Between Foraging and Agriculture: Intersections of Archaeology, Anthropology, and Agroecology from the Perspective of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Part 1
January 7, 2024
Symposium
In this symposium, researchers in archaeology, ethnology, and agroecology will gather to present why the diversity of staple foods, especially starchy foods such as millets, acorns, and root crops, is important for resilient foodways.
Knotted Pasts, Entangled Futures: Screening of “Bon-Uta, a Song from Home”
February 2 and 6, 2024
Film Screening and Colloquium
Speakers: Ai Iwane, Photographer/Producer; Kota Takeuchi, Artist
This multi-day event explores visual works (in cinema, photography and video art) that have emerged in the wake of the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear catastrophe that hit northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011. Through these works, we will explore the issues of individual and collective memories and the ways in which these memories are structured by the global and digital circulation of events across time and space, as well as across social and political borders.
Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan
March 8, 2024
Colloquium
Speaker: Gennifer Weisenfeld, Professor, Duke University
This talk presents a fascinating look at the anxious pleasures of Japanese visual culture during World War II. Airplanes, gas masks, and bombs were common images in wartime Japan. Yet amid these emblems of anxiety, tasty caramels were offered to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, and magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil defense fashion to futuristic weapons. Gennifer Weisenfeld’s new book Gas Mask Nation (University of Chicago Press, 2023) explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual culture of Japanese civil air defense—or bōkū—through a diverse range of artworks, photographs, films and newsreels, magazine illustrations, postcards, cartoons, advertising, fashion, everyday goods, government posters, and state propaganda.
Choirs, Collectives, Collaboration: Polyphony and Parallax Memory as a Form of Activism in the Work of Three Japanese Artists
March 20, 2024
Colloquium
Speaker: Ayelet Zohar, Senior Lecturer, Tel Aviv University
Activism, in its collective form, has become a ubiquitous practice for those members in Japanese opposition or minority groups, using different methods and approaches to make their voice heard. Using theoretical tools that read into the choir and polyphony in Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Rancière’s writings, I argue that the choir is the immediate embodiment of polyphony, but also transformation of the silenced into the arena of activism and voicing of minorities who were silenced and left behind, in the name of Japanese homogeneity. In my presentation, I shall look into three video art/ photography projects that make innovative use of the medium of the chorus to express the multivocality and the parallax memory of the community, especially in relation to the silenced memories of the Asia-Pacific War.
Workshop on Tannishō Commentarial Materials
March 22-24, 2024
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 this year as before: in Berkeley from March 22 to 24, and in Kyoto at Ōtani University from June 28 to 30. 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.
Foundations of Buddhist Chaplaincy: A Japan-US Dialogue
March 27-29, 2024
Conference
The Institute of Buddhist Studies and the Center for Japanese Studies at U.C Berkeley are excited to announce this bilingual workshop, which brings together chaplaincy educators and working chaplains in Japan and the United States to reflect on how we connect Buddhist teachings with effective service. We will discuss the current state of chaplaincy in our respective countries, the practice of Buddhist chaplaincy on the ground, the training and education of Buddhist chaplains, as well as the role of chaplains in our changing world. Through a dialogical session format we intend to exchange ideas, create and strengthen relationships, and share resources that will equip and enrich Buddhist chaplaincy practice and education.
Okaiko: Performance Silkworm
April 10, 2024
Performance
Performer: Aine Nakamura
What is a cocoon, nest, safe space? How can a silkworm molt out of a cocoon and become a moth without being boiled? How can a new language be reimagined without being confined? If silkworms, diligent industrial and domestic labor, or export and import are linked in the chains of complicity with violence, what kinds of small acts can become catalysts for coexistence? Through these questions of gender, trade, labor, and Okaiko, Nakamura will study her familial and personal ethnography.