A Short Introduction to Toshio Hosokawa: 2023 Berkeley Japan Prize Winner
January 12, 2023
Colloquium
Speaker: Ken Ueno, Department of Music, UC Berkeley
Professor Ken Ueno will present a 12-minute presentation via Zoom to introduce composer Toshio Hosokawa, Japan’s most eminent living composer. In his operas, Hosokawa helped update Noh theater and has been influential in balancing Japanese and Western aesthetics in his compositional work, which have been widely commissioned and played in Europe and abroad.
Co-Sponsor: Institute of East Asian Studies
[Berkeley Japan Prize] Composer Toshio Hosokawa ~ Bringing Japanese Sounds and Aesthetics in Classical Music: In conversation with Ken Ueno and a koto performance by Kyoko Kawamura
January 20, 2023
Colloquium and Performance
Speaker: Toshio Hosokawa, Compsoer
Performer: Kyoko Kawamura
The Center for Japanese Studies (CJS) of UC Berkeley welcomes Japanese composer, Toshio Hosokawa to the campus as the recipient of the 6th Berkeley Japan Prize. At the award ceremony, Toshio Hosokawa will give an acceptance speech, followed by a performance of koto music that he composed. Kyoko Kawamura, renowned multi-instrumentalist, will play Hosokawa’s “Koto-Uta”.
Co-Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, Department of Music
[Aspects of Japanese Studies] Rethinking 20th Century Chinese Aesthetics in Japan
February 21, 2023
Colloquium
Speaker: Yi Ding, Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University of Tokyo
Discussant: Kevin Smith, UC Berkeley
Aesthetics is usually defined as a branch of philosophical inquiry dealing with “beauty,” “emotion” and “art.” However, with reference to this Western definition, the question of how to position the field of Eastern aesthetics remains unanswered. In China today, there is a tendency to emphasize the characteristics that distinguish Chinese aesthetics from the West. Yet, this view of East and West is a simplistic polarization and is itself a perspective that developed only after the 1950s.
In order to unveil more possibilities for Chinese aesthetics, I utilize the accumulation of Western aesthetics research in Japan, while also referring to trends in the study of Japanese aesthetics. This talk will revisit the development of Chinese aesthetics from the 1920s to the 60s, an era in which Chinese scholars did not blindly accept Western knowledge and reject Chinese traditions, as in the earlier period, nor were they restricted by the so-called Marxist framework, as in the subsequent period. I proceed by examining the Chinese reception of G. E. Lessing’s Laokoon (1766), whose main thesis regarding the relationship between painting and poetry was applied to Chinese art theory. The receptions by representative scholars such as Zhu Guangqian, Zong Baihua, and Qian Zhongshu reflect the fact that modern Chinese aesthetics is a synthesis of Eastern and Western, ancient and modern knowledge, drawing on ideas from adjacent disciplines including psychology, literature, and art history. This project itself will also serve as a resource for Japanese aesthetic inquiry.
*Aspects of Japanese Studies showcases the research being done by members of the CJS community. Faculty, graduate students and alumni of CJS present a casual 15-minute online talk on their current work or key research topics in Japanese Studies. Talks are followed by questions and answers.
Sacred Secrets: Networks of Secret Knowledge in Japanese Religions
March 3-4, 2023
Symposium
For more than four centuries, the history of Japanese religions has been dominated by secrecy. Secret texts circulated in every group regardless of their affiliation or social status, showing the porosity and pervasiveness of secrecy. Why and how did secrecy become such a central component of religious life? Although works on secrecy abound in the field of European and Tantra studies, the enormous body of Japanese secret works – many of which are recently discovered – has received relatively little attention, casting a shadow on a fundamental aspect of medieval and early modern Japanese religions.
This symposium brings together scholars working on a wide range of topics in the context of Japanese religions to discuss secrecy from different perspectives and methodologies. The aim of this event is to draw attention to the role of secrecy and better illuminate the dynamics underlying the process of “secretization,” the mobility of secrecy, as well as the factors that marked the decline of the culture of secrecy. More broadly, the scope of this symposium is to foster a conversation on Japanese religions from a cross-disciplinary perspective to understand the networks and logics that participated in the creation of religious identities during the Japanese age of secrecy.
Event Website: https://ieas.berkeley.edu/sacredsecrets
Co-Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
Workshop on Tannishō Commentarial Materials
March 10-12, 2023
Workshop
The Centers for Japanese Studies and Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, together with Ōtani University and Ryūkoku University in Kyoto announce a workshop under the supervision of Mark Blum that will focus on critically examining premodern and modern hermeneutics of the Tannishō, a core text of the Shin sect of Buddhism, and arguably the most well-read religious text in postwar Japan. We plan to meet twice each year as before: in Berkeley from March 10 to 12, and in Kyoto at Ryūkoku University from June 9 to 11. Organized around close readings of the most influential materials produced in early modern, modern, and postmodern Japan, the workshop aims at producing a critical, annotated translation detailing the salient ways in which this text has been both inspirational and controversial, as well as a series of essays analyzing a wide spectrum of voices in Japanese scholarship and preaching that have spoken on this work. For the early modern or Edo period, the commentaries by Enchi (1662), Jukoku (1740), Jinrei (1808), and Ryōshō (1841) will be examined. Papers will also be given on receptivity of the text in the modern period. Note that there are travel funds available to assist graduate students attend either or both of these workshops.
Co-Sponsor: Center for Buddhist Studies, Otani University, Ryukoku University, BCA Buddhist Center for Education, Institute of Buddhist Studies, Shinshu Center of America
The Transformation of Sino-Japanese Culture under Modernity: Reconstructing the Imazeki Tenpō (1882-1970) Sinology Collection
March 24, 2023
Symposium
東アジアの近代化と日本漢学の変容 ―今関天彭の蔵書構築を端緒として―
This conference aims to reconsider Sinology in Japan in the past, introducing Imazeki Tenpo’s (今関天彭) Chinese book collection co-held by the C.V. Starr East Asian Library of UC Berkeley and other libraries. Imazeki is one of the great Sinologists in Modern Japan who ran the Imazeki Institution in Beijing, sponsored by the Mitsui combine, around the 1920s. His cultural background was in the tradition of the Bunjin or Chinese-style scholars of the Edo period. He grew up in imperial Tokyo and moved to the Chinese continent. His collection gives us a glimpse into his thought inspired by the Chinese scholarship of the latter Qing dynasty and the Minguo period through his direct communications with Chinese scholars and learning from their publications in Beijing. However, the institution closed just before the end of World War II, and the Sinologist shifted his focus toward becoming a Chinese-style poet to edit a journal named “Gayu” or “Noble Comrades” in Tokyo. This became his lifework.
The conference has two sections. Section 1 features the Japanese tradition of Sinology encompassing over 1,500 years. The thoughts presented in this tradition were very effective in developing the history of Japanese culture, and formed the basis of Imazeki’s scholarship. Section 2 features the emergence of a new Sinology under modernity or imperialism. In this phase, East Asian scholars met directly and communicated using Chinese-style literature. The conference treats how their activities paved the way to Sinology in the contemporary world.
Co-Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Keio Institute of Oriental Classics
Japan’s Immigration Policy Conundrum: Technical Interns, Specified Skills, and International Students
April 11, 2023
Colloquium
Speakers: Glenda S. Roberts, Professor, Waseda University, Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies; Noriko Fujita, Adjunct Researcher, Waseda Institute for Asia-Pacific Studies; Gracia Liu-Farrer, Professor, Waseda University, Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies
Discussant: Michael Orlando Sharpe, Professor, York College of the City University of New York
Moderator: Keiko Yamanaka, Lecturer, UC Berkeley
Glenda S. Roberts and Noriko Fujita
Is ‘Short-term’ for the long run? Is ‘skilled’ really skilled? Japan’s convoluted short-term labor migration schemes
In Japan, despite rapid demographic decline, until recently, low-skilled migrant workers have been welcomed only through side doors, such as technical interns (TITP) and students. Yet pressure for change comes from two sides: the moral critique of the side-door TITP scheme, and the growing economic pressures of a dwindling labor force. In 2018 Japan put in place a short-term bona-fide labor scheme (SSW: Specified Skilled Workers) to meet the labor demand in fields heretofore largely inaccessible to foreign labor importation. These workers are not expected to need training; they should already have acquired ‘skills’ to do the work of their sector. Yet we have found the question of ‘skill’ to be a slippery one, indeed. Currently, skills acquired by most workers in SSWI derive from the workers’ experiences in the TITP program, which rests on the premise of technical transfer, not labor provision. Yet, the hourly wage of SSWI is only marginally above that of TITP workers, and while SSWI workers are permitted to remain at their jobs for five years, they are not given opportunities to increase their skills and wages in this status, nor can they easily change employers. While the construction and shipbuilding industries will gain access to a higher status visa, the SSWII, which envisions skills training, pay increases, family reunification and possibility of permanent residence, currently other industries are not slated for this enhanced status. We argue that because SSWI rests on top of the TITP, it keeps migrant workers in precarious low-paying work with no skills pathway upward for much longer than some scholars argue as desirable from the humanitarian viewpoint. Our research, based on qualitative interviewing with farmer stakeholders and labor dispatch agencies in Aichi and Kyoto, as well as with construction agencies in metropolitan Tokyo from 2018-2021, highlights the problems in these schemes, from the stakeholders’ viewpoints at the genba.
Gracia Liu-Farrer
The student-workers: Four decades of international student migration in Japan
Since 1983 when the Nakasone government initiated the plan of accepting 100,000 students by the early 2000s, international student population increased by thirty times from 10,428 in 1983 to 312,214 in 2019 before the COVID pandemic restricted cross-border mobilities. In Japan’s official discourses, international education is treated as one of the national strategies for expanding Japan’s international presence as presented in the Nakasone Plan, and globalizing Japanese higher education and society as embodied in the plan of accepting 300,000 students proposed by PM Fukuda. However, one of the important functions of international student migration is labor import. Like many other advanced economies, Japan treats international students as potential skilled workers who have the advantage of attaining the linguistic and cultural competency of the host countries. The government aims to retain 50% of international students in Japan’s labor market (Japan Revitalization Strategy 2016). Moreover, in Japan where demographic crisis has deepened and yet importing so-called simple labor is out of the question, student migrants have been an indispensable source of low-wage labor, making up one fifth of the foreign work force in the country. Because a student visa permits off-campus work during the school year, international educational institutions, especially Japanese language academies and vocational schools, have become key channels for importing low-wage non-regular migrant workers. The educational institutions have acted as de facto migration industry. This presentation focuses the discussion on this form of labor migration and how the student-worker identity evolves among international students from different national backgrounds over the decades, from the Chinese in the late 1980s and 1990s to the Vietnamese and Nepalese in the 2010s. It highlights the mechanisms, especially the practices of institutional actors, that perpetuate this dual identity, and the impact of this identity on the mobility trajectories of international students.
Language Teaching Assessement Workshop
May 3, 2023
Workshop
Speakers: Jianhua BAI, Professor, Kenyon College; Yuri KUMAGAI, Senior Lecturer, Smith College; Sun-young SHIN, Associate Professor, Indiana University Bloomington
Facilitator: Mark Blum, Professor, UC Berkeley
This meeting seeks to forge new approaches to assessment strategies for how we teach Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures. We seek to clarify what goals students currently have for their commitment to study these languages and how we can best help them realize their goals. The workshop will also discuss recent scholarship and consensus statements on curricular goals found in professional language-teaching organizations, as well as how the remote teaching experience of the pandemic has resulted in new insights about foreign language teaching and learning.