Center for Japanese Studies Fall 2007 Events

December 1, 2007

Policeman
Sharon Hayashi, Assistant Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, York University, Toronto
September 16, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies, Pacific Film Archive

Tomu Uchida: Japanese Genre Master
Pacific Film Archive Film Series
September 8-29, 2007

This series of the films of Japanese genre master Tomu Uchida, offers a rare chance to see the work of a director barely known in the West. Born in 1898, Uchida joined a theater troupe in his youth, perfecting a sense of stagecraft and theatrical aesthetics that would become the backbone of his films. He turned to directing in the late 1920s; comedies and police actioners dominated his early production, but Uchida also developed a fledgling realist aesthetic rare in the industry at the time.

"Policeman" intruduced by Sharon Hayashi, and Judith Rosenberg on Piano, is a story of a rookie policeman who suspects his old friend of a crime in this high-energy, visually inventive silent crime saga. Preceded by short: History of Crab Temple (Kanimanji engi).

Sharon Hayashi is assistant professor of cinema and media studies at York University, Toronto. She is currently finishing a manuscript on the travel films of Hiroshi Shimizu.

(Total running time: c. 121 mins, B&W, 35mm, From National Film Center, Tokyo.)

CAMPAIGN: 選挙
Steve Vogel, Introduction
September 21, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies

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."

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) had 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.

The election was critical for the LDP. Yama-san's loss would automatically oust the LDP from its position as the dominant political party on the council. Thus, the LDP forms a strong campaign team consisting of every LDP politician from the Kawasaki region to fight the intense battle against the party's opponents — all veterans of the Democratic Party, the Communist Party, and the Kanagawa Network. The campaign team invites many of the LDP's political big shots — Nobuteru Ishihara, Yoriko Kawaguchi, and even Prime Minister Koizumi himself — to back its inexperienced candidate — a rare sight for an election in a politically insignificant suburban town. Adhering to the campaign tactic of "bowing to everybody, even to telephone poles," Yama-san visits local festivals, kindergarten sports events, senior gatherings, commuter train stations, and even bus stops to offer his hand to every one he sees.

Shedding Light: Performance and Illumination
Denise Uyehara, Performance Artist/Playwright
September 28, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies, Consortium for the Arts, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Berkeley Art Museum

One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now
Art Exhibitions
September 19-December 23, 2007

Light, like memory, tells a story. So can an artist create a performance from a string of light bulbs, a child's rotating fish lamp and lump of clay? Performance artist Denise Uyehara says yes. Challenged by a beautifully minimalist theater at the Berkeley Art Museum, internationally presented Uyehara will perform new and recent works that harness the intangible qualities of light, memory and history. An artist whose work is hailed by Los Angeles Times as "mastery [that] amounts to a coup de theater," Uyehara explores individual and collective memory through theater, movement, video projection and odd light sources.

Uyehara will share excerpts from Big Head, exploring the links between the Japanese American relocation, detention and internment during the WWII, and current state violence against Arab Americans, South Asians, and Muslims in the U.S. Previews from The Senkotsu (Mis)Translation Project respond to war and occupation in Okinawa, and her post-partum performance Yo Mama is still Queer-ish posits "When do babies begin voting Republican?" This evening also celebrates the publication of Uyehara's new book Maps of City & Body: Shedding Light on the Performances of Denise Uyehara (Kaya Press), a collection that brings together her performance work of the last 15 years. Book signing follows.

A pioneering performance artist, playwright and writer Uyehara was one of the first to explore Asian American queer subjectivity through performance. Her work has appeared at REDCAT at Disney Hall, the Walker Art Center, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Highways Performance Space, and internationally at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, and in Tokyo, Vancouver, and Hairou, China. Her performances take on issues of body, memory and identity, bringing together narrative, movement, clay animation and other visual elements, while challenging pre-conceived notions of identity, and catalogues what marks the body in migrations across borders. The Los Angeles-based artist is also a founding member of the culturally diverse experimental collective Sacred Naked Nature Girls. Her ongoing workshops including the Rad Asian Sisters explore notions of shares space and community formation through a focus on form and aesthetics. She is a recent recipient of the mid-career City Of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Fellowship and a frequent lecturer at the University of California, Irvine.

Fukuzawa Yukichi's Asian Strategy
Naoaki Hiraishi, Emeritus Professor of Japanese Political History, Tokyo University, Japan
October 1, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies

Professor Naoaki Hiraishi, CJS distinguished visiting scholar will be in residence for a month from September 20 through October 19. Currently emeritus professor of Japanese political thought at the Institute of Social Science (University of Tokyo), Professor Hiraishi is an eminent and wide-ranging scholar, whose books include studies of the Confucian philosopher Ogyû Sorai, a survey history of Tokugawa political thought, and an essay on the notion of "Heaven" (ten) in Japanese thought. In his many articles, Professor Hiraishi has taken up topics in Meiji and postwar thought, focusing particularly on the figures of Fukuzawa Yukichi and Maruyama Masao.

The seminar will focus on Fukuzawa's famous 1885 text, "Datsu-A ron" (Leaving Asia Behind). Faculty and students in all areas of Japanese studies are warmly welcome to attend. This will be a great opportunity to discuss a major issue in Fukuzawa's thought (and in Japan's modern history) with one of its major interpreters.

This presentation will be given in Japanese. Please contact CJS if you are interested in participating in the seminar. Paper will be available after September 24th.

Catching the Wave: Connecting East Asia Through Soft Power
October 5–6, 2007
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Korean Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Berkeley China Initiative, Institute of International Studies, Asia Society of Northern California, The Japan Society of Northern California

This conference will explore a number of broad threads under the rubric of "soft power." The overarching goal is to examine some of the important ways in which culture, product branding, export projection of national cultures, athletic events, and global NGOs serve to create a more unified (or divided) Asia. To what extent are cultural and athletic activities used by national governments to project positive images? Do transnational groups such as NGOs operate independently of governments as cross national cultural unifiers? Are cultural products such as films, soap operas, and toys moving more easily across national borders in ways that foster some comprehensive sense of "Asian-ness" or "Asian identity?"

Friday, October 5, 2007
9:00 am - Opening Remarks
Wen-hsin Yeh (UC Berkeley)
T.J. Pempel (UC Berkeley)

9:15 am - Panel I: Soft Power and the Conceptualization of Asian Identity
Chair: T.J. Pempel (UC Berkeley)
Panelists: Steve Fish (UC Berkeley) — Projecting What We've Not: Sustaining the Cult of Whiteness and Forfeiting Cultural Power in Indonesia
Josh Kurlantzick (Carnegie) — China's Soft Power in Southeast Asia
Chyungly Lee (Institute of International Relations of National Chengchi University)
Richard Madsen (UC San Diego) — The Asian Cultural Cooperation Forum: Hong Kong as a Nexus of Soft Power

11:00 am - Keynote Address: The Conditions for a Security Community in East Asia
Alastair Iain Johnston (Harvard University)

1:30 pm - Panel II: Image-Making in Asia: Branding, Commercialization & Product Penetration of Popular Products across Asia
Chair: Laura Nelson (California State University, East Bay)
Panelists: Anne Allison (Duke University)
Ian Condry (MIT) — Anime, Online Piracy, and the Workings of Soft Power
Roald Maliangkay (Australian National University) — The Myth of Soft Power: Selling Korean Pop Music Abroad

3:15 pm - Panel III: Governmental & Non-Governmental Export Projection of Culture
Chair and Panelist: Roger Janelli (Indiana University) — Korea, Soft Power, and the Politics of Culture (paper co-authored by Dawnhee Yim)
Panelists: Chan E. Park (Ohio State University) — Hungboga, Song of Korean Diaspora
Xiao Qiang (UC Berkeley) — Bloggers as Cultural Ambassadors in Cyberspace 
Isao Tsujimoto (Japan Foundation, New York) — How Soft Is Japan?

4:45 pm - Wrap-up/Q&A

8:00 pm - Korean Dance Recital

Saturday, October 6, 2007
9:00 am - Panel IV: Sports/Soft Power: National Teams and Regional Competitions
Chair: Martha Saavedra (UC Berkeley)
Panelists: Jinxia Dong (Peking University/Beijing Sports University) — Elite Athletes, National Identity and the Olympic Games: Winning Glory for China
John Horne (University of Edinburgh) — Hosting Major Sports Events in East Asia: Connections, Challenges and Contradictions
Wolfram Manzenreiter (University of Vienna) — The Soft Power of Sports in Japan's International Relations
Andrew Morris (California Polytechnic State University) — Kanō Baseball and "Triethnic" Identity in 1930s Taiwan

10:45 am - Panel V: Role of National and Transnational NGOs in Asia
Chair: Wen-hsin Yeh (UC Berkeley)
Panelists: Kim Reimann (Georgia State University) — NGOs, Transnational Networks and Regional Governance in East Asia
Jeffrey Wasserstrom (UC Irvine) — NGOs and China: Putting Current Patterns into Historical Perspective
Peter Beck (ICG Seoul/US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea)

12:30 pm - Panel VI: (Lunch Panel) Inter-Asian Cultural Flows
Chair and Panelist: Keiko Yamanaka (UC Berkeley) — Civil Activism for Migrant Workers' Rights in Japan, Korea and China
Panelists: Stanley Rosen
Sang Yeon Sung(Indiana University) — Constructing a New Image - Korean Popular Culture in Taiwan

1:45 pm - Concluding Remarks

History, Culture, and Aesthetics of Bunraku
Peter Grilli, President, Boston Japan Society
Mary Elizabeth Berry, Chair, Department of History
Janice Kanemitsu, East Asian Languages and Cultures
October 11, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Cal Performances, Japanese American Cultural & Community Center

Bunraku, Japan's centuries-old form of puppet theater, combines three distinct and highly refined artistic disciplines: joruri, or ballad narration, shamiseninstrumental music, and ningyo tsukai, or the art of puppet manipulation. Each of these skills demands years of intense training (it is said to take at least 25 years to attain the status of omozukai, the main puppet master). But the true magic of bunraku is revealed when the three independent components of movement, words, and music come together — it is this awe-inspiring ensemble work that evokes such deep emotion and wonder. This is extraordinary, multidimensional performance, displaying complexities not found in any other theater in the world. In a major cultural event, Japan's foremost exponent of this singular living art form — a company that includes four "Living National Treasures" — visits the United States for the first time since 1983.

In a symposium moderated by the Boston Japan Society's Peter Grilli, a leading scholar of Japanese culture, the puppets of the Bunraku — The National Puppet Theatre of Japan will be at the center of a discussion about the history, culture, and the art of puppetry in Japan. Presented by Cal Performances in association with the Institute of East Asian Studies and made possible by the Japanese American Community and Cultural Center.

Cal Performances presents Bunraku: The National Puppet Theatre of Japan — a company that includes four "Living National Treasures"
October 13–14, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Cal Performances

Bunraku, Japan's centuries-old form of puppet theater, combines three distinct and highly refined artistic disciplines: joruri, or ballad narration, shamiseninstrumental music, and ningyo tsukai, or the art of puppet manipulation. Each of these skills demands years of intense training (it is said to take at least 25 years to attain the status of omozukai, the main puppet master). But the true magic of bunraku is revealed when the three independent components of movement, words, and music come together — it is this awe-inspiring ensemble work that evokes such deep emotion and wonder. This is extraordinary, multidimensional performance, displaying complexities not found in any other theater in the world. In a major cultural event, Japan's foremost exponent of this singular living art form — a company that includes four "Living National Treasures" — visits the United States for the first time since 1983.

Program: Date Musume Koi no Higanoko (Oshichi of the Fire Watch Tower) (1773), Tsubosaka Kannon Reigenki (Miracle at the Tsubosaka Kannon Temple) (1887), and an introduction to bunraku

The Concept of "Heaven" in Japanese Intellectual History
Naoaki Hiraishi, Emeritus Professor of Japanese Political History, Tokyo University, Japan
October 18, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies

As Professor Hiraishi stresses, the notion of "Heaven" was used, not only to justify social hierarchy, but also, in the era of the Tokugawa-Meiji transition and afterward, to support ideals of universal equality among people, and indeed as a justification for the dismantling of hierarchical relations in society.

Corporate Environmentalism and the Aesthetics of Industrial Ruins in Post-Industrial Japan
Tak Watanabe, Lecturer, Anthropology, Sophia University
October 26, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies

How is a mining enterprise aestheticized after centuries of industrial growth and ecological damage? This paper examines the tension between corporate environmentalism and industrial tourism in Niihama, a blue-collar city on Shikoku island widely known as the ancestral home of the Sumitomo keiretsu. The city and the corporation trace their origins to the Besshi Mine, one of Japan's richest and oldest copper mines. But with the mine exhausted and factories moving overseas, residents are faced with the economic and environmental aftereffects of the sustained development that began in the late seventeenth century. This economic decline has coincided with the promotion of industrial ruins as monuments of environmentalist triumph, thus turning earlier connotations of brutal exploitation and social discrimination into proud stigmata of ecological suffering. The paper will focus on the representation of industrial ruins in corporate literature and tourism-promotion haiku, the apotheosis of a Meiji-period corporate mogul as the father of environmentalism in a local musical, and the cynicism found in the responses of former mineworkers who live on Besshi mountain. In sum, this moral and aesthetic appraisal of modern industrialization is part of the search for meaning in a post-high-growth-era Japan.

Touristic Ritual, Sacred Journeys, and Tourism's Effects on Religious Life in Tibet
Jinfu Zhang, Assistant Professor, Department of Tourism, Xiamen University, China
November 9, 2007
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Tourism Studies Working Group

Professor Zhang's research interests are tourist behavior, relationships in tourism, and the social impact of tourism. His current research focuses on tourism, pilgrimage, and social change in Tibet. His published papers include "Evaluation and Guidance of Folk Custom", "Towards a Framework on the Sociology of Tourism," and "Security Cognition of Tourists." He is co-author of the book of Tourism Security: Theory and Practice. Prof. Zhang is also an active fieldworker who has finished several research projects in western China and Tibet.

As usual, following the colloquium the Working Group will host a dinner with the speaker for graduate students and faculty who are conducting research on allied issues. If you would like to participate in the dinner, please RSVP as soon as possible at tourism@berkeley.edu. Spaces are limited.

Zombie Lending and Depressed Restructuring in Japan
Takeo Hoshi, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego
November 16, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies

The talk is based on the following two recent papers by Professor Hoshi.

"Economics of the Living Dead," Japanese Economic Review, 57:1, 30-49, March 2006.
Zombie firms are those firms that are insolvent and have little hope of recovery but avoid failure thanks to support from their banks. This paper identifies zombie firms in Japan, and compares the characteristics of zombies to other firms. Zombie firms are found to be less profitable, more indebted, more dependent on their main banks, more likely to be found in non-manufacturing industries and more often located outside large metropolitan areas. Zombie firms tend to increase employment by more (but do not reduce employment by more) than non-zombies. Finally, when the proportion of zombie firms in an industry increases, job creation declines and job destruction increases, and the effects are stronger for non-zombies.

"Zombie Lending and Depressed Restructuring in Japan" (Joint with Ricardo Caballero and Anil Kashyap), NBER Working Paper 12129.
This paper starts with the well-known observation that most large Japanese banks were only able to comply with capital standards because regulators were lax in their inspections. To facilitate this forbearance the banks often engaged in sham loan restructurings that kept credit flowing to otherwise insolvent borrowers (called zombies). Thus, the normal competitive outcome whereby the zombies would shed workers and lose market share was thwarted. The model in this paper highlights the restructuring implications of the zombie problem. The counterpart of the congestion created by the zombies is a reduction of the profits for healthy firms, which discourages their entry and investment. Empirical analysis confirms the model's key predictions that zombie dominated industries exhibit more depressed job creation and destruction, and lower productivity. The paper presents firm-level regressions showing that the increase in zombies depressed the investment and employment growth of non-zombies and widened the productivity gap between zombies and non-zombies.

Foreign Direct Investment and Wages: Differential Impacts by Worker Rank at Japanese Manufacturing Firms
Masao Nakamura, International Business, The University of British Columbia
November 30, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies

Foreign direct investment (FDI) can have important implications for domestic economies. For example, inward FDI is thought to bring in new foreign technologies, employment and competition, while outward FDI is often associated with hollowing out and skill upgrading of domestic economies. These in turn have effects on domestic wages. However, available empirical evidence on these wage effects of FDI is mixed.

Japan has accumulated significant amounts of inward and outward FDI since the early 1980s but empirical evidence on their impacts on Japanese wages is scarce. Such evidence for Japan's FDI since the 1990s would be of particular interest because of certain FDI-related economic issues. For example, the outward FDI-related transfer of jobs out of Japan was thought by some to have worsened Japan's deep recession, which began after the burst of a financial bubble in 1990 and continued into the early 2000. Meanwhile Japanese manufactures blamed their inflexible domestic keiretsu relationships with Japanese suppliers for their inability to rapidly reduce their production cost by extending their outsourcing and FDI operations in overseas low-cost production sites. In order to combat the recession and employment problems, the Japanese government instituted policy measures, such as promoting inward FDI.

This paper estimates the effects on workers' wages of Japan's inward and outward FDI in manufacturing industries in the 1990s. Using linked worker-employer data sets covering most of Japan's manufacturing firms and their employees, the authors find that Japanese employees benefit, in the form of wage gains, from their employers' association with FDI in both directions. The main findings are as follows. (1)Firms' preferences towards higher ownership shares in their overseas subsidiaries (such as fully-owned subsidiaries) are justified given that higher ownership shares lead to higher wages at home. (2)Workers in higher ranks benefit more from outward FDI. (3)Contrary to their foreign connections, Japanese firms' equity connections with other domestic firms (keiretsu) have negative effects on the wages of their employees.

Hierarchy, Power, and Poetry: Haiku Groups from an Anthropological Viewpoint
Hideaki Matsuoka, Anthropology, Shukutoku University, Japan
December 3, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies