Workshop: Agroecology, Environmental Education and Traditional Knowledge in Japan and California
August 28, 2023
Colloquium
Speaker: Sanae SAWANOBORI, Professor, Keisen University
Moderator: Junko Habu, Professor, UC Berkeley
Facilitator: Miguel Altieri, Professor, UC Berkeley
This workshop presents efforts in Japan to develop food and ecoliteracy outreach programs through a full-year practical course of vegetable-garden-based education at the college level. In 2022, Japan enacted the Green Food System Act, aiming for zero greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture by 2050. Efforts towards this goal, such as increasing the area of organic farming to 1 million hectares and 25% of the total cultivated land, are underway. However, a successful transition to a sustainable food and agricultural system requires not only an update to agricultural production methods but also a change in consumer awareness and purchasing behavior through systematic outreach and ecoliteracy programs.
Co-Sponsors: Department of Anthropology, Agroecology, Sustainable Food Production and Landscape Conservation Project
Theory and Methods in the Japanese Humanities: Research Using Visual Sources and Archives
September 15, 2023
Colloquium
Book Talk with Lawrence Repeta
September 20, 2023
Colloquium
Speaker: Lawrence Repeta
When the Administration of George W. Bush demanded Japanese “boots on the ground” to support its 2003 invasion of Iraq, Prime Minister Jun’ichiro Koizumi responded by deploying a small contingent of Self-Defense Forces in the first significant display of SDF force abroad. On the day following deployment, three antiwar protesters distributed flyers at SDF apartment buildings in Tachikawa. These protesters were arrested shortly after and detained for 75 days. Amnesty International called the Japanese detainees “Prisoners of Conscience,” the first time such a term has been applied to Japan.
This case presented a severe test for Japan’s criminal justice system. Who would stand up to support the lonely trio? Would they find adequate defense counsel and how would the lawyers be paid? Would the courts recognize constitutional protection for political speech? Repeta will discuss these questions in the context of his new book Japan’s Prisoners of Conscience: Protest and Law During the Iraq War (Routledge, 2023), taking participants behind the scenes of Japan’s courtrooms and introducing the lawyers and advocates who rallied to defend the protestors.
Co-Sponsors: Center for the Study of Law and Society, Sho Sato Program in Japanese and US Law, Legal Studies
International Workshop: Revitalizing Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Designing Agroecological “Lighthouses”: Theory and Practice in Agroecology and Historical Ecology
September 23, 2023
Zoom Webinar
This workshop aims to promote transdisciplinary conversations on the theory and practice of agroecology in the context of a broader discussion of historical ecology with a focus on the importance of revitalizing traditional ecological knowledge. Agroecology is defined as an interdisciplinary research field, with an emphasis on establishing both scientific and social foundations for alternative agricultural practice. Agroecology critically examines whether conventional agricultural practice with large amounts of external inputs, including chemical fertilizer and pesticide, is sustainable in the long run. The discipline of agroecology also covers experimental studies in the crop field, examinations of agroecosystems, and the conservation of local and landscapes. The workshop starts with a keynote speech by Prof. Miguel Altieri, who will be talking about establishing agroecological “lighthouses” in Latin America. An agroecological lighthouse is a scientific experiment station, a community gathering and networking space, and pass along the knowledge of agroecology, including traditional ecological knowledge. In the second part of this workshop, three scholars, Kazumasa Hitaka, Sanae Sawanobori and Junko Habu, will present agroecological and historical ecological case studies in Japan to further the discussion of transdisciplinary approaches towards more resilient food production.
Co-Sponsors: Archaeological Research Facility, The Agroecology, Sustainable Food Production and Landscape Conservation Project
Reforming Lesson Study in Japan: Theories of Action for Schools as Learning Communities
September 28, 2023
Hybrid Colloquium
Speaker: Yuta Suzuki, Associate Professor, Institute for Liberal Arts (ILA), Tokyo Institute of Technology
Moderator: Junko Habu, Professor, Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Panelist: Judith Warren Little, Carol Liu Professor of Education Policy, Emerita, School of Education, UC Berkeley
This lecture elucidates the formation and development of theories of action in school reforms for Schools as Learning Communities (SLC) during ten years from its inception in 1998 in select Japanese elementary schools, junior high schools, and one secondary school. While growing international interest in Japanese lesson study is in pursuit of a standard lesson study, Suzuki offers a unique perspective into school reforms for SLC and how they resisted the standardization of lesson study out of concerns that it would limit a teacher’s autonomous judgment and choice.
Co-Sponsors: Institute for Liberal Arts (ILA), Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo Tech ANNEX Berkeley
Japan’s Unsung Gifts: Masks, Umeboshi and More
October 5, 2023
Colloquium
Speaker: Kathryn Graven, Author
How does a 5-year-old girl navigate deep loss after a tragic car accident leaves her motherless? Charting a lifelong process of sifting through grief and rediscovering hope, Memoirs of a Mask Maker honors the women who stepped in to help the girl stitch together a beautiful life—a grandmother, a neighbor and a pharmacist in Japan…
Years later, when the global pandemic forced Kathryn Graven and everyone else inside, she responded by sewing hundreds of colorful masks for family, friends and complete strangers. She signed each one with a note of encouragement. She discovered that making masks not only called for artistic skills, it tapped all she learned about filling a void and building resilience.
Now, as global society faces immeasurable individual and collective grief, these lessons are collected for a new crop of motherless children and those around them. Memoirs of a Mask Maker invites readers to join a new conversation about how we gather our tears and mend the tears.
Sexual and reproductive health and rights of migrant women denied in Japan: A case study on unintended pregnancies and access to contraception and abortion services among Asian migrants
October 11, 2023
Zoom Webinar
Speaker: Masako Tanaka, Professor, Sophia University
Moderator: Keiko Yamanaka, Lecturer Emerita, UC Berkeley
Guest: Khuat Thu Hong, Director, Institute for Social Development Studies
In March 2023, Japan’s Supreme Court acquitted a Vietnamese technical intern trainee of abandoning stillborn twins, to whom she had given birth alone at home, overturning earlier rulings on the crime of corpse abandonment. She is one of the countless migrants who cannot access contraceptives and abortion pills after coming to Japan. Few options for reproductive health services exist for migrants, and pharmaceutical law prevents them from bringing to Japan more than a two-month supply of drugs/medications, including contraception, without permission in advance. Furthermore, immigration laws do not allow the trainees to bring their families.
Masako Tanaka will present findings from a study that highlights changes in contraceptive use among migrants to Japan from five Asian countries: China, Vietnam, Nepal, Indonesia, and Myanmar.
Supernatural Japan: Izumi Kyōka and Literature of the Fantastic
October 19, 2023
Colloquium
Speaker: Pedro Thiago Ramos Bassoe, Assistant Professor, Purdue University
Moderator: Dan O’Neill, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley
Izumi Kyōka (1873-1939) is widely acknowledged as the founding author of literature of the fantastic in Japan, a country that has been at the forefront in the production of fantasy literature and media for decades. Kyōka’s role in the establishment of the fantastic as a genre, however, remains little known outside of Japan. In this presentation, Professor Bassoe will discuss the development of the idea of literature of the fantastic, or gensō bungaku, as a cohesive genre in the 1970s, in part as a reevaluation of Kyōka, but also as a reception of French scholarship on contes fantastiques (stories of the fantastic). He will describe the influence of global texts with fantastic themes on Kyōka’s fiction, including the author’s reception of the Arabian Nights and The Improvisatore by Hans Christian Andersen, before examining these themes in several short stories by Kyōka.
The Beginnings and Development of Japanese Porcelain
October 30, 2023
Colloquium
Speaker: Koji Ohashi, Honorary Advisor and Former Director, Kyushu Ceramic Museum
This lecture outlines the origins and developments of porcelain production in Japan, with a focus on its origins in the early 17th century to its full development in the 18th century. Japanese porcelain played a major role in the world trade scene during and after the mid-17th century. The first Japanese porcelain was successfully fired in Arita in the province of Hizen, Kyushu, by Korean potters during the 1610s. At that time, Chinese porcelain was highly valued in both Japan and Europe. Because of the dynastic shift from Ming to Qing in 1644, however, the availability of Chinese porcelain in the export market declined dramatically. As a result, Hizen porcelain began to dominate the Japanese market by the mid-17th century. The late 17th century was the heyday of Japanese porcelain production in the world scene, during which Japan was the single major supplier of artistic porcelain to Europe.
While the early phase of porcelain production in Hizen was based on Korean porcelain technologies, it was replaced by new Chinese techniques, including the overglaze polychrome enameling method, by the mid-17th century. Major styles of Hizen porcelain during and after the late 17th century include the Kakiemon style and the Nabeshima style. The stylistic distinctions between Hizen porcelain for domestic circulation and European trade are examined through the lens of an expert, who has excavated numerous Hizen kiln sites and conducted extensive museum research in Europe, Southeast Asia, and the United States.
Half Life: Radiation and Animation
December 8, 2023
Colloquium
Speaker: Thomas Lamarre, Professor, The University of Chicago
Moderator: Alan Tansman, Professor, UC Berkeley
This talk aims to offer a perspective on the nuclear ecology of Japan that does not begin or end with a divide between ecology and economy, nuclear energy and nuclear warfare, or national and global orders. A couple of propositions are integral to it. The first is that radiation, that is, radioactivity, radionuclides, or ionizing radiation, is better thought on the model of microorganisms, bacteria, or viruses, than in the received manner of substantialist physics, in which radioactivity is treated as a toxic substance. The second is that animation techniques afford an especially useful set of procedures for taking on this task of thinking through this “radioanimacy.” Radioactivity does not need animation to bring it to life, however, for it is caught up in an ongoing coming-to-life. Animation situates that animacy. Consequently, the animation techniques of primary interest are those that participate in worlding radioanimacy. Here I propose to discuss how Approaching radioactivity in terms of worlding potentially brings to the fore connections across struggles, conflicts, and histories that have often been held apart in discussions of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima.