Center for Japanese Studies Fall 2016 Events

December 1, 2016

Security Policy and Military Power in Japan
Colloquium
Speaker: Nori Katagiri, Saint Louis University
Date: September 9, 2016 | 4:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library

In this presentation, Professor Nori Katagiri will explore the question of what explains the rise and fall of Japan's military power in the post-Cold War era. He shows how technology, logistics, and defense budget sustained a decent military power, but powerful legal, normative, and political constraints on the use of force make the application of military power difficult. Changes in the external environment, such as military activities of China, North Korea, and Russia, are an important driver of change, but they are not sufficient at this moment to cause a drastic reform on Japan's security policy.

Dr. Nori Katagiri is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University. He received a B.A. from the University of South Carolina, a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania. He joined Saint Louis University after five years of federal service teaching at Air War College, a joint military graduate school for senior officers and officials of the U.S. government and international officers at Maxwell Air Force Base. In 2015, he received the Meritorious Civilian Service Award from the Department of the Air Force.

Dr. Katagiri's research focuses on irregular warfare, military strategy, and East Asian security. His book, Adapting to Win: How Insurgents Fight and Defeat Foreign States in War was published from the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2015. In the book, Dr. Katagiri investigates the circumstances and tactics that allow some insurgencies to succeed in wars against foreign governments while others fail. He is working on his second book on Japanese military power and East Asia and has been a visiting fellow in Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Japan. His research has been supported by the US Air Force Institute for National Security Studies, Air War College, RAND Corporation, Smith Richardson Foundation, and Matsushita International Foundation. His articles have been published or forthcoming in Asian Survey, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Harvard Asia Quarterly, among other journals.

Instability, Crisis in Japanese Politics and New Social Movements
Colloquium
Speaker: Eiji Oguma, Keio University
Date: September 16, 2016 | 2:00–4:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library

Eiji OGUMA (小熊英二) is a professor of Faculty of Policy Management at Keio University in Tokyo. His researches cover the national identity and nationalism, colonial policy, democracy thoughts and social movements in modern Japan from the view of historical sociology. He has earned 6 prizes for his published works in Japan. He has participated and gained credibility in the anti-nuke movement in Tokyo after the Fukushima incident.

Professor Oguma will also present his film, "Tell the Prime Minister (首相官邸の前で)" at 7:00PM.

Tell the Prime Minister (首相官邸の前で)
Documentary Film
Speaker: Eiji Oguma, Keio University
Date: September 16, 2016 | 7:00 p.m.
Location: Hearst Field Annex, A1 PFA 

After "Occupy Wall Street"in New York, and before the "Umbrella Revolution" in Hong Kong, 200 thousand people surrounded the Prime Minister's office in Tokyo for an anti-nuclear demonstration. However, this incident was not reported extensively by the media and subsequently went unnoticed by the world.

This documentary film captures the anti-nuclear protests in Tokyo after the Fukushima nuclear incident in March 2011. The theme of the film is the crisis that democracy faces, and the reconstruction of democracy.

The film is composed of interviews with eight individuals and footage from that time. The eight people who appear include a former Prime Minister, an evacuee from Fukushima, a political activist, a shop clerk, an artist, a hospital worker, and a businessperson, both Japanese and non-Japanese. The film describes how these people from diverse backgrounds converged amidst the crisis.

Video recordings cited in the film show the terrifying experiences of the nuclear disaster, anti-nuclear demonstrations, speeches, and the official meeting between activists and the Prime Minister. The videos were shot by independent citizens and uploaded to the internet. We sought permission to use footage from each person after explaining our intentions. As such, each person voluntarily provided their videos to us.

This groundbreaking film was created in a unique and unprecedented manner.

View the trailer here.

Additional US tour dates can be found here.

Eiji OGUMA(小熊英二) is a professor of Faculty of Policy Management at Keio University in Tokyo. His researches cover the national identity and nationalism, colonial policy, democracy thoughts and social movements in modern Japan from the view of historical sociology. He has earned 6 prizes for his published works in Japan. He has participated and gained credibility in anti-nuke movement in Tokyo after Fukushima incident. This is his first film work which was completed by cooperation of many activists and voluntary filmers.

Director's Notes on "Tell the Prime Minister"

This is a documentary film on anti-nuclear movement after Fukushima nuclear disaster on March 11th 2011 in Japan. This film is composed of interviews with eight individuals and footage which were shot by ordinal citizens and uploaded in internet at that time.

The eight interviewees are four males and four females. Four mails are the Prime Minister at that time, a young entrepreneur, a hospital worker, an anarchist. Four females are an evacuee from Fukushima, a shop clerk, an illustrator, and a Dutch businessperson.

These people represent diversity and change of Japanese society. Japan have been suffered from stagnation of economy, increase of unstable jobs, dysfunction of political system, and rise of right wings. However, is this the common situation in the world?

You will find many activists in this film are people who are highly educated but could not get stable jobs. They utilized their resources to change the situation. They used their skills and knowledges on IT, illustration, PA system, and music to activate the movement. And they mobilized 200,000 people in front of Prime Minister Office in the summer of 2012.

This is a film which has recorded reincarnation of democracy in a society. You will find how people felt strong fear in the nuclear disaster, how they were disappointed and depressed, and how they revived their power, and finally succeeded to meet with the prime minister and tell their will to him.

This is a story of reincarnation of people at the crisis. Total running time is 109 minutes.

Excrement and Debt: Insights from a popular anatomical image into the depths of history and of the heart
Colloquium
Speaker: Shigehisa Kuriyama, Harvard University
Date: September 23, 2016 | 4:00 p.m.
Location: Stephens Hall, Geballe Room, Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian StudiesDepartment of RhetoricTownsend Center for the Humanities

Professor Shigehisa Kuriyama'sresearch explores broad philosophical issues (being and time, representations and reality, knowing and feeling) through the lens of specific topics in comparative medical history (Japan, China, and Europe). His recent work includes studies on the imagination of strings in the metaphysics and experience of presence, the visceral fear of excrement in Western medicine, the transformation of money into a palpable humor in Edo Japan, the nature of hiddenness in traditional Chinese medicine, and the surprising web of connections binding the histories of ginseng, opium, tea, silver, and MSG.

Since joining the faculty in 2005, he has also been actively engaged in expanding the horizons of teaching and scholarly communication through the creative use of digital technologies. He was a pioneer in the development of course trailers at Harvard, founded the Harvard Shorts competition [add url] for scholarly clips, and has held workshops on multimedia presentations of research for faculty and students at many universities around the world. He currently serves on the FAS Standing Committee on IT, the Advisory Committee for the secondary Ph.D. field in Critical Media Practice, and is a Senior Researcher at Harvard's metaLAB.

Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan's Unending Postwar
Colloquium
Speaker: Akiko Takenaka, University of Kentucky
Date: October 4, 2016 | 4:00 p.m.
Location: 305 Wurster Hall
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies

Yasukuni Shrine is well known for the political controversies its presence has generated both within Japan and between Japan and its neighbors. But what exactly was Yasukuni Shrine's role during that war? How could one shrine impart such significant and lasting influence throughout Japan and beyond? In my talk I follow one army private who was stationed in Northern China in 1933, only to be killed the following year. Through a reconstruction of the postmortem fate of his body and spirit — including his cremation and return of ashes back home, memorials in his hometown, and the lavish memorial service conducted at Yasukuni Shrine — I demonstrate the particular ways in which private grief for war death was institutionalized into a national experience. The experience of various events and rituals hosted by the shrine functioned as a training ground for those involved to practice an acceptable brand of grief, which was reproduced and disseminated by modern media to involve the entire nation.

Akiko Takenaka is an associate professor at the Department of History, University of Kentucky. Her book Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan's Unending Postwar (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) is the first book-length work in English that critically examines the controversial war memorial.

East Asia as Method: Culture, Knowledge, Space
Conference
Featured Speakers: Jim Glassman, University of British Columbia; Jini Kim Watson, New York University
Dates: October 7 – 8, 2016 | 9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Location: 1995 University Avenue — IEAS Fifth Floor Conference Room
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian StudiesCenter for Korean StudiesTownsend Center for the HumanitiesCenter for Chinese Studies

What is East Asia? From ideological construct to physical and material reality, East Asia is still a contested territory, marked by the discourse of "Asian ascendancy" in the midst of new forms of conflict and contradiction, ranging from territorial disputes to economic tensions and historical revisionism. By questioning what constitutes East Asia today in a world of shifting boundaries, this conference for junior scholars seeks new approaches to understand the region and new methods to conduct area studies. Attending to flows, connections, travels and interactions that dismantle the understanding of East Asian studies as a bounded entity, the conference invites papers that critically discuss East Asia from multiple disciplinary perspectives. The questions our conference seeks to engage include, but are not limited to, three major thematic areas:

Theme 1: Culture
Cultural productions have always played a major role in the East Asian imaginary, variously constructed through the lens of memory, identity, and belonging. What are the roles of texts, images and practices in imagining East Asia? How do cultural productions reinforce or challenge nationalist discourses? What are alternative forms of cultural productions that reimagine national and regional boundaries?

Theme 2: Knowledge
Research interests abound in knowledge production, exchanges, and flows within East Asia and beyond. How has knowledge about East Asia been constructed in specific historical contexts? What are the roles of various actors, ranging from states and academics to international agencies? How has such knowledge contributed to the shape and content of East Asian society?

Theme 3: Space
East Asia can also be examined as a space produced through transnational flows of ideas, materials, and practices. What are cross-boundary inquiries that destabilize categories and narratives about East Asia as a fixed spatial entity? Some examples of topics to be explored are interconnections between imperialism, nationalism, and globalization that have shaped and reshaped East Asia.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2016

9:30 – 9:45 Welcome / Introductory Remarks

9:45 – 10:45 Keynote: Jim Glassman (University of British Columbia) | Discussant: You-tien Hsing (UC Berkeley)

11:00 – 12:30 Panel 1: Palimpsests of Pacific Empires
Haruki Eda (Rutgers University): East Asia as Archipelagic: Rethinking Place, Decolonizing Maps
Ti Ngo (UC Berkeley): (Re)Defining Development: Japan and the United States in Micronesia, 1917-1979
Hannah Roh (University of Chicago): The Haunted City: "East Asia," Urbanization, and Specters of Colonial Modernity
Bridget Martin (UC Berkeley): From crisis to opportunity: Re-casting militarization as development in Pyeongtaek
Discussant: Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira (UC Berkeley)

2:00 – 3:30 Panel 2: Knowledge from Without
Luwei Yang (Washington University in St. Louis): Communist way of healing: "Soviet Medicine" in 1950s China
Dongmin Park (UC Santa Cruz): Intellectual Baptism: Educational Exchange Programs and the Rise of Pro-U.S. Architectural Elites in South Korea
James Lin (UC Berkeley): Teaching the World: Taiwanese Agricultural Development Missions to Vietnam and Africa, 1959-1971
Discussant: Kyoko Sato (Stanford University)

3:45 – 5:15 Panel 3: Language in the (Re)making of East Asia
Jeff Weng (UC Berkeley): Liberation or Domination? The Early Twentieth-Century Chinese State and the Creation of Modern Standard Chinese
Carolyn Choi (University of Southern California): Globalizing English in the East: The case of S.Korean English language schools in the Philippines
Grace Kim (UC Berkeley): Global Korean: Online multilingual interactions in a K-dramas forum
Discussant: Laura Nelson (UC Berkeley)

6:00 – Dinner (for conference participants)

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2016

9:30 – 10:30 Keynote: Jini Kim Watson (NYU) | Discussant: Dan O'Neill (UC Berkeley)

10:45 – 12:15 Panel 4: Inter-Asia Literature
Sixiang Wang (Stanford University): Empire, Ecumene, and Cosmopolis: Korea in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction
Yung Hian Ng (Harvard University): Saving Korea, Reviving Asia: The development of early Pan-Asianism through the Koakai and Korean Reformists (Kaehwadang)
Eunyeong Kim (Stanford University): The last afterlife of Lu Xun: A hundred-year quest for counter-modernity in East Asia
Christopher Fan (UC Riverside): Toxic Discourse and the End of History in Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea
Discussant: Colleen Lye (UC Berkeley)

2:00 – 3:30 Panel 5: Rethinking the Border
Huasha Zhang (Yale University): We are what we eat: Food culture and ethnic identity on Sino-Tibetan borders, 1930-1950s
Yang Yang (CU Boulder): Connecting the Chinese Muslims to the global Umma through practices of charity in Xi'an
Xinyi Zhao (Columbia University): Crystalized spatio-temporalities: Mapping cinematic landscapes in Man'ei Films
Sujin Eom (UC Berkeley): After Ports Were Linked: The Sea and the City in Maritime Asia
Discussant: Lan-chih Po (UC Berkeley)

3:45 – 5:15 Panel 6: De-Cold War
Sangmee Oh (UCLA): From Colonial to International: A study of knowledge construction on Korean history 1937-1950s
Susan Eberhard (UC Berkeley): Granite Re-alignments: The Transnational Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial
Kira Donnell (UC Berkeley): The Orphan Nation: Orphans and Nationalism in Cold War Korean Film
Kristen Sun (UC Berkeley): Transnational Memory Circuits of the Korean War and the Limits of Reconciliation in South Korean Memorial Museums and Peace Parks
Discussant: Steven Lee (UC Berkeley)

5:15 – 5:25 Closing Remarks

Kintsugi: A Japanese approach to ceramic repair
Colloquium
Speaker: David Morrison Pike
Date: October 14, 2016 | 4:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library

Kintsugi is a time consuming and technical process to repair ceramic using lacquer and a metal finish. The repaired piece is usually more valuable and aesthetically pleasing than before the repair. Kintsugi dates back to about the 15th century and is closely related to makie. The damaged area is covered in gold or silver which pulls the eye to the repair and in effect celebrates the imperfection of the piece. A ceramic piece repaired with kintsugi embodies the contradiction that a damaged vessel is more beautiful and valuable than a 'whole' vessel. This talk will focus on the steps in the process and the materials used. I will also spend some time on how kintsugi came into being as a repair technique.

David Morrison Pike has lived in Nara, Japan since 1994. He did an apprenticeship with Naoki Kawabuchi in ceramics from 1996-1999 and continues to make ceramics and fire them in 2 large, wood fueled kilns. He became interested in kintsugi through attending Japanese antiques auctions for which he holds a Japanese antiques dealers license. He has worked with kintsugi since 2008 and has been giving workshops in the U.S. and Japan since 2013. He repairs his own ceramic pieces, antiques, and does repairs for broken pieces through his website.

The Regime and The Scene: Or, What Difference Did the Tokugawa Shogunate Make to the Visual World of Early Modern Japan?
Colloquium
Speakers:
 •  Mary Elizabeth Berry, UC Berkeley
 •  Julie Nelson Davis, University of Pennsylvania
 •  Matthew McKelway, Columbia University
 •  Timon Screech, School of Oriental and African Studies,
     University of London
 •  Kären Wigen, Stanford University
 •  Marcia Yonemoto, University of Colorado
Date: October 28, 2016 | 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Location: Women's Faculty Club, Lounge

"Visual World" is spongy shorthand for the physical, representational, and conceptual space of the Edo period. It can conjure the imagery of painting, prints, cartography and other texts. It can conjure urban planning and cityscapes, architecture and infrastructure, and the "look" of the built landscape (from the scale of construction to the universe of night). It can conjure interiors and clothing.

The remarks of the speakers will be brief. Most of our time will be dedicated to discussion — voluble and free-ranging. No formal parade of solitary star-turns but stimulating commotion.

Edo-zu byōbu, in the collection of the Kokuritsu
Rekishi Minzoku Hakubutsukan, the National
Museum of Japanese History

MORNING SESSION:

Mary Elizabeth Berry, Department of History, UCB
Does Power Trump Wealth in the Urban World?

Matthew McKelway, Department of Art History, Columbia University
Can We Trust a Painter? Vision and Invention in the the Representation of Cities

Kären Wigen, Department of History, Stanford University
Experiencing Time in the Landscape, Representing the Past in Maps

AFTERNOON SESSION:

Julie Nelson Davis, Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania
The Imagery of the Floating World in Context: Politics and Consumption

Timon Screech, Department of the History of Art, SOAS, University of London
The 'Journey to the East' in Contemporary Painting

Marcia Yonemoto, Department of HIstory, University of Colorado
Seen from the Road: The Built Environment in the Literature of Travel

Visit the conference website for more information.

Neutrality in the Pacific War, 1941–1945
Colloquium
Speaker: Florentino Rodao, Associate Professor, Complutense University, Madrid
Date: November 3, 2016 | 12:00 p.m.
Location: 3335 Dwinelle Hall
Sponsors: Department of History

The role of neutral countries during World War II is increasingly being considered in the historiography of the conflict. Neutrals were crucial in trading strategic materials, exchanging currencies, espionage, representing interests in enemy countries, providing legitimacy in occupied territories or diplomatic negotiations. Their role is being increasingly studied in the European scenario but less so in Asia, where neutral countries have been considered only for their role in negotiations to end the war by peace-feelers. The talk aims at considering the function neutral countries played in the Pacific War, analyzing Japanese relations with Switzerland, Sweden, Turkey, Spain and Portugal, with further references to the Vatican and Thailand. The talk focuses on the last year of the Pacific War, aiming at showing the return of a more pragmatic decision-making process in Japan through changes in minor decisions related to these countries that show the larger role assigned to its diplomacy, even before the war ended.

Florentino Rodao is associate professor with tenure at Complutense University, Madrid, and visiting scholar at the Center for Japanese Studies, University of California at Berkeley. He has authored Franco and the Japanese Empire: Images and Propaganda in Times of War (2002; Japanese translation, 2012).

Women in Leadership: Kaori Sasaki, CEO, UNICUL International and ewoman Inc.
Colloquium
Speakers:
 •  Kaori Sasaki, Founder & CEO, UNICUL International, Inc.
 •  Jon Metzler, Lecturer, Haas School of Business
Panelists:
 •  Kakul Srivastava, VP Marketing, GitHub
 •  Angie Chang, VP Business Development, Hackbright Academy
Date: November 4, 2016 | 4:00 p.m.
Location: 102 Wurster Hall
Sponsors: Consulate-General of Japan in San Francisco

UC-Berkeley’s Center for Japanese Studies and Haas are happy to announce a special session with business pioneer Kaori Sasaki. Ms. Sasaki founded UNICUL International, which offers executive media training and translation and interpretation in seventy languages, in 1987. In 1996, she launched ewoman, Japan’s first Internet portal for women in 1996, and that same year started the International Conference for Women in Business, which just completed its 21st installment. In 2000, Ms. Saksaki founded ewoman Inc, a think tank and diversity consultancy that consults to government and enterprise. Ms. Sasaki is visiting the Bay Area with Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and will join us at UC-Berkeley for a special private session on women and Abenomics.

The subject of women in the workforce is not limited to Japan. Joining Ms. Sasaki for a panel discussion on women in technology will be Kakul Srivastava, VP Marketing, GitHub and Angie Chang, VP Business Development, Hackbright Academy. Ms. Srivastava and Ms. Chang are both alums of UC Berkeley. GitHub has the world’s largest repository of open source code and used by software developers worldwide, including Fortune 500 businesses like GE and Target. Hackbright, recently acquired by Capella Education, provides coding training to working women.

Our panel discussion will be moderated by Jon Metzler, Lecturer, Haas School of Business.

Kaori Sasaki (Twitter) established UNICUL International, Inc. (www.unicul.com), a communications consultancy that offers executive media training and translation and interpretation in seventy languages, in 1987. Known as an internet pioneer, she opened the first portal for women in Japan in 1996 and founded ewoman Inc.(www.ewoman.jp), an influential think tank and diversity consultancy that provides marketing, branding, product development, and training to major corporations in 2000. She also founded and produces the International Conference for Women in Business (www.women.co.jp/conf/) in 1996, now the largest annual working women's conference in Japan.

Angie Chang (Twitter) is a Vice President at Hackbright Academy, where she focuses on Strategic Partnerships. Hackbright Academy runs a 12-week accelerated engineering fellowship exclusively for women quarterly in San Francisco. In 2008, she started Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners to network women in technology. Dinners are sponsored by companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Palantir. Prior to that, she co-founded Women 2.0, a media company which promotes women in high-growth, high-tech entrepreneurship. She was named in Fast Company's 2010 "Most Influential Women in Technology" and more recently Business Insider named her one of "30 Most Important Women Under 30 in Tech". She has been invited by the U.S. State Department to speak on women's high-tech, high-growth entrepreneurship in the West Bank, Switzerland and Germany. Angie has held positions in product management and web/UI production at various Silicon Valley startups. She holds a B.A. in English and Social Welfare from UC Berkeley.

Kakul Srivastava (Twitter), Kakul is the VP of Marketing at GitHub, looking after brand, marketing, customer advocacy and PR. Her belief is that great technology only becomes powerful in the hands of the people who can use it. Kakul has made a career out of bringing innovative technologies to market at key industry inflection points. She helped build products like Adobe’s Photoshop line & Flickr when digital photography was transforming social interactions. She helped transform rich web applications like Yahoo Mail and web-based media tools when it was becoming clear that all consumer software would increasingly be delivered via the internet. In the last several years, Kakul has worked on projects where transparent, open social tools are changing how people work and collaborate together. This work spanned her time as the CPO of WeWork; as the CEO and founder of Tomfoolery, Inc (bought by Yahoo in 2014); and now as the VP of Marketing at GitHub. In 2016 Fast Company selected her as one of their most creative people in business.

Neglected but not Forgotten: Nikkei Brazilian Returnees in Japan
Panel Discussion
Date: November 4, 2016 | 4:30 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library

Introduced by Keiko Yamanaka, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Commented by Lilian Hatano, Kindai University, Osaka, Japan

Presenters: Oleg Salamatov, Alejandro Serrano, Elizabeth Kim, Arisa Nakamura, Yubing Tian, UC Berkeley

Hidden away amongst the myth of Japan’s homogenous society are various ethnic groups and immigrant communities struggling to find a place in a country that refuses to accept them.

What are the barriers that keep them from obtaining membership to Japanese society? How does this affect the second generation of immigrants who call Japan home?

The UCB-AIU Project Based Learning course participants conducted research in Japan this summer and will share their experiences as they interacted with these communities and listened as they told their stories on their journeys navigating their immigration and settlement at work, at school and at home.

The presentation will conclude with a commentary by Professor Lilian Hatano who teaches in the Department of Applied Sociology at Kindai University, Japan, and researches the multiculturalization of Japan.

Special Thanks to Akita International University.

Super High Maintenance!!: Making and remaking our built environment, a Japanese Approach
Lecture
Speaker: Mitsuhiro Kanada, Tokyo University of the Arts
Date: November 7, 2016 | 6:30–8:00 p.m.
Location: 112 Wurster Hall
Sponsors: College of Environmental Design

Through recent architectural projects such as National Taichung Theatre and Gifu Media Cosmos, and some student projects at Tokyo University of the Arts, College of Environmental Design alumnus Mitsuhiro Kanada (BA, Architecture '94 / M Sci. Structural Engineering' 96) will discuss the collaborative and holistic design process as well as the importance of continuous relationship between people and the built environment we design.

Mitsuhiro Kanada is a structural engineer and associate professor at Tokyo University of the Arts. Among his many projects are Pabellon Puente, Zaragoza, Spain by Zaha Hadid, Taichung Metropolitan Opera House by Toyo Ito, and Maison Hermes in Tokyo by Renzo Piano.

China-Japan Relations after World War Two: Empire, Industry and War, 1949–1971
Colloquium
Speaker: Dr. Amy King, Australian National University
Date: November 9, 2016 | 4:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian StudiesCenter for Chinese Studies

In this seminar, Dr. Amy King examines the rebuilding of the China-Japan relationship after World War Two. Drawing on rare archival sources, she explains why and how, even in the immediate aftermath of their bitterest war and the onset of the Cold War divide, China’s leaders were willing to rely on Japanese technical assistance in building the new Communist state, and Japan could become China’s most important economic partner by 1971. King will discuss the conceptual and empirical advances offered by her recently published book (Cambridge University Press), and its implications for research on Chinese foreign policy, rising powers, and non-Western models of economic development.

Dr. Amy King is a Lecturer (“Assistant Professor”) in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, specializing on Chinese foreign and security policy, China-Japan relations, and the international relations and security of the Asia-Pacific region. Amy received her D.Phil in International Relations and M.Phil in Modern Chinese Studies from the University of Oxford. Her research has been published in Modern Asian Studies, Asian Perspective, and the Asan Forum.

Computationally Designing Origami Structures
Colloquium
Speaker: Tomohiro Tachi, The University of Tokyo
Discussant: Yusuke Obuchi, The University of Tokyo
Date: November 16, 2016 | 5:00 p.m.
Location: 250 Sutardja Dai Hall
Sponsors: UC Berkeley Department of MathematicsThe University of Tokyo

Paper is a material that can neither stretch nor shrink, but can easily bend or fold. The behavior of paper is governed by “folding.” The geometric pattern of origami is self-organized when a sheet material breaks. The interactions between panels and folds exhibit stiffness and strength, which can lead to structures at the architectural scale. Different folding patterns can yield flexible structures that can compactly fold, leading to deployable structures in space or transformable robots. The concept of "origami" is now being researched through a collaboration between various fields, including mathematics, engineering, biology, design, art, and education. Computational Origami, i.e., the geometry and algorithm of origami, plays an important role in bridging these diverse fields. In this talk, I present the theoretical and practical aspects of computational designs of 3D and kinematic origami that leads spatial and temporal structures.

Tomohiro Tachi is an assistant professor in Graphic and Computer Sciences at the University of Tokyo. He studied architecture and received his Ph.D. degree in Engineering from the University of Tokyo. He has been designing origami from 2002 and keeps exploring three-dimensional and kinematic origami through computation. He developed origami software tools including "rigid origami simulator", "origamizer", and "freeform origami", which are available from his website. His research interests include origami, structural morphology, computational design, and fabrication.