Positive Action or Part-time-ization? Japan's Changing Environment for Equal Job Opportunity
Charles Weathers, Economics, Osaka City University
February 7, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Japan is noted for the persistence of gender discrimination in workplaces. Nevertheless, rising concern about declining economic competitiveness and the falling birthrate led the government, business, and organized labor to become more serious about promoting equal opportunity in the late 1990s. This presentation examines the course of policymaking leading up to the Revised Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1997, Positive Action (affirmative action) initiatives and conditions for part timers and other non-regular workers. While prospects for many professional and career-oriented women are improving, a deteriorating economy and the increasing "non-regularization" of the work force may mean worsening conditions for most women workers.
The Brazilian Imaginaire on Zen: Global Influences, Rhizomatic Forms
Christina Rocha, Religious Studies, University of Western Sydney
February 8, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
This lecture aims to show that Zen Buddhism in Brazil is not isolated from global trends. Quite the contrary, not only is Zen in Brazil influenced by "centers" which originate the global traffic of ideas, people and images on Zen, but Brazil is also a "center" itself for other "peripheries". Using the concept of imaginaire and Arjun Appadurai's five scapes, the author will analyze how Brazilian media has reported the Buddhist boom, which has taken place in Brazil since the 1990s. She will identify the sources of this media imaginaire and discuss the reasons for the new Brazilian interest in Buddhism.
The American Indictment: The Japan That Cannot Say Sorry
Charles Burres, Berkeley Bureau Chief, San Francisco Chronicle
February 14, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Women, Youths, and Men: Male-Male Eroticism and the Age/Gender System of Tokugawa Japan
Gregory Pflugfelder, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University
February 21, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Bungalows and Culture Houses: Westernization in Early Twentieth-Century Japan and the Imperial World Order
Jordan Sand, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Georgetown University
February 25, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
The small, inexpensive houses known as "bungalows" were at the height of their popularity in the western United States in 1908, when Japanese reformers discovered them and began promoting them as the ideal dwelling type to bring Japan closer to modern standards of living in the West. Although these simple buildings made no significant contribution to the high tradition of modern architecture, the story of their importation to Japan reveals much about the formation of modern bourgeois class culture, and about the international position of the Japanese bourgeoisie in the early twentieth century. "Culture houses" (bunka jutaku) — the new hybrid style dwellings that appeared in the Tokyo suburbs of the 1920's — were similarly humble, and similarly expressive of class culture and national consciousness. While bungalows failed to gain a mass market before World War I, the success of the culture house after the war suggests the new cultural milieu of the first generation of urban consumers to grow up in imperial Japan.
Reasserting Imperial Power? Britain and East Asia in the 1930's
Yoichi Kibata, International Studies, Tokyo University
February 27, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Sustainable Environment of Our Civilization - From Japanese Perspective: Agriculture and Industrialization
Koyu Furusawa, Economics, Kokugakuin University
February 28, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
The author will review the traditional Japanese agricultural system and modern ecological movement from cultural, social and historical aspects, and examine comparatively the prospects of sustainable agriculture in Japan, East, South and Southeast Asia in an attempt to find a holistic perspective for a new sustainable industrial system.
Parody and Pathology in Mori Ogai's "Vita Sexualis"
James Reichert, Asian Languages, Stanford University
March 8, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
During the first decade of the 20th century, Naturalism dominated the Japanese literary scene. The movement served as lightening rod for various ideological battles. Some praised Naturalism for its "truthfulness"; others dismissed Naturalist literature as near-pornography. One prominent participant in these debates was Mori Ogai, who waged a 20-year campaign against Naturalism. The culmination of this extended campaign was Vita Sexualis (1909), a work that strove to discredit Naturalism and its founding principles. This talk will consider how Ogai mobilized two strategies to attack Naturalism: history and science. Specifically, the author will explore the way that these two strategies work with and against each other.
Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within
March 15-16, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
This two-day colloquium will focus on the recent dramatic changes in the nature of the Japanese/non-Japanese boundaries within Japan, including what some have called "internal internationalization" (kokunai kokusaika), dealing with the growing paradox of increasing political conservatism and retrenchment vs. private open-mindedness and liberal attitudes. The emphasis will be on the existence, nature, components and permeability of these sociocultural boundaries and their on-going modification.
All of the presenters - please note almost all were trained or associated with Berkeley - have carried out contemporary research on topics related to sociocultural boundaries at the grass-roots level as seen and felt by different kinds of Japanese people and their neighbors.
The participants are multinational, with four from Japan, three faculty members, four present and three former graduate students from Berkeley. The resulting collection will be submitted for publication in both English and Japanese.
*This conference is one of a series of events celebrating the Centennial of the Department of Anthropology. It is co-sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies, Department of Anthropology and the Institute of East Asian Studies.
Japan and the Nobel Science Prizes, 1901-1949
James Bartholomew, Ohio State University
March 21, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
From the Age of Growth to the Age of Sustainability: Paradigm Shift Turmoil in Japan
Gavan McCormack, Professor, East Asian History, Australian National University
April 18, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
This lecture will examine Japan's "construction state," its institutions and practices, and the Koizumi "reform" agenda and its likely consequences, with particular attention to two large-scale regional "development" projects on the island of Kyushu, and to the political and social movements generated around those issues.
The Japanese Constitution After 55 Years: The Revision Debate
Gavan McCormack, Professor, East Asian History, Australian National University
April 19, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
In January 2000, Constitutional Reform Councils were set up in both houses of the national Diet to debate the constitution and its possible reform. The inherent implausibility of the notion that Japan's constitution, drawn up under American occupation, would remain unchanged for so long is such that dispute is hard to avoid. The debate is no mere narrow or legal matter, but goes to the heart of how Japan should see itself and its role in the coming century. This seminar will analyze this debate and its implications.
Gavan McCormack is Professor of Japanese History in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. He was educated at Melbourne and London universities, with a Ph.D. in History from London University in 1974. He taught at the Universities of Leeds (UK), La Trobe (Melbourne), and Adelaide, before being appointed to his current position in 1990. He has lived and worked in Japan on many occasions since first visiting as a student in 1962, and has been a visiting professor at Kyoto and Kobe universities. He has written a dozen books on aspects of modern Japanese, Korean, and Chinese history. He is well known in Japan (where many of his works have been translated and published) and his work has also been translated and published in Chinese, Korean, Thai, Arabic, and the main European languages.
Phantom Women: An Examination of the Disappearing Acts of Female Bodies in Contemporary Japanese Performance
Katherine Mezur, Dramatic Art, Georgetown University
April 25, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Dumb Type, a contemporary theatre collective from Kyoto, Japan, uses its female roles to emphasize a creation of illusionary phantom women. These "phantom women" appear as part human, part ghost/fantasy, and part machine and perhaps reflect a different consciousness that attenuates identity and gender roles. Do they ironically substantiate "new desires" and fluid identities for contemporary Japanese women or do they merely sustain the traditional practices of the male-created role? This presentation suggests that women are indeed exploiting phantom women roles in order to create fissures in iconic traditions through their outrageous and ephemeral critique of those structures. The presentation will include video excerpts from Dumb Type's performances from 1992 through 2002.
US-Japan Relations: How Will the Next 10 Years Differ From the Last 50?
Steven Vogel and Keith Nitta, Political Science, UCB
April 29, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Keith Nitta and Steven Vogel will report on their work on a new edited volume entitled U.S.-Japan Relations in a Changing World (Brookings, 2002). The book examines eight factors that have driven the U.S.-Japan relationship over the past 50 years, and that will continue to shape the relationship in the future.
Nitta will focus especially on U.S. and Japanese foreign policy paradigms. Vogel will discuss the volume's conclusions and the implications for the future.
Korean Officials in the Land of the Kami: Diplomacy and the Prestige Economy, 1607-1811
Nam-Lin Hur, Asian Studies, University of British Columbia
May 3, 2002
Center for Korean Studies, Center for Japanese Studies
From 1607 to 1811 Choson Korea maintained an official diplomatic and trade relationship with Tokugawa Japan. During this period, to the Tokugawa Japanese Korea was a powerful source of "otherness" — both an object of curiosity and an alien presence that remained forever outside the cultural ambit of the country of the gods (kami). In contrast, to the Koreans Tokugawa Japan, despite its status as Korea's only equal diplomatic partner, was no more than a country of "pirates and barbarians" — a country beyond the reach of Confucian teachings.
In this presentation, which will be based upon analyses of reports, government documents, travelogues, diaries, literary works, and gazetteers, the speaker will explore how the Korean-Japanese relationship was molded by the diverging values of Confucianism and Shinto (interestingly, Buddhism was absent) in imagination and in practice. Professor Nam-lin Hur (Ph.D., Princeton) teaches premodern Japanese history at The University of British Columbia. Having published Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensooji and Edo Society (Harvard University Press, 2000), he is now working on a monograph entitled Funerary Buddhism and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: The Danka System and the Cultural Politics of Ancestor Worship. A first draft (about 480 pages) of this project has been completed and is currently under revision for publication. Professor Hur also writes on the issues of Korean-Japanese relations in premodern East Asia.
Anime and Techno-Orientalism
Freda Freiberg, Visual Dept., Monash University
May 23, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
This presentation argues that anime texts of the late 1990s reveal the reemergence of a brooding melancholia constitutive of a critical approach to history that has been absent from the Japanese cinema since the sixties. This mood of mourning has not been previously evident in anime, which has been generally marked by its exuberant vitality and (ahistorical and apolitical) postmodern pastiche. Freiberg will examine the return of history and the political repressed, with detailed reference to Jin-Roh and some attention to Princess Mononoke and Blood-The Last Vampire. She will suggest possible reasons for the shift, and raise questions about its extent and maintenance, given the industrial, generic and commercial constraints of the industry. The lecture will be illustrated with clips from the films.