The Yomiuri Shimbun, From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor: Who Was Responsible?
Takahiko Tennichi, Editorial writer, The Yomiuri Shimbun
January 24, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Walter H. Shorenstein Fund, Graduate School of Journalism
History is a controversial issue in East Asia today. The Yomiuri Shimbun, the largest daily paper in Japan, with a right of center editorial position, has recently completed a year-long project to clarify Japanese leaders' responsibility for the Pacific War. In Japan such an undertaking is an exceptional case. Why did the Yomiuri launch this campaign? How will this history review affect the contemporary Japan? To what extent was its conclusion different from the judgments of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East? Takahiko Tennichi, an editorial writer of the Yomiuri Shimbun, will discuss the implications of the project, clarifying the Yomiuri's position on the so-called history issue.
The US-Japan Special Relationship and East Asia: How to Build up a Stable Triangle?
Fumio Matsuo, Journalist/Author, Former Washington Bureau Chief, Kyodo News
February 5, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
Fumio Matsuo, author of numerous articles and essays on U.S. politics, is recognized as one of Japan's foremost experts on U.S. political affairs. His book entitled: Democracy with a Gun: The Making of America, published in 2004 won the 52nd Annual Award of the Japan Essayist Club. The book is currently under English translation for international readers.
Mr. Matsuo earned his B.A. in Political Science from Gakushuin University. After joining Kyodo News in 1956, Mr. Matsuo was assigned as foreign correspondent to New York and Washington from 1964 to 1969 to cover the escalation of the Vietnam War, the resulting antiwar movement and political and social upheavals under the Johnson administration, and the emergence of Richard Nixon into the Presidency in 1968.
In 1971, three months prior to Henry Kissinger's secret visit to China, Mr. Matsuo wrote an article titled "Nixon's America: Its Skillful Approach to China" in anticipation of the historic reconciliation between the U.S. and China. When his predictions proved correct, Mr. Matsuo became renowned for his keen insight on the American political arena. He published the book Nixon's America in 1972 and translated The Memoirs of Richard Nixon into Japanese in 1980.
Mr. Matsuo served as Bangkok Bureau Chief from 1972 to 1975 to cover Southeast Asia, including the final phase of the Indochina War, reporting from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
From 1981 to 1984, Mr. Matsuo returned to the U.S. as Washington Bureau Chief, covering the first term of the Reagan Administration. During the 1980s and 90s he managed K.K. Kyodo News, the business arm of Kyodo News, promoting international financial information services as a joint venture with Dow Jones and The Associated Press.
On August 16th, 2005, Mr. Matsuo contributed an article to the opinion page of The Wall Street Journal under the title of "Tokyo Needs its Dresden Moment," in which he proposed that President Bush lay a wreath at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial to mourn the deceased and call for permanent reconciliation between the US and Japan, as Germany had achieved with the U.S. at Dresden upon the 50th anniversary of the Dresden Bombings.
Mr. Matsuo has also lectured at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Journalism and Communication Studies.
Limits and Potential of Media: Iinuma Yokusai's (1783-1865) Pictorial Experiments
Maki Fukuoka, Japanese Humanities, University of Michigan
February 16, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies
Dr. Fukuoka will be discussing the work of this natural historian in Owari-domain at the end of Tokugawa Japan, and the ways in which he used a variety of picture-making methods to construct and test his knowledge of botanical specimens. How did he evaluate the "accuracy" of pictorial representations? What kind of images did he have access to, and how did he describe the images he created? She will explore Yokusai's pictorial experiments, including photographic technology, within the larger discourse of history of photography, as well as practices of picture making and viewing in 19th century Japan.
Trained in the field of visual culture, Maki Fukuoka's interests include the history of photography, the history of exhibition practices, and the discursive formulation of "art history" in 19th century Japan. Her current project looks at the ways in which photographic images of the deceased were reproduced and circulated between the years of 1872 to 1902 and tries to shed light on the ways in which concepts and values of individual life and death shifted during these turbulent years of Japanese history.
Girl-time and Commodity Aesthetics: The Feminization of Japanese Mass Culture
Tomiko Yoda, Japanese Literature, Duke University
March 9, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies
Tomiko Yoda is Associate Professor of Asian and African Languages and Literature, Duke University. She received Ph.D. in Japanese Stanford University. She specializes in Japanese literature, intellectual history, gender, and feminist studies. Her Recent Publications include: Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life From the Recessionary 90s to the Present. Duke University Press, Summer, 2006. (co-ed). Also her recent work entitled "Kogyaru and the Political Economy of Feminized Consuer Culture" Zappa: the Social Space and Movements of Contemporary Japan has been accepted for publication.
Voice in Japanese Literature: Symposium in Honor of Susan Matisoff
March 10, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Presentations:
Man'yôshû Reception in the Heian and Kamakura Periods
Robert Huey, University of Hawaii
Love Among the Ruins: Depictions of the Kawara-no-in in Medieval Nô Plays
Paul Atkins, University of Washington
The Woman Warrior Tomoe in Bangai Nô
Elizabeth Oyler, University of Illinois
Who is the Clint Eastwood of Medieval Japan?: Competing Masculinities in Gunki monogatari
Roberta Strippoli, University of Naples
Unsilencing the Silent: Prequeling and Sequeling in Chikamatsu's Komochi yamauba
Janice Kanemitsu, University of California, Berkeley
Questioning Chastity in Taisho Popular Fiction: Kikuchi Kan's Shinju fujin
Michiko Suzuki, Indiana University
Lady Ise Remix — Michitsuna no haha's Making of Literature
John Wallace, University of California, Berkeley
Half Made-up, or How the Truth is Properly Told in Kengozen's Tamakiwaru
C. Miki Wheeler, University of California, Berkeley
Vision, Violence, and Voice in Mori Ôgai's "Masui"
Michael Foster, University of California, Riverside
Jizô, Datsueba, and the Sai no kawara: on the Illustrations in Two Illustrated Books of Fuji no hito ana in the New York Public Library's Spencer Collection
Hank Glassman, Haverford College
Saigyô's Wanderings in Hell
Joseph Sorensen, University of California, Davis
A Woman at the Top: The Solo Poetry Contest of Eifukumon-in
Stefania Burk, University of British Columbia
Voices of Anguish: Kudoki and Monogatari Scenes in Kabuki
Katherine Saltzman-Li, University of California, Santa Barbara
Typologies of the Subject in Zeami's Go on
Tom Hare, Princeton University
Kobayashi Hideo: French Symbolism, Shishosetsu-ron, and After
Atsuo Morimoto, Graduate School of Language and Society, Hitotsubashi University
March 13, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies
(The talk will be delivered in Japanese.)
This talk will examine how Kobayashi Hideo, creating his own critical idioms through the study of French Symbolists such as Paul Valéry, had to return to the idea of "Japanese-ness" after he epitomized the critical trend around 1935 in the essay Shishosetsu ron (Essay on the I-novel). The following issues will also be considered: the discourse on shishosetsu (I-novel) at the time was more diversified than what is generally known by Nakamura Mitsuo's postwar summary; and the I-novel discourse had certain affinities with the jingoistic sentiment of the time. <
Morimoto Atsuo is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Language and Society, Hitotsubashi University. His main field of research is French Literature with a focus on Paul Valéry. He is author of Kobayashi Hideo no ronri (The Logic of Kobayashi Hideo, 2002) and Mikan no Valéry (Unfinished Valéry, 2004). His doctorate dissertation on Paul Valéry, submitted to Université Blaise Pascal — Clermont II in 2005, is being prepared for publication.
Outcasts, Treaty Ports and the Meanings of "Liberation": Revisiting Meiji Japan's Emancipatory Moment
Daniel Botsman, History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
March 16, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies
This presentation explores the background to the so-called "Emancipation Edict for Outcasts" (buraku kaihorei) issued by Japan's Meiji government in 1871. It focuses on the role of an official named Oe Taku (1847-1921), who is generally credited with having first proposed the Edict, and delves into the social history of one particular outcast community on the outskirts of the newly opened treaty port of Kobe, which Oe later claimed inspired his interest in the issue. At a thematic level, the paper considers how experiences and stories that carry localized meanings at one point in time come to be appropriated and woven into larger narratives of progress and nation in modern Japan
Daniel Botsman is Associate Professor at the Department of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. His main field of research is the social history of Japan in the late Tokugawa and the Meiji periods. He is the author of Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (2005).
Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S.
Roland Kelts, Lecturer, University of Tokyo, and Editor, "A Public Space" Literary Journal
March 20, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Graduate School of Journalism
Contemporary Japanese pop culture such as anime and manga (Japanese animation and comic books) is Asia's equivalent of the Harry Potter phenomenon — an overseas export that has taken America by storm. While Hollywood struggles to fill seats, Japanese anime releases are increasingly outpacing American movies in number and, more importantly, in the devotion they inspire in their fans. But just as Harry Potter is both "universal" and very English, anime is also deeply Japanese, making its popularity in the United States totally unexpected. Japanamerica is the first book that directly addresses the American experience with the Japanese pop phenomenon, covering everything from Hayao Miyazaki's epics, the burgeoning world of hentai, or violent pornographic anime, and Puffy Amiyumi, whose exploits are broadcast daily on the Cartoon Network, to literary novelist Haruki Murakami, and more. With insights from the artists, critics, readers and fans from both nations, this book is as literate as it is hip, highlighting the shared conflicts as American and Japanese pop cultures dramatically collide in the here and now. For more information visit http://www.japanamericabook.com/.
Roland Kelts is a Lecturer at the University of Tokyo and a co-editor of the New York-based literary journal, A Public Space. His first novel, Access, will be published next year. His articles, essays, and stories have been published in Zoetrope, Playboy, Salon, The Village Voice, Newsday, Cosmopolitan, Vogue and The Japan Times, among others. He has lectured at New York University, Rutgers University and Barnard College, and he is a graduate of Oberlin College and Columbia University. He currently splits his time between New York and Tokyo.
Grotesque
Natsuo Kirino, author of Grotesque and Out
April 6, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, The Japan Foundation (New York), Consulate-General of Japan in San Francisco, The Japan Society of Northern California
In her riveting new novel Grotesque, Kirino once again depicts a barely known Japan. This is the story of three Japanese women and the interconnectedness of beauty and cruelty, sex and violence, ugliness and ambition in their lives. Tokyo prostitutes Yuriko and Kazue have been brutally murdered, their deaths leaving a wake of unanswered questions about who they were, who their murderer is, and how their lives came to this end. As their stories unfurl in an ingeniously layered narrative, coolly mediated by Yuriko's older sister, we are taken back to their time in a prestigious girls' high school — where a strict social hierarchy decided their fates — and follow them through the years as they struggle against rigid societal conventions. Shedding light on the most hidden precincts of Japanese society today, Grotesque is both a psychological investigation into the female psyche and a classic work of noir fiction. It is a stunning novel, a book that confirms Natsuo Kirino's electrifying gifts.
Natsuo Kirino was born in 1951. The author of sixteen novels, four collections of short stories and one essay collection, she won the Japan Mystery Writers' Association Prize for Out in 1998, as well as the Naoki Prize, one of Japan's premier literary awards, for Soft Cheeks (which has not yet been published in English) in 1999. Several of her books have also been turned into movies and her work has been translated into more than 19 different languages. Out was the first of her novels to appear in English and was nominated for an Edgar Award. Grotesque, Kirino's next book to be translated into English, won the Izumi Kyoka Literary Award in Japan and was published by Alfred A. Knopf in March 2007.
China and India: How Japan Approaches Asia's Two Giants
Ambassador Sakutaro Tanino, Former Japanese Ambassador to China and India
April 11, 2007
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Consulate-General of Japan in San Francisco, Japan Society of Northern California, Asia Society of Northern California, Center for South Asia Studies
China and India are frequently compared to a giant dragon and a giant elephant. There is much these two countries have in common, but there are also major differences. Ambassador Sakutaro Tanino will discuss how Japan has approached these two great giants in the past, and he will look at the present and future of Japan's bilateral relations with them.
Ambassador Tanino was born in Tokyo and attended the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo. Upon graduation in 1960, he joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, and in 1989 was named Director-General of the Asian Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Ambassador Tanino was subsequently named Cabinet Secretariat of the Chief Cabinet Councillors' Office on External Affairs. In 1995, he was appointed as Ambassador to India, and three years later became Ambassador to the People's Republic of China. Ambassador Tanino retired from the government in 2001 and became Director of Toshiba Corporation.
Discursive Frames in Early Japanese Photography
Allen Hockley, Art History, Dartmouth College
April 12, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies, History of Art
Nineteenth-century Japanese photographs were highly mobile commodities. Produced in relatively large quantities and packaged in a variety of formats for Western consumers, they circulated among viewer constituencies that were fractured along national, class, and gendered lines. These constituencies were themselves mobile. As they returned home from their residencies or travels in Japan, the photographs they acquired entered new viewing contexts far removed geographically and chronologically from their points of origin. Images derived from photographs also circulated through a variety of Western print media, creating yet more consumer constituencies and viewing contexts.
The fractured and transient nature of this visual culture complicates any attempt to address issues of signification, as individual photographs were re-inscribed with new meanings in each of the viewing contexts through which they passed. This lecture adopts the concept of 'discursive frames' to manage this complexity. Working from the assumption that photographs have no intrinsic meaning in and of themselves, it examines instead the discourses photographs acquired in a variety of personal, social, cultural and commercial transactions.
Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, and Anxiety in Contemporary Japan
David Leheny, Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison
April 13, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
Examining both Japan's 9/11 counterterrorism strategies and the government's handling of the "compensated dating" problem (in which high school girls date adult men for money or presents), Think Global, Fear Local argues that global agreements on crime and justice can shape the local politics of fear and scapegoating. In both cases, police and security officials had long wanted to enhance the state's coercive authority — against external threats like potential North Korean saboteurs, and internal concerns like sexually active schoolgirls — but used international conventions directed at different problems to legitimize their efforts. Although the book draws attention to strategic action by political elites, it also draws heavily on the presentation of contemporary fears in Japanese popular culture.
David Leheny (Ph.D., Cornell University, 1998) is an associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of articles in English and Japanese, as well as his previous book, The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure (Cornell University Press, 2003).
Confronting Modernity: Maruyama Masao, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor
Robert Bellah, Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus, UC Berkeley
April 26, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies
Robert N. Bellah is Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. He was educated at Harvard University, receiving the B.A. in 1950 and the Ph.D. in 1955. He began teaching at Harvard in 1957 and left there as Professor of Sociology in 1967 when he moved to Berkeley. He served from 1967 to 1997 as UC Berkeley Ford Professor of Sociology where, from 1968 to 1974, he also chaired the Center for Japanese and Korean Studies.
Professor Bellah is the author and editor of several essays and books. His two most influential articles are "Civil Religion in America" (1967) and "Religious Evolution" (1964) the latter of which he is currently transforming into a book. His books include Tokugawa Religion, Beyond Belief, The Broken Covenant, The New Religious Consciousness, Varieties of Civil Religion, Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation, and most recently (2006) The Robert Bellah Reader. In 1985 he published Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, in collaboration with Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton, and in 1991, with the same collaborators, The Good Society.
On December 20, 2000, the highly acclaimed educator received the United States National Humanities Medal. The citation, which President William Jefferson Clinton signed, reads:
"The President of the United States of America awards this National Humanities Medal to Robert N. Bellah for his efforts to illuminate the importance of community in American society. A distinguished sociologist and educator, he has raised our awareness of the values that are at the core of our democratic institutions and of the dangers of individualism unchecked by social responsibility."
This series is supported by a grant from the Konishi Foundation for International Exchange, Tokyo
How Multiple are "Multiple Modernities"?
Robert Bellah, Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus, UC Berkeley
April 27, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies
Exhibit: Painting to Live 生きるために描く: Art from Okinawa's Nishimui Artist Society 沖縄の西森美術会の美術と美術品, 1948-1950
May 29 – September 7, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Japan Society of Nothern California, Northern California Okinawan Kenjin Kai
In the wake of World War II, a group of American physicians stationed during a military occupation in Okinawa happened upon a small artist colony near the ruins of Shuri Castle. Hungry for culture and community in a ravaged country, they began painting with the Okinawan artists and commissioning art in exchange for Lucky Strike cigarettes — one of the currencies of the day.
The artists of the Nishimui Artist Society — including Masayoshi Adaniya, Kanemasa Ashimine, Itoku Gushiken, and Seikichi Tamanaha — are now credited with founding Okinawa's modernist art movement. For the first time in the U.S., paintings, drawings, and Christmas cards by these artists will be shown, along with paintings by one of the Americans who befriended them, Stanley Steinberg. Painting to Live is an intimate record of Americans and Okinawans connecting with their collective humanity through art. The opening reception for the Painting to Live exhibit will be held on Thursday, June 14, 2007 from 4:00-6:00 pm.
Curated by Jane Dulay, from the private collections of Stanley Steinberg, MD, Dr. and Mrs. Walter H. Abelmann, Chosho Ashitomi, Jane Dulay, MD, David Frederick Dahlin, and David Holman Dahlin.
Opening Reception: Painting to Live 生きるために描く: Art from Okinawa's Nishimui Artist Society 沖縄の西森美術会の美術と美術品, 1948-1950
Chosho Ashitomi, Professor, University of the Ryukyus
June 14, 2007
Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Japan Society of Northern California, Northern California Okinawan Kenjin Kai
Lecture by Professor Emeritus Chosho Ashitomi, University of the Ryukyus: "Restoration of Art in Post-War Okinawa."
Prof. Ashitomi was the first art student to graduate from the University of Ryukyus, in 1954, under the tutelage of Professors Adaniya, Ashimine and Tamanaha — artists highlighted in the Painting to Live exhibit. He joined them in their artistic group, Goninten in the 50's and Sotokai in the 60's. Prof. Ashitomi is the 2006 recipient of the prestigious Ryukuan Shimpo award for the promotion of Okinawan art and culture, the second artist in the 42 year history of the awards to receive such an honor. He is renowned in the Japanese art world and in March of this year was a judge of the Koku Ten, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.
Prof. Ashitomi will lecture in Japanese. Wesley Ueunten, UC Berkeley alumnus, and Vice President,Northern California Okinawan Kenjin Kai, will translate to English.