Center for Japanese Studies Spring 2003 Events

June 1, 2003

Japan Mapped: Historical Maps For Digital Display and Research
David Rumsey, Founder/Director, Cartography Associates
January 22, 2003
Digital presentation
East Asian Library, Center for Japanese Studies, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, GIS Center

A Blast from The Past: Meiji Sound Recordings of Oral Storytelling
Scott Miller, Professor, Japanese Language and Literature, Brigham Young University
January 30, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies

Beginning with performances by members of the Kawakami Theatre Troupe at the 1900 Paris Exposition, pioneer recording companies used both cylinders and wax discs to capture and market Japanese music and stage performances to European and Japanese audiences. Pristine copies of these early recordings, which the speaker recently discovered in a British archive, allow us the rare chance to hear Meiji voices and music in relative clarity. The presentation will feature an aural sampler of hits from both the Kawakami Paris recordings and storytellers recorded in Tokyo in 1903.

The Writing of the Postwar Constitution and the Promulgation of Equal Rights for Men and Women in Japan
Beate Sirota Gordon
February 4, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies, Graduate School of Journalism

Beate Sirota Gordon was born in Vienna and lived in Tokyo until she moved to the United States in 1939 to go to Mills College. While Gordon was in the U.S. studying and working, the Japanese government imprisoned her parents because they were Jewish. After the war, Gordon returned to her home in Japan. First, she found and rescued her parents, who had been relocated to a rural area and were suffering from malnutrition. Then, she began her work in the Government Section at the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander, General MacArthur. The 25 employees of the Government Section were charged with researching and writing the new post-war constitution for Japan. As the only woman among the 25 drafters, Gordon was determined to make sure that Japanese women were treated fairly by the new government. In less than a week, she and the other workers had written the new constitution for Japan - a code of laws that gave women constitutional equality. Japanese women have benefited greatly from the work of Beate Sirota Gordon. Just think how much better off U.S. women would be if there had been a woman in the room when our own constitution was written.

Gutai group and Mono-ha: Art Movements in Japan, 1950's - 1970's
Akira Tatehata, Professor, Japanese Modern Art, Tama Art University
February 6, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies

How can the originality of art movements in postwar Japan be evaluated and reconciled with the noteworthy simultaneity they shared with contemporary movements in the West?

This presentation will examine the activities of the Gutai group and Mono-ha, the two most important vanguard movements in postwar Japan. The Gutai group, formed in 1954 in Osaka and considered to be akin to Abstract Expressionism, were pioneers of later directions in art such as "Happening" performance art, "Environmental Art" and Conceptual Art. Mono-ha, on the other hand, a movement that emerged in Tokyo in the late '60s, was more limited in scope and favored a material-based approach that bore an indirect relationship to Minimalism. These two movements offer us a unique perspective on the international dynamics of postwar Japanese art.

Information, Technology and Democracy in Japan: From Internet to I-mode
Laurie A. Freeman, Assistant Professor, Political Science, UC Santa Barbara
February 13, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies, Graduate School of Journalism

Professor Freeman will present material from her book in progress examining the intersection between information technology and democracy in Japan and the US. Contrary to much of the literature on globalization, she has found that local factors (historical, regulatory and technological) have played an important role in shaping the development and use of the Internet in Japan and the US. Among important examples in the Japanese case are the use of radically different platforms for connecting to the Internet (such as web-enabled cell phones) and restrictions on the use of the Internet during electoral campaign.

The Appeal of Anime: From Akira to Spirited Away
Susan Napier, Professor, Japanese Studies, University of Texas
February 25, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies, Graduate School of Journalism

Japanese animation has spawned a cult following in American pop culture, attracting an audience as large and as diverse as the "anime" phenomenon itself. This presentation combines the speaker's new research on anime audiences in America with a broad overview of the greatest anime films and series from the past decade, beginning with Otomo Katsuhiro's Akira in 1989 and ending with the US release of Spirited Away in 2002. She examines how Western perceptions of anime often differ according to age group, gender, and sexual orientation. By exploring the "appeal" of the anime phenomenon in America, the speaker shows how anime's international following is made up of a widely varied audience.

Anti-Object
Kengo Kuma, Kengo Kuma & Associates, Tokyo, Japan
March 5, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies, Department of Architecture

Kuma's work successfully incorporates traditional building materials such as straw, bamboo and stone into a clean, modernist architecture. His best known works include the Water/Glass House at Atami, a glass villa that is a guest house for a neighboring villa designed by architect Bruno Taut. The building features a staircase, bridges, and even furniture constructed of laminated glass, with the floor in one area under a shallow pool of water and lit from below. His work also shows a sensitivity to site; at Atami, the glass walls and floors blend with the Pacific beyond.

In 1985-86, Kuma received an Asian Cultural Council fellowship Grant, allowing him to spend a year as a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University. His work has received numerous awards, most recently the Residential DuPont Benedictus Award in 1997. His entire body of work received the prestigious "International Spirit of Nature" Wood Architecture Award in 2002.

Hybrid Heaven
Mark Dytham, Klein Dytham, Tokyo, Japan
March 19, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies, Department of Architecture

The architectural partnership Klein Dytham's witty projects use a variety of unusual materials, such as the fake-snakeskin of the Chu-Coo chair, silvery inflatable canopies for Virgin airlines, or a gummy-bear like synthetic rubber, for an Italian outdoor bathtub. Their work is colorful, cleanly organized, and highly popular with clients from advertising agencies to artists. Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham received the Kajima Space Design Award for best young practice in Japan in 1993. Three years later, their Id? Workstation won both the Asahi Glass Design Award and the National Panasonic Design Award. Their office is frequently mentioned in fashion and design magazines in Tokyo, and is also well known at home and abroad for its quirky support of performance art (they once had a woman in a bathtub full of feathers hanging above their conference area for a week) and its web-based collection of Japanese commercials featuring Western celebrities in peculiar roles.

Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry
Janine Beichman, Professor, Japanese Literature, Daito Bunka University
April 1, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies

Janine Beichman is the author of the literary biographies Masaoka Shiki and Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry, and also of Drifting Fires, an original Noh play written in English, which has been performed in Japan and the United States. Her translations include Setouchi Harumi's award-winning fiction The End of Summer, and two collections of the celebrated poet and critic Ooka Makoto: Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets: Selected Poems 1972-1989 (Ooka's own poems), and Poems for All Seasons: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry from Earliest Times to the Present (an anthology chosen by Ooka with his commentary). She has read her translations of the poetry of Yosano Akiko and Ishigaki Rin in New York, Tokyo, and Edmonton, Canada.

The Influx of Katakana Japanese
Yoshimi Nagamine, Journalist, Yomiuri Shimbun
April 2, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies

The Battle for the Japanese Corporate Soul
Ronald Dore, Economics, Political Science, Centre for Economic Performance at London School of Economics
April 8, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies

Dore recalls the "modernization theory" that so much influenced academic analysis of the trajectory of Japan's development in the 1950s and 1960's, and asks what connection it has to the changes which Japan's "reformers" seek to bring about. He takes in particular the debates surrounding corporate governance. Is there indeed some process of social evolution which makes it inevitable that there should be some convergence on "global standards" or is it primarily a matter of the pressures to conform deriving from the political and economic hegemony of the the United States?

Shiina Rinzo and the Questions of Tenko and Subjectivity
Seiji Mizuta Lippit, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA
April 9, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies

The fictional writings of Shiina Rinzo had a significant impact on the establishment of literary discourse during the immediate postwar period in Japan. In particular, Shiina's evocation of his "ideological conversion" (tenko), an act of apostasy common to many Japanese leftist thinkers who abandoned their beliefs during the 1930s in the face of pressure applied by the state, helped to establish a conceptual basis for the "postwar school" in Japanese literature. Shiina presents his experience of the aftermath of war as a continual repetition of this earlier act of ideological conversion, thereby linking the prewar and postwar periods. This lecture examines Shiina's influence on Japanese literature by placing particular emphasis on his use of the trope of the ruin as the representation of a collapsed and fragmented subjectivity, which in turn determined his relationship to various competing ideological discourses.

Religion in Japanese History
April 15, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies

Hiroki Kikuchi, Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo, Visiting Fellow, Princeton University — "Reevaluating 'Genko-shakusho' in the Buddhism of the Kamakura Period"
Kokan Shiren (1278-1346) was an eminent zen monk in the early period of the Gozan sect. "Genko-Shakusho," the earliest comprehensive history of Japanese Buddhism, is the most famous of his literary works. This lecture reevaluates previous interpretations of "Genko-Shakusho" as a text that deliberately privileges Japanese Buddhism over that of China and favors Zen Buddhism over other sects. The speaker argues that, far from being "nationalist" or "sectarian," "Genko-Shakusho" should instead be seen as Kokan's attempt to trace the history of his own Shoichi branch from its origins in China through its development in the context of Japanese Buddhism.

Kojiro Hirose, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Visiting fellow, Princeton University — "'Judo' or 'Aikido': Propagation Strategies of Tenrikyo in the U.S"
Of the "new" religions in modern Japan, Tenrikyo has one of the largest followings. Its doctrine emphasizes the importance of joy and harmony to bring about "world salvation." In 1927, the first Tenrikyo church in the United States was founded in San Francisco. Although their activities were interrupted by the Pacific War, there are now more than fifty Tenrikyo churches (including seven in the Bay Area) in the United States. This lecture will focus on how Tenrikyo is practiced in the United States and in particular on how this religion represents "Japaneseness" to its American practitioners.

Machiavelli's Children: Leadership and Historical Choices in Italy and Japan
Richard Samuels, Political Science, Center for International Studies, MIT
Monday, April 21, 2003
Distinguished Speaker Lecture
Center for Japanese Studies

Two late-developing nations, Japan and Italy, similarly obsessed with achieving modernity and with joining the ranks of the great powers, have traveled parallel courses with very different national identities. Beginning with the founding of modern nation-states after the Meiji Restoration and the Risorgimento, a similar developmental dynamic can be identified in both countries through the failure of early liberalism, the coming of fascism, imperial adventures, defeat in wartime, and reconstruction as American allies. This lecture argues that although Japan and Italy have often traveled along convergent historical paths, the respective leaders of the two countries and the historical choices they made have led to very different national identities. Drawing upon a fascinating series of paired biographies of political and business leaders form Italy and Japan, the speaker emphasizes the important role human ingenuity plays in political change.

Co-sponsored by Institute of East Asian Studies, Department of Political Science and Center for Italian Studies.

War Memory, Tourism, and the Politics of Peace at Okinawa's Himeyuri Peace Museum
Linda Isako Angst, Anthropology, Lewis and Clark College; Reischauer Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard
May 1, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies

The story of the Himeyuri Student Nurse Corps, in which Okinawa's top female students were killed caring for Japanese soldiers on the battlefield in the last days of the Battle of Okinawa, has become the emblematic story of Okinawan wartime suffering. This talk explores the complex historical and symbolic role of the Himeyuri in postwar Okinawan identity politics, particularly as represented in the Himeyuri Peace Museum, and points to the gendered dimensions of national discourse in the relationship of Okinawa to Japan. Time permitting, film and video clips will be included.

The Innovation of New Model Development: Case of Toyota
Takashi Shimizu, Accounting, Waseda University; Visiting Scholar, UCB
May 8, 2003
Center for Japanese Studies

In the mid-1990s, Toyota Motors struggled to compete with other automobile manufacturers. This talk focuses on the new model development strategies Toyota has implemented in order to regain its competitiveness. In particular, Toyota's lack of popularity among Japan's younger generation caused its market share to shrink considerably. Although Toyota had had many previous successes based on "just-in-time" (JIT) and target costing, it now needed a new breakthrough to gain a continuous competitive advantage. The speaker argues that Toyota has achieved this breakthrough mainly by formulating two new strategies. One has been to develop cars well suited for the 21st century and the other has been to develop cars that would be popular with the Japanese youth.

How Asia Got Rich: Japan, China, and the Asian Miracle
Edith Terry, Opinion Pages Editor, South China Morning Post
May 16, 2003
Shorenstein Seminar
Institute of East Asian Studies

Reception and book signing will follow the presentation.

Japan has, for the past two decades, been seeking new alliances in Asia through trade and aid, in an effort to enhance its security. As its fortunes have risen and fallen in the west, Japan has built enduring ties in East Asia, culminating this year in China replacing the U.S. as Japan's number one trading partner. Could productive economic ties with its neighbors eventually supplant Japan's Cold War pact with the U.S.? Author Edith Terry argues that this quiet progress, with Japan's leadership and China's growth, could create a new regional movement counter to the convergence theories of free markets and globalization. Join us for this forward-looking discussion.

Edith Terry is an author, journalist, and consultant based in Hong Kong. She has been a foreign correspondent and bureau chief for Business Week Magazine and Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper, and is currently Opinion Pages Editor of the South China Morning Post. Ms. Terry has been a visiting fellow at research institutes in East Asia and the United States, including the Japan Institute for International Affairs in Tokyo, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, Gaston Sigur Center for Asian Studies in Washington, DC, and the Economic Strategy Institute, also in Washington. She has been the recipient of grants and awards including Journalist in Residence at the East-West Center in Honolulu; an Abe Fellowship from the Center for Global Partnership of the Japan Foundation; and a Fulbright Pacific Rim fellowship. Her most recent book, How Asia Got Rich: Japan, China and the Asian Miracle, was published by ME Sharpe in 2002.