Investigating the U.S. Military Crimes in Japan
January 26, 2022
Colloquium
Speaker:
Hanayo Oya, Journalist/Documentary Filmmaker
Hanayo Oya, a journalist and former visiting scholar at CJS, will discuss her latest investigative story on the issue of crimes perpetrated by U.S. military personnel against local people in Japan. Especially controversial has been the criminal jurisdiction over the U.S. military personnel, because of the Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs), which are multilateral or bilateral agreements that protect U.S. military personnel from being subject to criminal justice systems in host countries. As a result, once jurisdiction is handed over to the U.S. side, there is no more legal recourse - and effectively no transparency - for the local communities affected by the crimes. Japanese laws don’t apply to the perpetrators, and Japanese journalists often treat these crimes as an extraterritorial matter. This state of affairs leaves crucial questions unanswered: How exactly were such agreements made between Japan and the U.S.? And what was the purpose of the agreements? The presenter will examine the historical background of the agreements as well as their influences to local communities in Japan.
Watch the recorded talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPxcrHH4IVk&t=4s
Uptown and Downtown in Early Modern Japanese Urban Literature: The Making of a Three-Volume Anthology 
February 18, 2022
Colloquium
Speaker:
Sumie Jones, Professor Emerita, Indiana University, Bloomington
Discussant:
Michael Emmerich, Professor, UCLA
A Kamigata Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Metropolitan Centers, 1600-1750
An Edo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Mega City, 1750-1850
A Tokyo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Modern Capital, 1850-1920
The three volumes, widely used in graduate and undergraduate courses both nationally and internationally, have inspired many questions: After Haruo Shirane’s anthology, why is another anthology of early modern Japanese literature necessary? Why focus on these particular cities? Why exclude regional literature? Why not use footnotes? Why did the anthology take sixteen years to complete? In this online lecture, Sumie Jones, editor-in-chief, will answer those questions and others posed by enquiring audience members ahead of this event. Along the way, she will explain the principles and methods of this compilation, narrate some little-known backstage episodes, and highlight the fun of some of the translated texts. In short, she will expose all the quirk of this publication in broad daylight.
Watch the recorded talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saNeN8acG9s
[Aspects of Japanese Studies] Doctrinally True but Historically Untrue?: Deconstructing Mahāyāna in 18th and 19th Century Japan 
February 23, 2022
Colloquium
Speaker:
Mark Blum, Professor, UC Berkeley
Moderator:
Marta Sanvido, Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Japanese Buddhism, UC Berkeley
In the 18th century there were two separate movements in Japan that aimed to delegitimate the Mahāyāna sutras of Buddhism (the mainstay of institutional Buddhism since its arrival in the 6th century) as not actually deriving from the Buddha’s sermons in India. One was about advancing the discipline of critical historical scholarship, and the other was about resurrecting the ancient discipline of monasticism within the Buddhist clergy. The former came from a Confucian-trained scholar, the latter from Buddhist monks to bring more rigor to their communities. Both contributed to the anti-Buddhist hysteria (haibutsu kishaku) of the early Meiji period. But by the later Meiji period, a second wave of critical writing emerges that points to the same conclusions, but in this case the effort was aimed as modernizing Mahāyāna Buddhism in order to improve it. This latter effort arose in the context of the newly created academic field of Buddhist Studies, something born in Europe that was often swayed by the political agendas of nations in that part of the world. While both discourses led to a certain defensiveness among Buddhist institutions, the Edo-period effort was seen as polemic, while the Meiji-period scholarship was often seen as stimulating and challenging, forcing new, modern approaches to defining what Buddhism is, and ultimately leading to the conclusion that what may not be historically real may nonetheless be doctrinally true.
Watch the recorded talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lA0LWk_5_M&t=1s
Language, Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Landscapes of the Ainu: Perspectives from Nibutani, Hokkaido: Part 1 | Indigenous Rights and the Importance of Ainu Language Education
March 4, 7, 8, 2022
Lecture Series
Speakers:
Shiro Kayano, Director, Kayano Shigeru Nibutani Ainu Museum
Kenji Sekine, Ainu Culture Learning Section, Board of Education of Biratori Town
Koichi Kaizawa, Executive Director, National Trust Cikornay
Discussants:
Chie Sakakibara, Native American and Indigenous Studies Program, Syracuse University
Takayuki Okazaki, Faculty of International Studies, Kindai University
ann-elise lewallen, Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria
The Center for Japanese Studies of the University of California, Berkeley, and the JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) San Francisco Office are pleased to present a three-day online lecture series by speakers from Nibutani, Biratori Town, Hokkaido. Recent discussions of indigenous rights highlight the critical roles that indigenous cultural landscapes, traditional knowledge and indigenous languages play in restoring the identity of indigenous peoples and promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. Three distinguished speakers from Nibutani present lectures on their ongoing efforts and future perspectives to revitalize the Ainu culture, language and cultural landscapes. Each presentation is followed by comments from a scholar working on aspects of Ainu and/or indigenous cultures and languages.
Read abstracts and bios here: https://ieas.berkeley.edu/language-indigenous-knowledge-and-cultural-landscapes-ainu
Watch the recorded talks here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv8epZaAz2OdyXLoYk1hBGn6UtliXPKLq
Explicating the evolution and limits of Japan’s Asylum Policy
March 16, 2022
Colloquium
Speaker:
Naoko Hashimoto, Graduate School of Social Sciences, Hitotsubashi University
Discussant:
Keiko Yamanaka, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Japan has long been known for its exclusive asylum policy. While there is a certain truth in this perception, Japan in fact has been implementing a variety of refugee protection measures particularly since 1975, including the admission of 11,000 Indo-Chinese refugees, accession to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1981, launching and expansion of refugee resettlement policies since 2008, admission of a small number of Syrian refugees as students, and limited evacuations of Afghan nationals who used to work for Japanese entities in Afghanistan. The speaker has been engaged practically with Japan’s asylum policy both as a national and international civil servant and as an academic scholar for the past 20 years. Based on her practical experience and social scientific research, this talk will explicate the twists and turns surrounding the following three questions:
1. Why does Japan recognize so few refugees?
2. Why did Japan embark upon refugee resettlement?
3. How has Japan been implementing the Afghan evacuations to Japan?
Watch the recorded talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzPj9pTytAU
Literature as Commons: Re-reading Natsume Sōseki from the United States, circa 2022
April 15, 2022
Colloquium
Speaker:
Michael K. Bourdaghs, The University of Chicago
Discussant:
Dan O'Neill, UC Berkeley
Presenting ideas from his recent book, A Fictional Commons: Natsume Sōseki and the Properties of Modern Literature (Duke University Press, 2021), Michael Bourdaghs in this talk will explore the ways that the fictional and theoretical writings of Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916), often celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, engage critically and playfully with modern ideas of property and ownership. Sōseki's fictional narratives often revolve around ambiguous forms of property, such as animals, and connect them to broader philosophical questions about the (im)possibilities of self-ownership. Moreover, his ambitious attempt to create a fully scientific theory of literature defined it as a realm in which the property norms assumed in other domains did not apply--a stance that has critical ramifications for today's theories of world literature. What does it mean to re-read Sōseki from our own place and time, more than a century after his death?
Myth-making in Verse: Banquet Poetry and the Creation of a Japanese Origin Story
April 22, 2022
Colloquium
Speaker:
Matthieu Felt, University of Florida
Moderator:
Bonnie McClure, UC Berkeley
At the conclusion of court-sponsored readings of the historical chronicle Nihon shoki, Japanese aristocrats celebrated at banquets where they drank wine and composed poetry about the legendary gods and sovereigns from the text. However, their compositions often differed in tone and content from the original text. In this talk, I identify the thematic and rhetorical strategies of these variations and argue that they served to transform Nihon shoki from a dynastic history into a broader origin story for the tenth-century court and capital. By extension, I suggest that verse has several unique possibilities as a vehicle for expanding the scope of canonical texts.
The Ones Who Leave by Nagahara Hideaki
April 30, 2022
Performance
A Stage Reading of Nagahara Hideaki's --The Ones Who Leave-- translated by Andrew Way Leong with Q & A moderated by Philip Kan Gotanda.
The Ones Who Leave (Sariyukumono, 去り行く者, 1927) is the only surviving play of Nagahara Hideaki, a Los Angeles-based author who wrote for a Japanese-language audience in the mid-1920s. The Ones Who Leave depicts the struggles of the Ohtsus, a Japanese American farm family in Southern California. During one fateful summer, the Ohtsus welcome the arrival of a handsome wanderer with a mysterious secret. Unspeakable desires collide with impossible obligations, setting husbands against wives, sisters against brothers, and lovers against mothers. Brutal and passionate, soft and sentimental: Japanese California as you’ve never seen it before!
Co-sponsors:
UC Berkeley - Japanese American Studies Advisory Committee, Department of English, Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
From Global Financial Crisis to Covid-19 Pandemic: Old and New Challenges for Nikkei Brazilians in Japan
May 10, 2022
Colloquium
Speaker:
Angelo Ishi, Professor, Musashi University
Discussant:
Keiko Yamanaka, Lecturer, UC Berkeley
The reform of the Japanese Immigration law in 1990 enabled foreigners of Japanese descent (so-called “Nikkei”) to obtain a long-term visa and as a result, although it was not a working visa, they adapted it to become de-facto non-skilled foreign workers in Japan. Since then, the Nikkei of South American origin, mainly from Brazil, have become one of the most significant ethnic minorities in Japan. Following the peak number of more than 320 thousand by mid-2008, Nikkei populations saw a sudden, drastic decline due to the global financial crisis and subsequent massive unemployment. A controversial “Voluntary Return Program,” launched by the Japanese government, catalyzed an exodus of Brazilians to their home country. Most Brazilians, however, chose to stay in Japan. Twelve years later, the Covid-19 crisis exposed the old issues, bringing to light the continuing precarity of the Nikkei in Japan’s economy and society. From the very beginning Angelo Ishi, a third-generation Brazilian Nikkei himself, joined the journey of Nikkei workers/immigrants. As a sociologist, as a community leader, and as editor of an ethnic news publication, he has personally experienced and witnessed the multiple challenges confronted by the Nikkei communities. With his first-hand knowledge and perspective, he also served on the advisory committee for the Japanese government’s first “Multicultural Coexistence” guideline announced in 2006. Based on his multi-sourced field research as a community insider for more than 30 years, the speaker combines his qualitative and quantitative data for this talk, focusing in the main on the following topics:
1. Brazilians in Japan and Covid-19 Pandemic: (Dis)Continuities if compared to 2 prior crises ––mass unemployment due to the global financial crisis in 2008 and the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear accident “3.11” triple disaster in 2011.
2. To understand what is happening now, I will briefly present an issue that affected the Nikkei community: the controversial Voluntary Return Program (2009).
3. A quick look at new issues: The Yonsei (4th generation Japanese descendants) visa and the “historicization” efforts.
Watch the recorded talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cbFRbZmGos