Center for Japanese Studies Fall 2011 Events

December 1, 2011

The Sumidagawa Project — Noh Screening: JETAANC Kabuki Club Special Event
September 11, 2011 — 200–4:30 p.m.
Moderator: JETAANC Kabuki Club, Japan Exchange & Teaching Program Alumni Association of Northern California
Center for Japanese Studies, JETAANC Kabuki Club

Three versions. One haunting tale.

A mother searches for her lost son. Driven half-mad with worry, she meets a ferryman on the Sumida River who may know something. But is she prepared to learn the truth?

The tragic story of Sumidagawa has haunted Japanese and Western artists for hundreds of years. Join JETAANC as we explore three very different versions of the story: Noh theatre, Kabuki theatre, and chamber opera. Don't miss this chance to see these rarely-screened masterpieces.

    • 9/11 Noh theatre version (CJS)
    • 9/18 Kabuki theatre version (Oakland Asian Cultural Center)
    • 10/16 Chamber opera version (CJS)

September 11, 2011, 2:00 pm
Center for Japanese Studies
Sumidagawa (Noh version)
First performed in medieval Japan, the Noh version of Sumidagawa has moved audiences for centuries with its particular blend of mystery and pathos. A master work in the kyôjomono category of Noh play - dramas of madwomen.

80 mins. In Japanese with English and Japanese subtitles.

September 18, 2011, 2:00 pm
Oakland Asian Cultural Center
Sumidagawa (Kabuki version)
Inspired by Russian ballet, the Kabuki actor Ichikawa Ennosuke II adapted the Noh version to the Kabuki stage. The result is one of the great modern masterpieces of Kabuki. The famed onnagata actor Nakamura Utaemon VI plays the mother, in a role that became his signature.

45 mins. In Japanese with English translation.

October 16, 2011, 2:00 pm
Center for Japanese Studies
Curlew River (chamber opera version)
Benjamin Britten was a world-renowned composer when he saw the Noh version of Sumidagawa in Japan in 1956. Intensely moved by the experience, he vowed to write a chamber opera version of the story. Transposing the setting to the Curlew River in medieval England, Britten composed a powerful and touching parable for our times.

70 mins. In English with English subtitles.

Ikebana as Industry and Diplomacy: Budding Fortunes in Postwar Japan
Nancy K. Stalker, University of Texas, Austin
September 26, 2011, 4:00-6:00 p.m.
Center for Japanese Studies

Despite a five hundred year history, ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arrangement, was not practiced on a massive scale until the twentieth century, especially after the Second World War. During the Edo period the largest school claimed tens of thousands of students, overwhelmingly male. In contrast, in the late 1960s, the top three schools had over a million students each and twenty more schools had over 200,000 followers, with 98% of the total population female. The number of schools multiplied from five hundred in 1930 to over three thousand by the late 1960s, when the headmasters of the largest schools were among the wealthiest people in Japan.

This presentation focuses on the three largest schools of ikebana during the 1950s and 60s (i.e. Ikenobo, Ohara and Sogetsu) to investigate the organizational and competitive strategies behind the transformation of an elite traditional art to a massive popular phenomenon with ten million practitioners and international appeal.

Nancy K. Stalker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. Professor Stalker's scholarship examines the relationship between cultural and religious practice and national identity in modern Japan.

Her first book, on new religious movements in the 1920s-30s, is entitled Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburo, Oomoto and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan. Her next monographic project will examine the role of ikebana, the art of flower arrangement, in constructing national and international Japanese identity in the twentieth century, especially focusing on its rapid expansion in postwar Japan from the 1950s-70s.

Other research interests include the conception of traditional Japanese cuisine and gender ideology.

Getting out of a Long Slump: What Japan could tell the United States
Tetsuro Sugiura, Vice Chairman, Mizuho Research Institute
September 27, 2011, 4:00-6:00 p.m.
Center for Japanese Studies

The US economy is struggling to land on a sustainable trajectory of growth, with persistent unemployment and huge government debt. It seems the US has been following a similar path, before and after the bubble burst, which Japan has traced in the past 20 years. We now know the process of adjustment is far more complex and difficult than has been anticipated.

Japan's failure to get back to a sustainable recovery could tell the US what you should do and shouldn't do.

Mizuho Research Institute is a research firm that offers economic and financial research, project research, consulting services, human resources development services, and corporate membership services.

Within economic and financial research, the firm provides research and analysis on macro economy, capital and money markets, foreign exchange markets, financial systems, and public policy.

Within project research, it provides research services to industries and governments on social systems and regional development. The firm offers consulting services on business management, corporate pension plans, and private finance initiatives and also provides privatization support services.

Of Power and Profit: American Seamen in Asian Waters
Exhibit - Photography
October 5, 2011 – January 25, 2012 every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday & Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Korean Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies

"Of Power and Profit: American Seamen in Asian Waters" is an exhibit of prints made from photographs by a nineteenth century American naval officer, Asa Mattice. In the 1880s, he was assigned to the USS Juniata, which undertook a three-year survey expedition, calling at ports from Suez to Sapporo. The photographs in this exhibit are the voyages relics of encounter. 

As the nineteenth century moved into the era of high colonialism, ships journeyed forth from the metropoles on voyages of power and profit. The USS Juniata rode the wave of America's post-Civil War international expansion. Unlike the whaler or slaver privateers of earlier generations, now the fleets served national agendas. The US "opening of Japan" at mid-century signaled a new conception of America's relation to Asia. 

With missions from the ice fields to the tropics, the Juniata was a part of the US effort to explore, engage, and extract. On board the USS Juniata was military engineer turned naval instructor Asa Mattice. He turned his camera on the sights around him, capturing images of Asia in the last century, and capturing too the sensibilities of his place and time. The photographs from the voyage shown in this exhibit include photographs of Korea, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. The categories of these visions — the "views," the "everyday life," the "coolie," — consolidated all through the generations of occidental gaze. The shadows captured on these plates, rescued from oblivion by photographer John Dowling, document a moment in America's trajectory toward being a contender in the Pacific.

Asian Horror Cinema and Beyond
October 7 – 8, 2011
Center for Japanese Studies, Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Center for New Media

This conference features contemporary works of horror cinema that explore issues of memory, desire, and media in East Asian and Southeast Asian cinema. Symposium lectures and discussions will offer alternative reading strategies and theoretical positions with which to assess the sprawling commercial, political and aesthetic ambitions of Asian horror cinema.

Organizers: Miri Nakamura, Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University and Dan O'Neill, Associate Professor of Japanese at UC Berkeley.

Symposium lectures, discussions and film screenings are free and open to the public. All films are subtitled in English.

Film screening seating is on a first-come-first-served basis. The theater is ADA accessible. For wheelchair seating, please contact cjs-events@berkeley.edu by October 5th to reserve.

Schedule

Friday, October 7
12:45 p.m.
Welcome: Miri Nakamura and Dan O'Neill

1:00-2:30 p.m.
Panel: "Memory and Horror"

Lan Duong (UC Riverside)
"The Ghosts of War and the Vietnamese Horror Film"

Jinsoo An (UC Berkeley)
"Fraught with Remembrance and Erasure: Spectral Terror in Epitaph"

2:30-4:00 p.m. 
Panel: "Desire and Horror"

Arnika Fuhrmann (University of Hong Kong)
"Tropical Malady: Queer Haunting in Contemporary Thai Cinema"

Jonathan Hall (Pomona College)
"The Horror of Attachment: Depopulating Recent Japanese Film"

4:00-4:30 p.m. 
Coffee Break

4:30-6:00 p.m. 
Panel: "Media and Horror"

Steve Brown (University of Oregon)
"The Sound of Horror in the Cinema of Kurosawa Kiyoshi"

Kristen Whissel (UC Berkeley)
"Vital Figures: The Life and Death of Digital Creatures"

7:30-9:00 p.m. 
Film: "Epitaph" (2007) directed by Jeong Beom-sik and Jeong Sik
(Doors open at 7 PM)

Saturday, Oct. 8th
10:00-11:30 p.m.
Special Session: "Rethinking Horror"

Lalitha Gopalan (University of Texas at Austin)
"Cruel Cinema: Tamil New Wave Cinema"***

Akira Lippit (University of Southern California)
"Modes of Pleasure: Ultraviolence and Extreme Loneliness"

1:00-3:00 p.m. 
Keynote Address: Bliss Lim (UC Irvine)
"Monstrous Intimacies: Aswang Fragments in Filipino Transmedia"

3:00-3:15 p.m.
Coffee Break

3:15-5:30 p.m.
Film: "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" (2010)
directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

5:30-7:00 p.m. 
Working roundtable with scholars and audience

The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA, from 10/6-10/9) will be screening two films from "Cruel Cinema," a collection curated by Lalitha Gopalan and Anuj Vaidya.

Toward a Sustainable Energy Policy after Fukushima: Voices for Reform
Hideaki Takabe, Osaka University, San Francisco Center; Yasuo Goto, Fukushima University; Nobuyo Goto, Fukushima Medical University
Panelist/Discussant: Steve Vogel, UC Berkeley
October 27, 2011, 4-6 p.m.
Center for Japanese Studies, Osaka University, San Francisco Center

This special symposium features three Japanese experts on nuclear power, Fukushima Prefecture, and national and local politics. They will report on the situation in Fukushima, present bold proposals for change in government policy, and discuss the political dynamics in Japan since the March 11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis.

Proposals for the Future: Starting from the Inconvenient Truth after Fukushima
Hideaki Takabe, Professor, Osaka University

The Tohoku Earthquake that hit northern Japan on March 11, 2011 and the subsequent tsunami led to the explosions at the Fukushima I (Daiichi) Nuclear Power Plant. In this talk, Prof. Takabe first analyzes the mechanisms behind the explosion and reviews the development of nuclear energy in Japan.

Nuclear power research in Japan sparked soon after President Eisenhower delivered his 1953 United Nations speech, "Atoms for Peace". Then in the 1970s after the oil crisis, Japan began to increasingly promote the use of nuclear power plants.

Shifting to other countries, China has continuously faced a shortage of energy due to the dramatic increase in consumption. Together with India, jointly a population of more than two billion, how can we meet these energy requirements? Based on his research as a member of the Steering and Evaluation Committee for the Earth Simulator Project, Prof. Takabe proposes new worldwide energy policies and governance in order to keep this enlightened age for thousands of years to come.

Protest and Survive: Declaration of Independence from Nuclear Power in Fukushima Prefecture
Yasuo Goto, Professor, Fukushima University

Fighting Against Radiation: The Emergence of New Social Movements in Fukushima for the Protection of Children
Nobuyo Goto, Lecturer, Fukushima Medical University

Discussant
Steve Vogel, Professor, UC Berkeley

Seismic Isolation Technology in Japan and the Performance of Rubber Isolated buildings in the Great 2011 Earthquake: SEMM Seminar
Nobuo Murota, Bridgestone Corporation
October 31, 2011, 12-1 p.m.
Center for Japanese Studies, Civil and Environmental Engineering

A giant earthquake of magnitude 9.0 occurred in Pacific Ocean off of Tohoku district Japan on March 11, 2011. The highest seismic intensity of 7 in JMA scale was recorded in Miyagi. In the Tohoku district, around 230 buildings are seismically isolated mainly by elastomeric isolators (seismic rubber bearings). According to the official survey reports by several organizations, the records of those buildings have verified the effectiveness of the seismic isolation. The response acceleration of the seismically isolated buildings was reduced from 30 to 50% of input ground acceleration. Additionally, the difference of the conditions inside the room between seismically isolated and the fixed-base building was obvious as well as the damage in main structures of the buildings. The displacements of the isolators by the earthquake were around 200 mm according to the records of the instruments.

The presentation will describe the principles of seismic isolation, the main properties of elastomeric isolators, and the current status of seismic isolation in Japan. Then, the performance of seismically isolated buildings in the Tohoku District – Off the Pacific Ocean Earthquake 2011 will be reported with records obtained from several buildings, focusing on the behavior of elastomeric isolators.

A Comparative Study on Female and Senior Labor in East Asia
Kaku Sechiyama, University of Tokyo
November 1, 2011, 4-6 p.m.
Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Japanese Studies , Center for Korean Studies, Center for Chinese Studies

East Asian capitalist societies of South Korea, Taiwan and Japan are now facing an unprecedented decline in birth rates and rapid aging of their population. To cope with the future shortage of the labor force, we will have three possible options, either singly or combined: (1) aggressively make full use of married women's labor power, (2) raise the rate of employment among seniors, and (3) utilize immigrant labor.

Although these three societies are often lumped together as a "Confucian cultural sphere," there exist significant and very interesting differences among them in terms of issues concerning who should be in the labor force.

In this presentation, I will focus on female and senior labor patterns to show how different they are from each other and what the solutions could be for each society. I will also briefly refer to the differences between the socialist societies of China and North Korea in terms of gender.

Kaku Sechiyama is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Tokyo, specializing in gender and East Asian studies. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Japanese Studies, UC Berkeley.

Tokyo Workshop: Architecture.Energy.2011
Panel Discussion November 15, 2011, 4-6 p.m.
Panelist/Discussants: Dana Buntrock, Professor of Architecture, UC Berkeley; Norihisa Kawashima, Architect, Nikken Sekkei; Susan Ubbelohde, Professor of Architecture, UC Berkeley; Brendon Levitt, Associate, Loisos + Ubbelohde
Center for Japanese Studies

Following March 11, electric resources in northern Japan were curtailed, and the conventional means architects rely on to develop new skills when faced with an emerging problem—industry support—were also impacted.

A team from UC Berkeley quickly organized a summer workshop in Tokyo, sharing low-consumption approaches to natural energy resources and energy saving that have been developed locally. The workshop was attended by nearly 60 Tokyo-based architects from leading offices, construction companies, and universities.

Panelists discussing the workshop and where we hope to go from include UCB faculty, an alumnus, and an architect from Tokyo's Nikken Sekkei.

Crazy Love: Japanese Underground Cinema and Happenings: A Lecture and Screening with Hirasawa Go
Hirasawa Go, Meiji University
November 17, 2011, 5-8 p.m.
Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), Townsend Center for the Humanities, Film Studies, Department of Comparative Literature, Arts Research Center

Acclaimed film curator and scholar HIRASAWA Go (Meiji University) will screen rare works of Japanese underground cinema from the 1960s that were related to the Neo-Dada movement and Happenings.

A lecture and introduction will precede the screenings.

Crazy Love
A pre-Stonewall, post-Kenneth Anger, highly stylized musical queer love extravaganza, "Crazy Love" romps exuberantly through the late 1960s Tokyo underground. Full of ephemeral performance art moments captured on film, with Fluxus artists and butoh dancers and the influential performance group Zero Jigen, Okabe's second film takes the avant-garde into a light and playful register. The director himself appears recreating his favorite roles from Bonnie and Clyde to Spaghetti Westerns, with quotation stills from Godard, Kennedy's assassination and the Vietnam War. Renowned curator and scholar Hirasawa Go will help us with the "who's who" and what's what of this film in a pre-show talk.

1968, 90 min., 16mm, b&w with color in part. Directed by Michio Okabe. Print courtesy of Fukuoka Public Library Film Archive with permission from Michio Okabe.

Hirasawa Go has written about and programmed many events centered on Japanese political cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. He is co-author of Film/Revolution (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2003), A Will: Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2008), a series of interviews with radical filmmaker Adachi Masao and producer Kuzui Kinshiro, and editor of Underground Film Archives (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2001), Godard (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2003), Fassbinder (Gendai Shicho Shinsha, 2005), Wakamatsu Koji (Sakuhinsha, 2007), Koji Wakamatsu: cinéaste de la révolte (IMHO, France, 2010) and Culture Theory of 1968 (Mainichi Shinbunsha, 2010).