642-5674) for more information.
Will the Internet Bring Democracy to China?
Professor Xiao Qiang, UCB Graduate School of Journalism
October 7, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, International House
Professor Qiang is a professional observer and commentator on Chinese Internet, media and politics. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the China Digital Times, an independent China news portal and directs the Berkeley China Internet project.
Congresses with Constituents, Constituents without Congresses in China
Melanie Manion, Political Science and Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Discussant: Kevin O'Brien, Political Science, UC Berkeley
October 8, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
For decades, congresses of elected representatives in China have been dismissed as rubber stamp legislatures, but local congresses have become real political players in recent years. Their new assertiveness presents a puzzle as it was set in motion by rules designed and promoted by authoritarian rulers in Beijing. Do rules that empower elected representatives strengthen authoritarianism? If so, how? Manion draws on qualitative interview evidence and original survey data to answer this question, illuminating core features of Chinese "authoritarian resilience."
Open to all audiences.
Contact the Center for Chinese Studies (ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321) for more information.
Dog Night with NYMPH: L@TE: Friday Nights at BAM/PFA
NYMPH, avant-garde music ensemble
Daniel Jay, artist
October 8, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Berkeley Art Museum
(Doors 5 p.m., DJ 6:30 p.m.)
Programmed by Tomo Yasuda
Japan's Edo Period had a strict law on the books: be nice to dogs and other animals, or else! Brooklyn-based psychedelic-shred/avant-garde ensemble NYMPH bares its teeth for an evening of new music with a decidedly tribal feel. Artist and intergalactic traveler Daniel Jay projects visuals celebrating our four-legged friends. Dog Night with NYMPH is programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Flowers of the Four Seasons.
Galleries Open Until 9 p.m.
Open to all audiences.
Tickets required: Free BAM/PFA members, UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff, and children (12 & under), $7 General, after 5PM
Ticket info: Purchase tickets at the front desk same-day.
Guided Tour: Flowers of the Four Seasons
October 9, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Berkeley Art Museum
A dazzling array of Japan's greatest artistic traditions from ancient to modern are on view in BAM/PFA's major fall exhibition, which features a selection of more than 100 works of art from one of the most significant collections of Japanese art in America.
Guided tours of Flowers of the Four Seasons are presented by UC Berkeley graduate students in the Department of Art History on Thursdays at 12 noon and Sundays at 2 p.m. Student guides, all of whom specialize in East Asian art, are Kristopher Kersey, Carl Gellert, and Michelle Wang. Guided tours included with regular museum admission.
Tickets required: Free BAM/PFA members, UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff, and children (12 & under), $10 Adults (18-64), $7 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17)
Ticket info: Purchase tickets at the front desk same-day. Tour included with gallery admission.
Film Screening: Throne of Blood; Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1957): Shakespeare on Screen
October 9, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Berkeley Art Museum
(Kumonosujô). In his audacious adaptation of Macbeth, Kurosawa captures the power and emotional grandeur of the original without using a word of Shakespeare's language, instead relying on the aesthetics of Noh theater and his own visual and cinematic invention to brilliantly evoke the Bard's themes of destruction, guilt, and overwhelming greed. Lords, warriors, witches, wives, and the prophesies that bind and bloody them make up the narrative, but the film's true force comes from its claustrophobic, paranoia-inducing milieu of darkened forests, low-ceilinged castles, and a drifting fog that chillingly haunts every frame. Toshiro Mifune brings his Macbeth to life with a concentrated physicality, using every gesture and glance to become a man possessed, then destroyed, by a dream of power. His look of terror during the penultimate scene might be traced to more than acting: Kurosawa had an archery squad shoot real arrows at him from just offscreen, their only instructions to aim very, very close. —Jason Sanders
Written by Shinobu Hashimoto, Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Kurosawa, based on Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Photographed by Asaichi Nakai. With Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Takashi Shimura, Minoru Chiaki. (107 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From Janus/Criterion Collection)
Followed at 8:10 by João César Monteiro's God's Wedding. Same-day second screening discount just $4!
Tickets required: $5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students, $9.50 Adults (18-64), $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)
Ticket info: Same-day second screening discount just $4! Purchase tickets at the PFA box office 1 hour before each day's first show time. Buy tickets online, or by calling 510-642-5249.
"Impressions": Opening Reception with Artist
Shinji Ando, Artist; Archana Horsting, Executive Director, Kala Art Institute; Mayumi Hamanaka, Communications Manager, Kala Art Institute
October 11, 2010
Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Japanese Studies
"Impressions: A Selection of Contemporary Japanese Prints" is on view in the IEAS Gallery through November 10. The opening reception features an appearance by artist Shinji Ando, whose work is included in the show, and representatives from the Kala Art Institute, a premier studio in Berkeley, who will discuss the art of the print.
Contact the Institute of East Asian Studies (ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809) for more information.
Toyota in Low Gear: How Serious Are Its Quality Problems? What Can We Learn From Them?
Robert E. Cole, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
October 12, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies
In late 2009 and early 2010, Toyota announced massive recalls for quality problems. There is some dispute about how serious and what might be the causes of these problems. This talk will address these issues, and deal with the root causes of their quality problems. It will also address the extent of the challenges they face in recovering their quality reputation.
These challenges are quite varied and range from the state of competition in the global industry, to the specifics of improving quality, and to the understanding of what is required to change consumer perceptions. Toyota has a number of tools to address these obstacles, but they also face challenges which are much larger than most observers have so far acknowledged. Finally, the talk will address the implications of Toyota's behavior for theories of Japanese organizational behavior.
Prof. Cole is Emeritus professor of sociology and business administration at UC Berkeley. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at Doshisha University. He is a long term researcher on Japanese work organization with a particular focus on quality improvement, innovation and organizational change. He has written extensively on quality improvement in the American and Japanese automobile industries.
Contact the Center for Japanese Studies (cjs@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3156) for more information.
The Flowers of Japanese-Korean Unity: the Female Labor Volunteer Corps, 1937-1945
Janice C. H. Kim, Associate Professor of History, York University
October 13, 2010
Center for Korean Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
My discussion on women's work in wartime Korea (1937-1945) has several aims. First, it narrates some of the contributions of Korean women to industrial production in the Japanese wartime empire. Second, by outlining some of the central policies and programs that brought industry and labor under the rubric of "imperial mobilization," I furnish examples of the scope of the war's social effects. Third, I elaborate on some of the ways in which female labor recruitment was performed under the auspices of student campaigns in its early years. Still facing a labor shortage in 1943, officials decided to recruit women explicitly for heavy industry and aimed for greater enlistment of women in the colonies. Describing how the Women's Labor Volunteer Corps mobilized trainable female workers for all types of war-related industries is the fourth objective of this study. Fifth, I focus on the oral histories of female volunteers employed in the machine and machine tools sectors, specifically, the operatives of the Fujikoshi steel factory in Toyama, Japan, to offer alternative renderings of women in wartime Korea. In so doing, I hope to expose some of the lesser known effects of Japan's total war in Korea. Introduced by Clare You, Center for Korean Studies.
Janice C. H. Kim is an associate professor of History at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Born in Seoul and raised in the Washington D.C. area, Dr. Kim has a B.A. and M.A. in History from The Johns Hopkins University (1996) and a M.A. in East Asian Studies (1997) and Ph.D. in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, U.K. (2001). Among her published articles and book chapters are: "The Pacific War and Working Women in Late-Colonial Korea," Signs 33:1 (Fall 2007), 81-104, "The Varieties of Women's Wage Work in Colonial Korea," The Review of Korean Studies 10:3 (June 2007), 119-146, "Processes of Feminine Power: Shamans in Central Korea," in Keith Howard, ed., Korean Shamanism: Revivals, Survivals and Change (Seoul: The Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch, 1998), 113-133, and "Labor Mobilization in Late-Colonial Korea, 1937-1945," in Andre Schmid, ed., Reader on Colonial Korea (Columbia University Press, forthcoming). Her book, To Live to Work: Factory Women in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2009) concerns the popular expansion of gender, labor and political consciousness among working women in colonial Korea. In this work she examines Japanese imperialism and the interplays between domestic events and the broader social and economic changes brought on by the First World War, the Depression and the Pacific War. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled, "Between Mountains: Refugee Life during the Korean War," which explores the social and economic history of refugees and civilian livelihood during and after the Korean War. Plans for future research include a study of affection, labor and the moral economy, in developing South Korea, from the 1960s to the 1980s. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies, Northeast Asia Council, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the British Council. She recently held a Korea Foundation Field Research Fellowship (2010) and holds a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant (2010-2013).
This event is part of the IEAS Book Series "New Perspectives on Asia."
Contact the Institute of East Asian Studies (ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809) for more information.
Conference: Asia's Global Influence: How Is It Exercised? What Does It Mean?
October 14, 2010
Institute of East Asian Studies, National Bureau of Asian Research, Asia Foundation, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
This conference address urgent issues in security and policy in contemporary Asia. Panels include:
- U.S.-Asia Relations in the 21st Century
- Globalization and Regionalism in Asia
- Governance in Asia: Emerging Political Elites
- Natural Resource Trends in Asia
The keynote address, "Keynote Address: Sources of Mutual Strategic Suspicion in U.S.-China Relations" will be delivered by David Lampton, Johns Hopkins University-SAIS
RSVP required
RSVP info: RSVP by October 12 by calling Caverlee Cary at 510-643-6492, or by emailing Caverlee Cary at ccary@berkeley.edu.
Red Leaves and Frog Feet: The Literary Japanese Maple
Liza Dalby
October 14, 2010
Botanical Garden, Center for Japanese Studies
As a special program tied in with the Berkeley Art Museum's Exhibition " Flowers of the Four Seasons: Ten Centuries of Art from the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture" the Garden is offering tours and lectures on nature in Japanese art.
On Thursday, October 14, 2010 we welcome Liza Dalby, celebrated author and anthropologist specializing in Japanese culture and Berkeley resident. She will be speaking on Japanese literature and art and the use of the natural world to evoke meaning and metaphor.
Registration not required: Free with Garden Admission (Free for UC Students, Staff and Faculty)
Contact the Botanical Garden (garden@berkeley.edu, 510-643-2755) for more information.
The Second U.S.- China Cultural Forum: A Binational Conversation on Bridging Cultures
October 15-16, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, National Endowment for the Humanities, President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities
The National Endowment for the Humanities, with additional support from the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, will host a delegation of scholars and artists from China at a conference highlighting the importance of culture and the arts in the dialogue between the United States and China. The day and a half program will feature a series of round table conversations among scholars, artists and other representatives of culture from the two nations. Discussions will review the history of relations between our countries and consider the influence of culture, especially various elements of the arts, on the development of mutual understanding.
Open to all audiences.
Contact the Center for Chinese Studies (ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321) for more information.
Painting Exception in Authoritarian Korea
Joan Kee, University of Michigan
October 15, 2010
Center for Korean Studies
Enjoying almost unrivaled preeminence in histories of modern and contemporary art in Korea, tansaekhwa was the first artistic movement in Korea to be deliberately promoted overseas as an exemplar of the nascent field identified as "contemporary Korean art." Its emergence coincided with the ambitions of an increasingly authoritarian South Korean state, which, from 1972, turned into an outright dictatorship as President Park Chung-hee famously suspended the constitution and declared martial law, thus ushering what is commonly referred to as the Yushin (Revitalization) era. Based on the theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt upon which the Yushin regime was partly dependent, this era might be described as an age of "exception." On the face of it, tansaekhwa seemed to take exception to the visual enterprises of the state. However, if tansaekhwa can be regarded as a painting of exception it was strongly contingent on how certain artists engaged with forms of visual productions mandated by the state. This talk looks at the works of Park Seobo, a painter doubly associated with tansaekhwa and the national documentary paintings project (minjok kirok'hwa), the single largest visual arts project ever organized by the South Korean government. By exploring what might be described as "painting exception," this talk attempts to propose another model through which to examine the relationship between art and politics outside binary frameworks of complicity versus resistance or abstraction versus realism.
Contact the Center for Korean Studies (cks@berkeley.edu, 510-642-5674) for more information.
H I D E O – A Theatrical Concert of Anime and Video Game Music
October 16, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies
From the creator of Tribute (2006) comes another theatrical concert of music from Japanese animation and video games! The story is timeless – a young hero on an epic quest for justice. The music – internationally acclaimed. Each piece performed tells a part of the story as this dramatic concert brings music from Noir, Fullmetal Alchemist, Final Fantasy, Mega Man and others to life with unique costumes, lighting effects, and projected illustrations as we follow Hideo down the hero's path.
PRE-SHOW EVENT AT 7:30 P.M. — A TRIBUTE TO SONIC THE HEDGEHOG
Join us in the lobby at 7:30 P.M. for a musical showcase of tunes from Sega's classic video game series Sonic the Hedgehog performed by local keyboardist Kevin Wong from BASSment!
For more information, visit the official website for the Hideo Concert.
UC Berkeley students with valid student ID receive 50% off and all other students with valid student ID receive 25% off (if requested at time of purchase). Please note that student ID is required at the door of the event for admission with a student ticket.
Groups of 10 or more receive a 15% discount; please contact the Ticket Office directly at 510-642-9988 to place your group order.
Tickets required: $64, $52, $40
Ticket info: Buy tickets online, or by calling 510-642-9988.
Changes in the World's Workshop: How New Laws, More Demanding Workers, and Activist Trade Unions Are Transforming the Chinese Workplace
October 18, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Berkeley Center for Law, Business and Economy
In 2008, the Chinese government passed three ambitious labor laws to improve working conditions at Chinese companies and the employment security of Chinese workers. Employers criticized these laws as a return to the age of the "iron rice bowl" under socialism, which guaranteed lifetime employment and extensive welfare benefits for all urban workers. Labor activists hoped that the new laws would help close the gap between the high standards of Chinese "law-on-the-books" with its implementation and enforcement in reality.
These protective measures coincided with the onset of the global financial crisis and a rapid decline in China's export markets. The combination of more protective laws and greater economic volatility led to a rapid and unprecedented increase in labor conflict, including legal filings and large-scale strikes and demonstrations. In the wake of China's recovery from the crisis, this conflict has continued. Workers are more aware of their new rights; trade unions have been encouraged by the government to do more to protect workers; and a labor shortage in manufacturing has emboldened workers to press for higher wages and better conditions.
This talk will discuss these important trends, upcoming local and national legislation, and the implications for the future of the world's workshop.
Bottom-Up Enforcement? Legal Mobilization as Law Enforcement in the PRC
Mary Gallagher, University of Michigan
October 18, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley Labor Center, Berkeley Center for Law, Business and the Economy
Photo: Living Protest
by Thomas Talhelm
This presentation will examine the post-2007 period of more stringent labor legislation through an examination of the local responses to central government attempts to enhance workers' rights. We argue that the Global Financial Crisis, local competition for investment, and close ties between employers and local governments reduced the state's ability to implement and enforce the new protections promulagated in 2007. However, workers' heavy use of the legal system for dispute resolution points to a new kind of "bottom-up enforcement" of labor laws in which legal action by workers reinforces central government attempts to improve local implementation of central laws. We hypothesize that fear of worker-initiated litigation leads to changes in firm behavior in regions with high rates of disputes. Firms adjust to the new protections offered by the law by increasing protection for some kinds of workers and reducing protections for other kinds of workers. The paper highlights the inequality of legal protections at the workplace in China, both across region and across types of workers.
Contact the Center for Chinese Studies (ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321) for more information.
Taiwan Stories: A Traveling Festival of Documentary and Feature Films
The Voyage to Happiness (documentary, 53 minutes, 2008)
Nyonya's Taste of Life (feature film, 78 minutes, 2007), followed by Q&A with the director, Wen Chih-yi
October 18, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office San Francisco
4:00 p.m.: The Voyage to Happiness (documentary, 53 minutes, 2008)
This film follows Le Thi Tu as she leaves her home in Vietnam for Taiwan as a mail order bride. This documentary includes interviews with immigrant women in 14 Asian cities and details their struggle for equal treatment and immigrant rights.
5:00 p.m.: Nyonya's Taste of Life (78 minutes/feature film/2007), followed by Q&A with the director, Wen Chih-yi
This film deals with the lives of Indonesian and Thai workers who go to Taiwan. Like the complex flavors of Nyonya's cuisine, with a mixture of sour, spicy, and sweet, the film is filled with misunderstandings, conflicts, miscommunications, and the reconciliation (or lack of thereof) between Taiwanese and their guest workers.
Open to all audiences.
Contact the Center for Chinese Studies (ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321) for more information.
Asia Business Center Conference: Leading through Innovation in Asia
Dr. Oliver Williamson, 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences; Dr. Michael Katz, Sarin Chair in Strategy and Leadership, Haas School of Business
October 19, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Asia Business Center, Haas
The Asia Business Center will host its SECOND Asia Business Center Conference "Leading Through Innovation in Asia" at the Peninsula Shanghai, China. Speakers include Dr. Oliver Williamson, 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences and Haas School Professor Emeritus, and Dr. Michael Katz, Sarin Chair in Strategy and Leadership at Berkeley-Haas, among others.
Taiwan Stories: a traveling festival of documentary and feature films
After 30 Seconds (85 minutes/feature film/2009)
Taipei 24H (94 minutes/feature film/2009), followed by Q&A with one of the directors, Lee Kang-sheng
October 19, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in San Francisco
4:00 p.m.: After 30 Seconds (85 minutes, feature film, 2009)
The despondent Ding takes on odd jobs, barely supporting a son, a daughter, and his elderly mother. One day, he sees a job announcement for a groundskeeper at his son's school. His mother encourages him to apply, while his son discourages him, worried about his classmates' reactions. In the end, Ding must make a decision.
5:30 p.m.: Taipei 24H (94 minutes, feature film, 2009), followed by Q&A with one of the directors, Lee Kang-sheng
Taipei 24H is eight short films by different directors that follow the events that unfold throughout the course of a single day. Taipei 24H is a contemporary urban chronicle of a vibrant city that rarely sleeps.
Share the Morning, dir. Feng-feng Cheng
Just a Little Run, dir. Chang-zer Niu
Summer Heat, dir. Debbie Hsu
Save the Lover, dir. Hsian-tse Cheng
Smoke, dir. Chi-yuarn Lee
Dream Walker, dir. Ying-jung Chen
Followed by Q&A with director Lee Kang-sheng
Open to all audiences.
Contact the Center for Chinese Studies (ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321) for more information.
Materials and Meaning in Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Tradition and Today
Dana Buntrock, Associate Professor, Architecture, UC Berkeley
October 20, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies: Institute of East Asian Studies
Temples and teahouses, shrines and sliding shoji screens, cascading cherry blossoms and solitary stones; Tokyoites carrying the tiniest, technologically-sophisticated telephones insist they are unaware of tradition, yet all around them vestiges remain. Visitors from abroad board high-speed trains traveling 200 kilometers an hour, but bound for Kyoto's gardens and shrines.
Japan nurtures two distinctly different poles of architectural practice. Innovative and up-to-date structures underscore modernity and a new social fabric, an international architecture with a purist bent: spare, state-of-the art structures, smooth and swooping, scholarly and scientific, skinned in sparkling aluminum, steel, and glass. Others allude to an older Asia, to Japan's religious roots or residential realms. These architects accept ruin and idealize age, offering up an approach that is raw and robust, raffish and ragtag, rambunctious and reckless, rough and rudimentary, risky and risqué, and regionally responsive. It is about being rooted and having a roof.
My book, Materials and Meaning in Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Tradition and Today, looks closely at the work of a handful of architects who could be from nowhere else, their provenance indisputably reflected in their architecture: Kengo Kuma, Terunobu Fujimori, Fumihiko Maki, Jun Aoki, and Ryoji Suzuki. Their work in Japan rots and inclines to ruin; it is made of rust, rammed earth, red brick, random rock rubble or recycled rubbish. In my book I introduce a number of wonderful works barely known in the West and I explain why these architects embraced aging in their unusual architecture. In my lecture, I will share some of these stories. Introduced by Steven Vogel, Chair, Center for Japanese Studies, UC Berkeley.
This event is part of the IEAS Book Series "New Perspectives on Asia."
Contact the Institute of East Asian Studies (ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809) for more information.
Mongolia and Its "Third Neighbors": Reflections on Relations between Mongolia and the United States
Jonathan Addleton, US Ambassador to Mongolia
Moderator: Wen-hsin Yeh, Director, Institute of East Asian Studies, Walter and Elise Haas Chair Professor in Asian Studies and Richard H. and Laurie C. Morrison Chair in History
October 21, 2010
Institute of East Asian Studies
Ambassador Addleton provides a broad perspective on the development and growth of ties between the U.S. and Mongolia since formal diplomatic relations between the two countries were first established in December 1987. The Ambassador will address such urgent domestic concerns as the recent boom in the minerals sector; Mongolia's role in the international scene, including the deployment of increasing numbers of Mongolian soldiers to U.N. Peacekeeping assignments in Sierra Leone, Chad, Darfur and elsewhere; and the role of such programs as the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), Peace Corps, and Fulbright programs in Mongolia.
Contact the Institute of East Asian Studies (ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809) for more information.
Asian Studies M.A. Admissions Workshop
October 21, 2010
Institute of East Asian Studies, Group in Asian Studies
The Group in Asian Studies will be having a workshop for undergraduates interested in finding out more about our M.A. degree. The staff advisor, Sharmila Shinde, and a current 2nd year M.A. student will be presenting. Open to all undergrads regardless of major. Event will take place in the art history seminar room of the East Asian Library on the UCB campus. Students can go to the Circulations Desk and ask for directions to the seminar room.
Contact the Group in East Asian Studies (asianst@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0333) for more information.
Sisters of the Blood: A Daoist Lineage in the Tang Imperial Court
Stephen Bokenkamp, School of International Letters & Cultures, Arizona State University
October 22, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
Bokenkamp will explore the literary remains of a group of remarkable Daoists of the late eighth and early ninth centuries. This group of women developed their own lineage and practices within the imperial court that was quite distinct from those of contemporary Daoist nuns.
Open to all audiences.
Contact the Center for Chinese Studies (ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321) for more information.
Reactions to the Market: Small Farmers in Nicaragua, Cuba, Russia and China
Laura Enríquez, Professor, Department of Sociology
October 25, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Latin American Studies
The year 1990 marked a turning point for both Nicaragua and Cuba, after which each pursued a distinct pathway toward the market. Russia also initiated its opening to the market at that time, while China began the process earlier. This talk is organized around a double comparison: of Nicaragua's rapid retreat from socialism with Cuba's reconfiguration of socialism; and Russia's rapid retreat from socialism with China's reconfiguration of socialism. These dynamics are examined through the lens of agricultural policy and its consequences.
Laura Enríquez is a professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. She has conducted and published research on rural Latin America for almost three decades.
Open to all audiences.
Tickets not required
Voices in the Wooden House: Angel Island Inscriptions and Immigrant Poetry, 1910-1940
Professor Charles Egan, Foreign Languages & Literatures, San Francisco State University
October 27, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Korean Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
Throughout the thirty years of its history as an immigration detention center from 1910 to 1940, those incarcerated at the Angel Island Immigration Station never ceased writing on the wooden barracks walls. Each of the hundreds of inscriptions tells the story of an individual, and taken together they illuminate historical, economic and cultural forces that shaped the lives of ordinary people in the first half of the twentieth century. The Chinese writing there is already well known, and is compelling because so much of it is poetry. Yet only a portion of the Chinese poems is as yet known to the public. Immigrants of other nationalities did not leave poems on the walls, but they did frequently contribute poems to the literary pages of ethnic newspapers in California. This talk will introduce Chinese, Japanese, and Korean poems drawn from the Angel Island walls and from the daily papers. These works provide rich perspectives on the Asian immigrant experience and its challenges.
Open to all audiences.
Contact the Center for Chinese Studies (ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321) for more information.
Fault Lines: The China-Japan Face-off and Shifting Power Dynamics in Asia
Daniel Sargent, Assistant Professor, History, UC Berkeley; Hong Yung Lee, Professor, Political Science, UC Berkeley; Vinod Aggarwal, Professor, Political Science, UC Berkeley; Lowell Dittmer, Professor, Political Science, UC Berkeley; Peter Zinoman, Associate Professor, History, UC Berkeley
Moderator: Wen-hsin Yeh, Professor, Director, Institute of East Asian Studies; Walter and Elise Haas Chair Professor in Asian Studies; and Richard H. and Laurie C. Morrison Chair in History
October 27, 2010
Institute of East Asian Studies
The recent dispute between China and Japan drew further attention to the rise of China and its ramifications on the world stage. This roundtable of Berkeley faculty offers an opportunity for a discussion of the changing dynamics among the nations of Asia and beyond. The historical context and contemporary implications are discussed in the light not only of the rise of China but changes across Asia over the past decade.
Contact the Institute of East Asian Studies (ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809) for more information.
Chinese Uhuru: A Maoist Reading of the Congo Crisis
Alexander Cook, Professor, UCB Department of History
October 28, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, UCB History Graduate Assocation
Between India, Rome and China: Buddhism in Gandhara
Jens-Uwe Hartmann, Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhist Studies
October 28, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies
It is probable that Buddhism had already reached Gandhara (an area in present-day northern Pakistan) during the time of King Asoka in the 3rd century BCE. In the wake of Alexander's campaign to northwest India, this region had absorbed a surge of Greek culture, which remained present for a surprisingly long time. Even centuries later, this culture still served as a matrix for creating visible representations of the Buddha and his followers. These representations proved extremely influential, spreading to India proper and, more importantly, traveling along the Silk Road, initiating the Buddhist art of local cultures and, finally, reaching China and the Far East. So far, Gandhara has mostly been understood as the name of this specific style of Buddhist art, but recent manuscript finds reveal that the region contributed much more to shaping Buddhism during a formative period than previously thought. It now appears that Gandhara, earlier considered to be situated at the margin of the Indian Buddhist world, played a decisive role in the spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road towards the east.
Jens-Uwe Hartmann holds the Chair of Indian Studies at the University of Munich. Before his appointment in 1999, he served as professor of Tibetology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Prof. Hartmann was trained in Indology and Tibetology at the University of Munich. In 1978/79, he spent one year in Kathmandu working for the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project. His work focuses on recovering and studying the literature of Indian Buddhism, mostly on the basis of Indian manuscripts and translations.
Contact the Center for Buddhist Studies (buddhiststudies@berkeley.edu, 510-643-5104) for more information.
Inventing a "Chinese" Portrait Style in Early Photography: The Case of Milton Miller (active 1850s-1860s): Elvera Kwang Siam Lim Memorial Lecture
Wu Hung, Art History, University of Chicago
Discussant: Patricia Berger, History of Art, UC Berkeley
October 29, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
Who invented the so-called "Chinese portrait style" in photography after this new visual technology reached China in the mid-19th century? What did such an "invention" mean at this particular historical moment? This paper speculates on these and other questions by focusing on Milton Miller's career as a transnational photographer and the creation of his China portraits.
Open to all audiences.
Contact the Center for Chinese Studies (ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321) for more information.
Willard Clark and Amy Poster: Conversation
Willard G. Clark, Founder, Clark Center; Amy Poster, Curator Emerita of Asian Art, Brooklyn Museum
October 31, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Berkeley Art Museum
Willard G. Clark, founder of the Clark Center, will converse with Amy Poster, Curator Emerita of Asian Art at the Brooklyn Museum, about his lifelong collecting of Japanese art.
Using visual illustrations, Clark will discuss his personal passion for Japanese art and culture and how he became involved in collecting, and share personal reflections about individual objects.
Amy Poster, currently an independent curator based in New York, was affiliated with the Asian Art department at the Brooklyn Museum from 1969 to 2006. Among her many major publications are Journey Through Asia: Masterpieces of Asian Art in the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Hiroshige: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo; and Crosscurrents: Masterpieces of East Asian Art from New York Private Collections.
Following their conversation, Clark and Poster will together offer an informal walkthrough of the exhibition.
Open to all audiences.
Tickets required: Free UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff; BAM/PFA members; Children (12 & under), $10 Adults (18-64), $7 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, young adults (13-17)
Ticket info: Conversation included with gallery admission. Purchase tickets same-day at the front lobby of BAM.
Contact the Berkeley Art Museum (bampfa@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0808) for more information.
When a Billion Chinese Jump: Why Japan and the World Are Concerned about China's Environmental Crisis
Jonathan Watts, Asia Environment Correspondent, The Guardian
November 3, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
China's environmental challenges differ from anything experienced by other countries during a similar stage of development. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with senior politicians, scientists, businessmen and individuals the length and breadth of the country, Watts considers four questions: How environmental destruction became the new "China threat"? Why history and geography are conspiring against China? Is scientific development turning red China green? And, Which values offer the greatest potential for future growth? He will also plot the process of "pollution in-sourcing" from the eastern coast to the western interior, and ponder the future of "middle-aged mankind."
Jonathan Watts is Asia Environment Correspondent for The Guardian, a former president of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China and vice-president of FCCJ. His is author of When a Billion Chinese Jump, a 100,000 km environmental travelogue that traces the course of China's development from coal mines and cancer villages to eco-cities and science labs. Watts' multimedia career includes seven years in Japan, five trips to North Korea, the 2000 G8 summit, the 2002 World Cup, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and work for CNN, BBC, TV Tokyo, Mother Jones, South China Morning Post and Asahi Shimbun.
Introduced by Thomas Gold, Professor of Sociology, UC Berkeley.
Contact the Institute of East Asian Studies (ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809) for more information.
The Emperor's Misaie as the Rite of Legitimation and Resistance
Asuka Sango, Religion Department, Carleton College
November 4, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies
This paper examines the Buddhist rite of the Misaie in order to address a paradox of monarchy in Heian Japan (794–1185). In this period, the emperor was the "exemplary center" (as Geertz has termed it) in the centripetal government called "Ritsuryo" state. In order to establish his unparallel leadership, at the beginning of the Heian period, the emperor inaugurated the Buddhist rite of the Misaie in adopting the image of the ideal Buddhist king depicted in the Golden Light Sutra. It is said that over the course of the Heian period, this monarchical system declined and became a mere puppet regime controlled by influential contenders for political power such as the Fujiwara regent and the retired emperor. However, recent scholarship has revealed that this transition in the structure of governance indicated, not the complete eclipse of the "exemplary center" but a shift from a centripetal government to shared rulership characterized by mutual dependence between competing political leaders including but not limited to the emperor. This paper casts new light on the indispensable roles that Buddhist rituals played in constructing and contesting political authority, and reveals a paradoxical nature of monarchy in the latter half of the Heian period wherein the centrality of the emperor was perpetuated not only by the emperor himself but also by those who tried to challenge it.
Asuka Sango (Wittenberg University, BA; University of Illinois, MA; Princeton University, PhD) is a specialist in premodern Japanese religions with particular interests in Buddhist rituals in the Heian period (794–1185). She teaches courses in East Asian religions at Carleton College, Minnesota. She is currently writing a book manuscript entitled In the Halo of Golden Light: Imperial Authority and Buddhist Ritual in Heian Japan (794-1185). It examines debate and lecture rituals in which monks discussed the doctrinal knowledge concerning the Golden Light Sutra, and analyzes how various constituencies of Heian society — Buddhist temples, individual monks, the state, the imperial family, and court nobles — legitimized themselves by claiming the aura of imperial religious authority associated with this sutra.
Contact the Center for Buddhist Studies (buddhiststudies@berkeley.edu, 510-643-5104) for more information.
Chinese Calligraphy Workshop
November 4, 2010
Center for Chinese, Associated Students of the University of California
Interested in learning more about Chinese culture? SHKCA and CCCB presents "Chinese Calligraphy Workshop" — a 2-hour introductory workshop teaching you the fundamentals of this beautiful, ancient, and expressive art. No prior experience is necessary & all materials will be provided. We're looking forward to seeing you there!
Korea and Koreans, Making a World Where People Live a Humane Life: Love of Learning, Training the Body and Mind, and Governing the Nation
Kumgok Ha Yeon Soon, Kumgok Foundation
November 4, 2010
Center for Korean Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Korea Times San Francisco
Kumgok Ha Yeon Soon, eminent scholar of Confucianism, began studying under his mentor Jee Dong at the age of 4. In 1972, he established the Kumgok Seodang (Confucian school) in Seoul, and subsequently opened seodang in Incheon and Jeju. He founded the Dongyu Institute and the East Studies Institute, both of which focus on Confucian classics, and became President of the Confucius Institute in 2004. He is currently president of the Kumgok Foundation. His publications include several guides to the Confucian classics, and he has lectured throughout Korea, Asia, and Europe. He provides the following introduction to this talk: "The work of heaven does not rest, not even for one second. It is constantly renewing and changing the universe. The message here is that we must renew and change the world so that it becomes a place where people can live a humane life. As heaven works, if our leaders do not work in equal proportion to guide and teach the people, they are of no worth. Are nations building a world where people can live a humane life? The key to this question begins with the concept of sachin jonghyeong, which means to serve one's parents and to respect one's elder siblings."
Contact the Center for Korean Studies (cks@berkeley.edu, 510-642-5674) for more information.
Rebuilding Safe, Satisfactory, and Sustainable Houses after Earthquakes
Elizabeth Hausler, Build Change
November 5, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, CITRIS (Center for Info Technology Research in the Interest of Society)
Build Change is a non-profit social enterprise that designs earthquake-resistant houses in developing countries and trains builders, homeowners, engineers, and government officials to build them. With programs in Indonesia, China, and Haiti, Build Change's work has improved over 18,000 homes and permanently upgraded the skills of 2,000 builders and construction professionals. Build Change starts by performing post-earthquake reconnaissance studies to understand why houses collapsed and why they didn't. Build Change then uses detailed housing subsector studies to identify low or no-cost improvements to existing, culturally appropriate building technologies, such as confined masonry and timber frame. Build Change develops training resources and works in partnership with structural engineers and local governments to develop and implement building standards and inspection programs. Build Change also works in partnership with research and testing laboratories to validate and improve simple methods for assessing materials and construction quality in the field. To learn more, visit www.buildchange.org and come to the CITRIS seminar!
Elizabeth Hausler is the founder and CEO of Build Change. She is a 2004 Echoing Green Fellow, a 2006 Draper Richards Fellow, a 2009 Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow and was a Fulbright Scholar to India in 2002-2003. She is a skilled brick, block and stone mason and has lectured on sustainable, disaster-resistant construction in ten countries. She served on the 2002-2003 National Research Council committee to develop a long-term research agenda for the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). Before graduate school, she spent five years in the engineering consulting industry, working for Peterson Consulting LP in Chicago, IL and Dames & Moore in Denver, CO.
Regime Reinforcing Noncompliance in Rural China
Lily L. Tsai, Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Discussant: Kevin O'Brien, Political Science, UC Berkeley
November 5, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
When relatively powerless individuals in nondemocratic systems refuse or fail to comply with government policies and regulations, we typically see their noncompliance as "everyday resistance" to the state. Yet, as the case of rural China illustrates, people in transitional political systems undergoing reform can often see individual noncompliance as a way of engaging rather than avoiding powerholders. This presentation argues that norms of regime-reinforcing noncompliance may partially substitute for formal democratic institutions for citizen participation in nondemocratic and transitional systems where such institutions are weak. These norms make noncompliance with policies and decisions that individuals see as misguided or inappropriate socially and politically acceptable when such noncompliance provides the state with information about citizen preferences and local conditions. This presentation draws on original data from a nationally representative survey of 2000 households in rural China and from multiple, intensive interviews conducted with twenty individuals randomly sampled from two villages.
Contact the Center for Chinese Studies (ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321) for more information.
Remembering the Almost Forgotten Killings: Civilian Victims of the Korean War
Yong-Jick Kim, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea
November 8, 2010
Center for Korean Studies, Insitute of East Asian Studies
The Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was launched five years ago by a special law enacted with bipartisan support by the Korean National Assembly. It is about to conclude its investigative activities and publish its final report. Its investigations have covered vast issues such as civilian mass killings during the Korean War and independence movement cases, as well as human rights violations during the authoritarian era. It has published more than twenty volumes of reports so far. Dr. Yong-Jick Kim is Professor of Political Science at SungshinUniversity and Standing Commissioner of Truth and Reconciliation. He will discuss the commission's work and potential uses for its reports in studies of Korean society, politics, and history.
Contact the Center for Korean Studies (cks@berkeley.edu, 510-642-5674) for more information.
Public Governance of Social Clashes surrounding Urban Housing Demolition and Relocation in China: A Cultural Value Viewpoint: 城市拆迁冲突公共治理的文化价值视域
Peng Xiaobing, College of Trade and Public Administration, Chongqing University
November 8, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
Social public governance strengthens the cooperative negotiation mechanism, and in the case of urban housing demolition in China, also strengthens a common understanding of cultural values among local government, business & social organizations and civil individuals. Institutions play an important role in solving the problem of social conflicts and clashes in urban housing demolition and relocation, but so do cultural beliefs. Through a lack of emphasis on cultural values, governments respond in an ineffective way to conflicts that arise from unjust and unequal distribution, resulting in a distortion of cultural ethics, clashes between developing the economy and improving the people's livelihood, and challenges to modernization. So in order to solve the problem of social conflicts and clash in urban housing demolition, it is very important to understand and transform cultural values not only for government and business & social organizations, but also for residents.
In Chinese and English with no Interpretation
Contact the Center for Chinese Studies (ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321) for more information.
The Japanese Bureaucracy under Siege: Political Change and Administrative Reform
Masahiro Horie, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies
November 9, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies
Why has Japan had such frequent changes of prime minister and short-lived cabinets in recent years? Professor Horie will discuss this and other puzzles as he analyzes the major issues for political and administrative reform in Japan.
Masahiro Horie received his Master's in Public Administration from Syracuse University, and is currently the Executive Advisor to the President and Professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo, Japan (GRIPS). He was also awarded the "2001 Stars of Asia Award" from Business Week for being a distinguished reform leader and innovator (as the first professional Japanese government official in the field of politics and public administration).
Contact the Center for Japanese Studies (cjs@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3156) for more information.
Pursuing Anna: The Art of Making History
Susan Morgan, Distinguished Professor of English, Miami University
November 10, 2010
Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Southeast Asia Studies
If you thought you knew the story of Anna in The King and I, think again. As this riveting biography shows, the real life of Anna Leonowens was far more fascinating than the beloved story of the Victorian governess who went to work for the King of Siam. To write this definitive account, Susan Morgan traveled around the globe and discovered new information that has eluded researchers for years. Anna was born a poor, mixed-race army brat in India, and what followed is an extraordinary nineteenth-century story of savvy self-invention, wild adventure, and far-reaching influence. At a time when most women stayed at home, Anna Leonowens traveled all over the world, witnessed some of the most fascinating events of the Age of Empire, and became a well-known travel writer, journalist, teacher, and lecturer. She remains the one and only foreigner to have spent significant time inside the royal harem of Siam. She emigrated to the United States, crossed all of Russia on her own just before the revolution, and moved to Canada, where she publicly defended the rights of women and the working class. The book also gives an engrossing account of how and why Anna became an icon of American culture in The King and I and its many adaptations. Introduced by Jeffrey Hadler, Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies.
Susan Morgan, Distinguished Professor of English at Miami University, is the author of Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women's Travel Writings about Southeast Asia, among other books.
This event is part of the IEAS Book Series "New Perspectives on Asia."
Contact the Institute of East Asian Studies (ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809) for more information.
Kabuki Close-Up: Makeup and Acting Demonstration
November 12, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Berkeley Art Museum
Kabuki Close-Up: Makeup and Acting Demonstration
Zenshinza Theater Company
In conjunction with the Flowers of the Four Seasons exhibition, members of the famed Zenshinza Theater Company will demonstrate and describe techniques of Kabuki makeup and acting. A cherished artistic institution in its homeland, Zenshinza performs before more than 250,000 people annually in a wide range of lavish and colorful productions, from traditional Kabuki to period dramas and historical plays about Japanese Buddhism.
One of Japan's oldest theater troupes, the Zenshinza Theater Company will appear at Cal Performances in two different programs, on November 13 at 8 p.m. and November 14 at 3 p.m. The museum's presentation offers a special opportunity for a behind-the-scenes encounter with these extraordinary artists as well as insights into their art.
Open to all audiences.
Tickets required: $10 Adults (18-64), $7 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), free BAM/PFA members, UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff, and children (12 & under)
Contact the Berkeley Art Museum (bampfa@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0808) for more information.
Burden of the Past
Kelly Y. Jeong, UC Riverside
November 12, 2010
Center for Korean Studies
This article examines Korean colonial intellectuals' writings, which I call "confessional writings," from the "space of decolonization" (1945-1948), in which they express shame and self-loathing for their colonial collaboration. It shows that such emotions not only stem from the authors' memory of their collaborative acts, but also from their recognition that they have failed to act their proper positionality as cultural leaders and elite male subjects in a deeply patriarchal culture, and also importantly, from their experience of the lack of autonomy. The writers' perception of their own weakness, their lack of autonomy, is almost as shameful as the fact of collaboration, even though the latter is in part a function of their colonial condition. The confessional literature of the immediate postcolonial years, then, is a site where issues of emotion, modernity, and identity come to a head within and surrounding the subject of the male intellectual.
Contact the Center for Korean Studies (cks@berkeley.edu, 510-642-5674) for more information.
Zenshinza Theatre Company
November 13-14, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Cal Performances
Experience an enthralling theatrical tradition presented by its most skilled practitioners! Among Japan's oldest theater troupes, this 68-member company performs before more than 250,000 people annually. A cherished artistic institution in its homeland, Zenshinza stages a wide range of lavish and colorful productions ranging from traditional kabuki to period dramas and historical plays about Japanese Buddhism.
Program A (Nov 13): Narukami (1724), presented in the aragoto (heroic) style, is one of the 18 greatest kabuki plays. This classic drama showcases the superhuman strength and valor of the kabuki hero, and is highlighted by a famous scene in which a beautiful princess seduces a fiery priest. In Chatsubo ("The Tea Chest"), a country bumpkin encounters many challenges when he comes to the city. It provides a light, comic counterpoint to the more serious drama.
Program B (Nov 14): Honen and Shinran (2006). Written by Tajima Ei. A moving historical drama depicting the upheaval of 13th-century Japan, and two priests, Honen and Shinran, who opened a path to freedom through affirming the essence of life and human existence in a time of civil war and moral collapse. Because of their break from monastic traditions and their founding of a lay ministry, they are often compared with Calvin and Luther.
Ticket info: Half-price tickets are available for purchase by UC Berkeley students for all performances. Tickets go on sale August 9. Buy tickets online, or by calling Cal Performances Box Office at 510-642-9988. Tickets go on sale August 15. Buy tickets by calling Cal Performances Ticket Office at 510-642-9988.
Crystal of Collected Wisdom: The Arabic Chinese Calligraphy of Haji Noor Deen
November 15, 2010 – March 4, 2011
Center for Chinese Studies: Institute of East Asian Studies
With his energetic command of the sini ("Chinese" in Arabic) script, Master Calligrapher Haji Noor Deen Mi Guang Jiang is almost single-handedly responsible for revitalizing the centuries-old art of Chinese Muslim calligraphy, and bringing it to the attention of a contemporary international audience. Born in 1963 in Yucheng, Shandong Province, China, Haji Noor Deen, whose title indicates that he has made the pilgrimage to Mecca, has already been a practitioner of calligraphy for thirty years.
For Haji Noor Deen calligraphy is primarily a practice of faith and secondarily a profession. Schooled first in mosques in his homeland, and then for eight years in Egypt, Haji Noor Deen is both an artist and scholar who continues to study with the finest Islamic calligraphy masters world-wide; he is also a prominent teacher in his own right. He is versed in the traditions of both Chinese and Arabic calligraphy separately, as well as the specific heritage of sini calligraphy – an art form developed by the Hui Chinese Muslims that dates back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). In his work Noor Deen honors this long lineage of Chinese Muslim calligraphers while presenting his own innovative style, a style that is startling contemporary in its power, beauty, and pluralism. In his own words, "Arabic Calligraphy in [the] Chinese style is the crystal of collected wisdom from countless ancestors. It is the Chinese Muslim's resplendent treasure house."
In 1997 Haji Noor Deen was awarded the Certificate of Arabic Calligrapher in Egypt, becoming the first Chinese person to be honored with this prestigious award. In 2000 Noor Deen initiated and taught the first regular and systemic Arabic Calligraphy course at the Zhengzhou Islamic College in China, where he continues to profess today. He exhibits and lectures around the world in both secular and religious settings and has his work is in such prestigious collections as the British Museum, the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, the National Museum of Scotland, and the Harvard University Art Museum. Here at the Institute of East Asian Studies we are pleased to be able to share Haji Noor Deen's work with the Berkeley community.
On Arabic Chinese Calligraphy:
Traditional Arabic calligraphy in China has been described as the most representative form of Islamic art in China. Calligraphy is part of the daily life of Chinese Muslims, used in homes and mosques. Sini calligraphy belongs to the Hui people, one of China's 56 officially-recognized ethnic groups. Unlike China's other Muslim minorities, Hui are Mandarin-speaking, though Arabic remains the language of the Koran. It is from the Hui calligraphy tradition that Haji Noor Deen descends.
The following is quoted from "East of East: The Art of Haji Noor Deen Mi Guang Jiang" by Dr. Hesham Alalusi:
"In a country that almost reveres the art of the beautifully written word, it is not rare to find a calligrapher that possesses the talent and creativity inherent to the practice of Chinese calligraphy, an intuitive and freely flowing art form in which the way a word is written can convey as much meaning as the word itself. However, it is rare to find a calligrapher that marries the spontaneous, water-like quality of Chinese calligraphy to the measured cerebrality and refined restraint of Arabic calligraphy. The Chinese and Arabic calligraphic traditions have often been compared as the two of the world's finest manifestations of the written word, but never likened; indeed, they are at once opposites and complements. When combined, the stunning simplicity of Chinese calligraphy softens the artistic deliberateness of Arabic calligraphy, while the Arabic informs the Chinese counterpart with its increased structurality. In the end, the result is calligraphy that blends the two greatest calligraphy traditions in an artistic piece that is a work of incredibly unique beauty, and a testimony to man's synthesizing genius. Haji Noor Deen Mi Guang Jiang is such a calligrapher."
The Institute of East Asian Studies would like to thank Haji Noor Deen Mi Guang Jiang for the generous loan of his work. The work will be on view at the Institute of East Asian Studies through March 4, 2011. As part of the opening festivities, Haji Noor Deen will offer his thoughts about his work and the traditions of which he partakes, as well as a demonstration of his art.
The following day, November 16, the Center for Chinese Studies hosts a calligraphy workshop.
Contact the Institute of East Asian Studies (ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809) for more information.
Islamic and Chinese Calligraphy: A Meeting of Two Traditions
Haji Noor Deen, Master Calligrapher; Patricia Berger, Associate Professor of Chinese Art History, UC Berkeley
November 15, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies: Institute of East Asian Studies
A Conversation with Master Calligrapher Haji Noor Deen and Patricia Berger, Associate Professor of Chinese Art History, UC Berkeley.
Traditional Arabic calligraphy in China has been described as the most representative form of Islamic art in China. Calligraphy is part of the daily life of Chinese Muslims, used in homes, Mosques, and elsewhere. Chinese Arabic calligraphy has its own schools, traditions, and techniques all little known in the West. A master calligrapher whose work draws inspiration from, and even transcends this tradition, will be featured in an upcoming exhibition at the Institute of East Asian Studies, "Crystal of Collected Wisdom: The Arabic Chinese Calligraphy of Haji Noor Deen."
Haji Noor Deen Mi Guangjiang, born in 1963 in Yucheng, Shandong Province, China, brings together the Islamic calligraphy of his Muslim heritage with the Chinese calligraphy of his homeland. Both traditions prize the art and poetry in the written word, Islam in the celebration of the sacred, Chinese largely in the secular realm. The Chinese Islamic style of Haji Noor Deen's work bridges the two traditions. Through exhibitions, lectures, and demonstrations, he brings to world attention work little seen beyond the borders of the Muslim-Chinese community in China.
The Institute of East Asian Studies will host this exhibition of his work beginning November 15. As part of the opening festivities, Haji Noor Deen will offer his thoughts about his work and the traditions of which he partakes, as well as a demonstration of his art.
The following day, November 16, the Center for Chinese Studies hosts a calligraphy workshop.
Haji Noor Deen's work will be on view at the Institute of East Asian Studies through March 4, 2011.
Co-sponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies and Center for Chinese Studies.
Contact the Institute of East Asian Studies (ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809) for more information.
Hands-on Workshop with Haji Noor Deen
Haji Noor Deen, Master Calligrapher
November 16, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
Traditional Arabic calligraphy in China has been described as the most representative form of Islamic art in China. Calligraphy is part of the daily life of Chinese Muslims, used in homes, Mosques, and elsewhere. Chinese Arabic calligraphy has its own schools, traditions, and techniques all little known in the West. A master calligrapher whose work draws inspiration from, and even transcends this tradition, will be featured in an upcoming exhibition at the Institute of East Asian Studies, "Crystal of Collected Wisdom: The Arabic Chinese Calligraphy of Haji Noor Deen."
Haji Noor Deen Mi Guangjiang, born in 1963 in Yucheng, Shandong Province, China, brings together the Islamic calligraphy of his Muslim heritage with the Chinese calligraphy of his homeland. Both traditions prize the art and poetry in the written word, Islam in the celebration of the sacred, Chinese largely in the secular realm. The Chinese Islamic style of Haji Noor Deen's work bridges the two traditions. Through exhibitions, lectures, and demonstrations, he brings to world attention work little seen beyond the borders of the Muslim-Chinese community in China.
The Institute of East Asian Studies will host this exhibition of his work beginning November 15. As part of the opening festivities, Haji Noor Deen will offer his thoughts about his work and the traditions of which he partakes, as well as a demonstration of his art. Haji Noor Deen's work will be on view at the Institute of East Asian Studies through March 4, 2011.
Co-sponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies and Center for Chinese Studies.
Registration required: free
Registration info: To register please email ccs-vs@berkeley.edu. Register by calling Mary Trechock at 510-643-6322, or by emailing Mary Trechock at ccs-vs@berkeley.edu.
Purges, Partisanship, and the Dialogic Origins of Mongolian Imperial Historiography
Christopher P. Atwood, Interim Director, Center of the Languages of the Central Asian Region; Chair, Central Eurasian Studies Department, Indiana University
November 17, 2010
Institute of East Asian Studies
Like the Arab empire before it, the thirteenth-century Mongol empire gave rise to a great efflorescence of historiography. Although written in Mongolian, most of this new historical literature has survived only in Chinese or Persian translations, with the exception of the extraordinary Secret History of the Mongols. In this talk, Professor Atwood will present the results of his years of research on Mongolian imperial history, using textual comparison, source criticism, and literary theory. Traditionally the origins of Mongolian historiography have been sought in epic traditions and oral history. Professor Atwood, however, finds the origin of Mongolian historiography not in these "monologic" genres, but in the intense debates that accompanied the conflict between rival branches of the imperial family culminating in the coup d'etat and subsequent purges of 1251-52. These debates were carried on through written works that oscillated between monologic and dialogic genres, showing how these two opposing imaginations can both be found at the foundation of Mongolian historiography.
Contact the Institute of East Asian Studies (ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809) for more information.
Documentary Film: OKINAWA: Reports from Japan and America
November 17, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, The Center for Digital TV and the World, a project of the Tides Center
Class of 2010's Noah Buhayar, Ayako Mie and Tyler Sipe and class of 2011's Diana Jou, Laurel Moorhead, Jake Schoneker, and Jun Stinson produced video stories in California, Hawaii and Okinawa for The Washington Post. Their reports explore the lives and challenges of Okinawans and their descendants.
Join us for a reception, a screening of their reports, and a Q and A session at North Gate Library. The works are part of the Digital TV and the World special project's experiment in multimedia, global reporting directed by Todd Carrel.
The Washington Post has published Digital TV and the World reports since 2002. Journalists have traveled the world -- from China to India, from Cambodia to Latin America -- in search of stories that reveal the fabric of communities. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/emergingvoices/
Next year's group will focus on Korea and Koreans in America.
The Center for Digital TV and the World, a project of the Tides Center, is supported by the Skirball Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Japan-United States Friendship Commission, the United States-Japan Foundation, ANA, the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, Center for Japanese Studies and Institute of East Asian Studies, and The East-West Center.
"Hawai'i is my Haven": Pacific Revisions of Blackness for People of African Descent in Hawai'i
Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Assistant Professor, African American Studies & Asian American Studies, Northwestern University
November 18, 2010
Center for Korean Studies, Center for the Study of Social Change, Department of Ethnic Studies
How do Pacific sites intervene historic Black/White relations and what alternatives do they offer to conceptions of Blackness as a historically denigrated identity in the U.S.? This talk draws upon ethnographic fieldwork on Blacks in Hawai'i to analyze the interplay between local/indigenous conceptions of difference with those African Americans bring with them from the continental U.S. African American transplants' responses to life in Hawai'i imply the possibility of a different conception of Blackness that the "fiftieth state" may offer. Yet, if these islands in the Pacific offer Blacks respite from continental forms of racism, I analyze the disappointment of these same individuals upon learning that non-Whites, namely local Asians, enact familiar forms of racism. I also compare the perspectives of African Americans transplants with those of mixed race (or "hapa") local Blacks, including Black/Hawaiians and Black/Koreans. The identifications of mixed race local Blacks reveal the Pacific as an alternative but not necessarily utopian society in which the one drop rule tussles with blood quantum definitions of "Blackness" and "Hawaiianess."
Tang Chang'an as Media Machine?
Linda Rui Feng, East Asian Studies, University of Toronto
Discussant: Nicolas Tackett, History, UC Berkeley
November 18, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
Two anecdotal collections in the late Tang, with narratives that revolve around events in the annual civil service examination, nonetheless point to an urban network of highly evaluative, consumptive, and performative relationships in the capital of Chang'an. Particularly noteworthy are the ways in which these anecdotes show us how information might have been propagated in the urban milieu, ranging from gossip from the demimonde to news and updates in the ubiquitous circuit in which literati reputation was made and updated.
Contact the Center for Chinese Studies (ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321) for more information.
Traditional Tibetan Art: Beyond Iconography and Religion
Lecture by Jeff Watt
November 18, 2010
Berkeley Art Museum, Center for Buddhist Studies
Followed by a special viewing of Tibetan paintings on loan to BAM/PFA.
Jeff Watt was the founding curator at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York and is currently the director and chief curator of Himalayan Art Resources (HAR ), a website and virtual museum.
In conjunction with Himalayan Pilgrimage
Tickets required: $10 Adults (18-64), $7 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), Free BAM/PFA members, UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff, and children (12 & under)
Contact the Berkeley Art Museum (bampfa@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0808) for more information.
The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic's Adventures in China: Book Event
Barbara Pollack, author
November 19, 2010
Insitute of East Asian Studies, Berkeley Art Museum
Author, journalist, and art critic Barbara Pollack will talk about her new book The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic's Adventures in China, illustrating her presentation with photographs of artists' studios, galleries, and parties in Beijing and Shanghai. The first book to take a critical look at the success, and also the pitfalls, of China's recent art boom, The Wild, Wild East describes her first-hand encounters with artists, dealers, collectors, curators, and auction specialists.
Pollack has been reporting on China's developing art scene since 1997, and has written a series of groundbreaking articles for a wide range of publications including Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Art in America, and Art & Auction. The Wild, Wild East was funded with grants from the Asian Cultural Council and the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundations.
Concurrent with the program, BAM's stunning new acquisition by artist Ai Weiwei, arguably China's best-known and most influential contemporary artist, is on display in the museum lobby.
In the Museum Store:
Delightful Pursuits: Highlights from the Lee
Institute for Japanese Art at the Clark Center, edited by Ishida Yoshiya.
$50.00, hardcover.
The Wild, Wild East: An American Ar t Critic's Adventures in China, by Barbara Pollack.
$24.95, paperback.
Open to all audiences.
Tickets required: $10 Adults (18-64), $7 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), free BAM/PFA members, UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff, and children (12 & under)
Contact the Berkeley Art Museum (bampfa@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0808) for more information.
Retail Clinics in America: Business Model Innovation
Cao Hongxing, International Business School, Beijing Foreign Studies University
November 22, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
The health care system of America and China has similar problems: incomplete coverage, lower accessibility, and escalating costs, which is in need of reform. Although American President Obama proposed "National Health Plan", under the current situation, this plan is less likely to work and in high uncertainty. Chinese government also takes several health care reforms but not work. Meanwhile, retail clinics are in progress and provide another alternative for health care provision. They have come up with a series of innovations and are still trying to find a viable business model. The speaker will present how their business models have innovated and evaluated in U.S. and provide implications for Chinese health care system.
NE Colloquium- China Nuclear Power Industry – A Comparative Study
Jun Li, Wharton School University of Penn
November 22, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Nuclear Engineering (NE)
China's nuclear industry has been moving forward very slowly until now. Under the growing international pressure on China's emission coupled with the domestic concern of energy security, has it has become the new national policy to accelerate the development of nuclear power, leading to the phenomenal change in China's nuclear market as well as its nuclear industry. This presentation will talk about the past, present and future of the China nuclear market and industry, as well as the comparison against its counterparts in the US, Japan, France and South Korea.
What Bonding? Cross-culturalism in Yue/Shu (Bond), a Yuju Adaptation of The Merchant of Venice
CHEN Fang, Professor of Chinese Theater, National Taiwan Normal University; President of Chinese-Taipei Theatre Association
December 1, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
BOND is the first Shakespeare play performed in Taiwan as a Yuju opera. The presenter will interpret the cross-cultural meanings of the Chinese opera production.
In Chinese without interpretation.
Contact the Center for Chinese Studies (ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321) for more information.
News and Stories from China
Yiyun Li, Assistant Professor, English, UC Davis
December 1, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
China in the past thirty years has transformed itself in so many ways that news from China seems always new, though is it really? What changes and what remains unchanged beneath a surface of prosperity? Yiyun Li will read from her latest book, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and discuss news and stories from China. Introduced by Andrew F. Jones, Chair, Center for Chinese Studies.
Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is the recipient of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her one of the best young American novelists under thirty-five, and in 2010, The New Yorker named her one of the top 20 writers under 40. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, The O.Henry Prize Stories, among others. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons.
This event is part of the IEAS Book Series "New Perspectives on Asia."
Contact the Institute of East Asian Studies (ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809) for more information.
Geography Department Colloquium: "Space Production in China: Industrialism, Urbanism, and Culturalism"
You-Tien Hsing, Professor, Department of Geography, UC Berkeley
December 1, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Department of Geography
Story Hour in the Library featuring Gene Yang
December 2, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies, Library
Gene Yang began publishing comic books in 1996 and received the Xeric Grant for Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks in 1997. American Born Chinese was the first graphic novel nominated for a National Book Award and the first to win the Printz Award. It also won an Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album. The Eternal Smile, a collaboration with Derek Kirk Kim, was also nominated for an Eisner. In 2010, Yang released two new graphic novels: Prime Baby and Animal Crackers.
Attendance restrictions: Free and open to the public.
Ritual Place: 1st Annual Toshihide Numata Book Prize Presentation and Symposium
Awarded to Harvard University Professor James Robson for his 2009 book Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue) in Medieval China
December 3, 2010
Center for Buddhist Studies, Center for South Asia Studies
The Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai Toshihide Numata Book Prize is presented on an annual basis to an outstanding book in the field of Buddhist Studies. The inaugural (2010) prize has been awarded to Harvard University Professor James Robson for his 2009 book "Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue) in Medieval China."
2:30-2:45 pm — Introductory Remarks and Book Prize Presentation
Rev. Brian Nagata, Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (Society for the Promotion of Buddhism)
2:45-4:00 pm — Keynote Address and Discussion
James Robson, Harvard University, 2010 Award Recipient
"Coming Down from the Mountain: The Regionalization and Ritualization of the Divine Thearch of the Southern Sacred Peak [Nanyue shengdi]"
4:15-6:00 pm — Symposium on "Ritual Place"
Robert Sharf, UC Berkeley, Chair
"Tracking the Lords of the Earth: Tracing a Subterranean Rite's Movements across Asia"
Jacob Dalton, UC Berkeley
"From Words to Walls and Back Again: Painted Relic Chambers in Sri Lanka"
Phyllis Granoff, Yale University
"Dharanis, Image Miracles, and Mandala Initiation: Reconstructing Early Esoteric Buddhist Rituals through Chinese Translations"
Koichi Shinohara, Yale University
"Reflections on the Identity of Deities Among the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley"
Alexander von Rospatt, UC Berkeley
Response
James Robson, Harvard University
Contact the Center for Buddhist Studies (buddhiststudies@berkeley.edu, 510-643-5104) for more information.
Bamboo and Porcelain: The Art of Uematsu Chikuyu and Fukami Sueharu: Gallery Talk with Andreas Marks
Andreas Marks, director and chief curator of the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture in Hanford, California
December 5, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Berkeley Art Museum
Andreas Marks, director and chief curator of the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture in Hanford, California, will offer an in-depth look at the contemporary component of Flowers of the Four Seasons: sculpture by two leading artists working in the traditional mediums of bamboo and porcelain.
Since the 1950s, some artists have experimented with bamboo—for centuries plaited by Japanese farmers and artisans into functional containers for utilitarian and ritual purposes—as a purely sculptural form. One of the highlights of Flowers of the Four Seasons is the work of Uematsu Chikuyu, an artist of extraordinary technical skill who pushes the medium of bamboo to new conceptual and technical limits.
Fukami Sueharu is internationally known for his razor-sharp, minimalist porcelain sculptures. Their distinctive pale bluish glaze, seihakuji, is inspired by later Song period Chinese celadons, but unlike their even glaze, Fukami's work displays an exquisitely variable density of color. The Clark Center will present a solo exhibition of Fukami, whose work is represented in forty-seven museums worldwide, opening on March 26, 2011.
Marks, co-curator of Flowers of the Four Seasons with Senior Curator of Asian Art Julia M. White, holds a Ph.D. in East Asian art history from Leiden University. He has curated exhibitions on various aspects of Japanese art and has published significantly on Japanese prints. He is currently working on the book Fukami: Purity of Form to accompany the Clark Center exhibition.
Open to all audiences.
Tickets required: $10 Adults (18-64), $7 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17), free BAM/PFA members, UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff, and children (12 & under)
Contact the Berkeley Art Museum (bampfa@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0808) for more information.
Conference: Scaling Green Finance in China and the United States: A Call to Action
December 8, 2010
Institute of East Asian Studies, Asia Society of Northern California
U.S. and China are positioned to play leading roles in scaling up green finance in coming years. With the green technology sector expected to grow to over $2 trillion annually by 2020, finance is a serious constraint. The U.S. has sophisticated financial mechanisms, while China has massive cash reserves and the capacity to deploy them quickly. The U.S. is strong in innovation and China is strong in pilot testing and manufacturing. The striking complementarities of the two economies will be discussed in terms of coordinating efforts to scale green finance.
Open to all audiences
Registration required: $125.00 Members ($140 at door); Students/Non-profits $50.00; Non-members $150.00 ($165 at door); Special offer (Admission + Asia Society Membership) $160.00
Contact the Institute of East Asian Studies (ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809) for more information.
Elements of Korean Traditional Music in My Works
Dong-wook Park
December 9, 2010
Center for Korean Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
Percussionist, composer, and conductor Dong-wook Park is recognized as a pioneer for becoming the first Korean classical percussionist to have officially introduced orchestral and contemporary percussion to the Korean music field.
He established the percussion departments and curriculums for the majority of the music colleges in Korea. He appeared in historical performances including the first percussion solo recital, percussion ensemble, chamber music recital, and solo concerto with orchestra. He studied percussion performance and composition at the Mannes College of Music in New York, where he later taught and formed the first percussion ensemble as a faculty member in 1968. He was also the principal timpanist for the Bridgeport Symphony Orchestra, and became a faculty member at Finch College of New York and Bridgeport University College of Music. In 1973, he was invited to return to Korea to become the principal timpanist of the Korean National Symphony Orchestra, later renamed as the KBS Symphony Orchestra. He also began teaching at many music colleges in Korea, including Seoul National University, where he taught for more than twenty years. He founded the Percussive Arts Society of Korea (PASK), and served as regional director for the International Percussive Arts Society in the United States. Presently, PASK consists of 14 different percussion ensemble groups, encompassing hundreds of professional percussionists and students in Korea. PASK members actively present numerous percussion performances and continue to commission various contemporary works every year. Currently, he serves as the Chief Consultant for the Seoul Drum Festival since 2001.
As a composer and a conductor, he has been commissioned to compose and release his own works, premiering hundreds of new compositions for percussion both in Korea and internationally as well. In 1980, he opened the Summer School for Percussionists and Composers, which served as an arena for composers and performers to work in close collaboration to produce new works. His compositions have been appreciated by critics and audiences for their unique harmony and inspiring sounds derived from elements of both western and Korean traditional percussion music.
Park's major compositions include: 'Spring I' for Percussion Ensemble and Three Flutes; 'Right and Left' for Film; 'Spring II' for Korean traditional instruments commissioned by the National Orchestra of Korean Traditional Music; 'Mast I,' 'Mast II,' 'Circular Cone' commissioned by the Navy Concert Band; 'Masked Dance' for Children's Choir and Percussion Ensemble; 'Contrast' for Wind Orchestra and Percussion Ensemble, commissioned for the 20th Anniversary of the Korean National Symphony Orchestra, 'Narae'80' for Percussion and Orchestra, 'Pentameter' commissioned by Okada ensemble in Japan, and 'Peace' for Chorus and Percussion.
The Korean Musicians Society honored and awarded him with "The Musician of the Year" in 1984 and "The National Music Award" in 1993. In 2005, he received the "Lifetime Achievement Award in Education" from the International Percussive Arts Society in the United States.
Contact the Center for Korean Studies (cks@berkeley.edu, 510-642-5674) for more information.
"Just Images" of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: Antonioni's Chung Kuo (1972) and Ivens/Loridan's How Yukong Moved the Mountain (1976)
Jie Li, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Discussant: Alexander Cook, History, UC Berkeley
December 10, 2010
Center for Chinese Studies
In the early 1970s, Premier Zhou Enlai invited European filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Joris Ivens to visit the People's Republic of China with their cameras. First released in 1972, Antonioni's Chung Kuo was denounced in The People's Daily for its "vicious motive" and "despicable tricks," followed by a nationwide mass criticism campaign. When Ivens released his 12-hour epic How Yukong Moved the Mountain in 1976, history turned a new page with Mao's death and revelations of atrocities under his reign, thereby raising questions of the "justness" of the film's apparent glorification of the Cultural Revolution.
Contact the Center for Chinese Studies (ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321) for more information.
The Transformation Call with Harupin-ha Butoh Dance Company: L@TE: Friday Nights at BAM/PFA
Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, Harupin-ha Butoh Dance Company; Vomica
December 10, 2010
Center for Japanese Studies, Berkeley Art Museum Programmed by Tomo Yasuda
December marks the end of the year, a transition to a new season, abrupt but not as shocking as the transition from the Edo to Meiji periods, a near-apocalyptic experience for the Japanese, when foreign pressure opened Japan to the modern world. Berkeley-based Butoh masters Koichi and Hiroko Tamano and over fifty dancers from their Harupin-ha Butoh Dance Company will interpret the winter season and change with a performance based on the 1918 short story "The Spider's Thread" by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Staged in Gallery B, the dance will incorporate BAMscape, Thom Faulders's 1,500-square-foot hybrid of sculpture, furniture, and stage. San Francisco-based Vomica will accompany the performance with an original composition. The final video loop in a series of four by Sara Magenheimer, this one evoking the last month of the year, will round out the spectacle. The Transformation Call is programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Flowers of the Four Seasons.
From meditative masterpieces to off-kilter performances, L@TE programming invades Gallery B with classical and experimental soundworks, dance, video, and conceptual and performance art. Guest programmer Tomo Yasuda's L@TE series concludes its dialogue with the exhibition Flowers of the Four Seasons: Ten Centuries of Art from the Clark Collection for Japanese Art and Culture. Friday night programs typically begin at 7:30 p.m. in Gallery B; doors open at 5 p.m. with DJs in the lobby or Gallery B at 6:30 p.m. Admission is $7; free for BAM/PFA members and Cal students.
Open to all audiences
Tickets not required: $7 General Admission after 5PM, Free BAM/PFA members, UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff, and children (12 & under)
Contact the Berkeley Art Museum (bampfa@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0808) for more information.