[Aspects of Japanese Studies] Both Eyes Open: Recasting History as Living Opera 
January 29, 2025
Colloquium
Speaker: Philip Kan Gotanda, Professor, UC Berkeley
Professor Gotanda will provide excerpts of his work from music, theater and film to illustrate his evolution from singing original Asian American-themed songs to librettist for the hybrid theater-opera, Both Eyes Open, created in collaboration with composer Max Giteck Duykers.
A Screening of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata: Seeing America’s Wars as a Noir Nightmare 
January 31, 2025
Film Screening
Speaker: Fareed Ben-Youssef, Assistant Professor, Texas Tech University
Facilitator: Miryam Sas, Professor, UC Berkeley
Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has defined horror movies as “that family of films that take as their subject matter the fear that follows one throughout one’s life.” His Academy Award-nominated Tokyo Sonata (2008) centers on a struggling family whose eldest son goes to serve in the Iraq War as part of Japan’s Security Defense Force. Cannily, Kurosawa punctuates the melodrama with oppressive noir shadows during a nightmare sequence to depict a home space invaded by American political forces. In so doing, the astonishing film unveils the fear following Japan in a post-9/11 context: a looming United States that pushes the constitutionally pacificist nation to become ever-more involved in its military conflicts in the Middle East.
Featuring Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef (Texas Tech University) in conversation with Dr. Miryam Sas, this moderated screening of the genre-crossing Tokyo Sonata will consider how international filmmakers like Kurosawa cannily negotiate and question a geopolitical terrain shaped by American visions of power. Ultimately, genre‑tinged international films like Tokyo Sonata encourage audiences to wake up from the nightmare created by American hegemony in times of global war.
Both Eyes Open: A chamber opera on the Japanese American WWII Incarceration 
February 15-16, 2025
Performance
Both Eyes Open recasts the incarceration of Japanese Americans to show us disturbing truths about America then and America now. In this exciting, experimental opera we mash up the lyrical with the raucous; an ambitious aesthetic with vaudevillian low brow humor. We hope you enjoy the ride: a fresh, new work that reframes the WWII Incarceration of Japanese Americans to resonate with the timely issue of anti-Asian and anti-immigrant hatred.
Additional support from the UC Berkeley Japanese American Studies Advisory Committee, a Mellon Project Grant from the Division of Arts & Humanities Dean’s Office, Cal Performances, UC Berkeley Department of Music, UC Berkeley Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the California Civil Liberties Program.
For more information, visit beo-opera.com
Tradition and Innovation Reflected in Japanese Material Culture: 日本の物質文化からみた伝統と革新 
February 28, 2025
Symposium
This symposium seeks to evaluate the strengths of these interdisciplinary approaches and explore future directions for the study of Japanese material culture. Additionally, it will examine the significance of the collection of Japanese mingu, porcelain, and lacquerware at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Novel as a Site of Multilingualism: Conversations with Yu Miri and Morgan Giles 
March 5, 2025
Colloquium
Speaker: Yu Miri, Writer
Speaker: Morgan Giles, Translator
Facilitator: Daniel O’Neill, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley
Special thanks to novelist Yu Miri, our 2022 Berkeley Japan Prize winner, who agreed to return to our campus on March 5 for a conversation about her newly translated novel, The End of August. In our conversation with Yu Miri and Morgan Giles (the translator of The End of August), we will explore how Yu’s work invites us to rethink the novel as a site of multilingualism, a site in which the scenes of speaking and writing continue to participate in the shaping of race and class in contemporary Japan.
Workshop on Tannishō Commentarial Materials 
March 7-9, 2025
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 7 to 9, and in Kyoto at Ōtani University from June 27 to 29.
Writing Archipelagoes: Queer Literature, Translation, and Multilingualism 
March 11, 2025
Speaker: LI Kotomi, Writer
Panelist: Daryl Maude,Assistant Professor, University of Colorado - Boulder Panelist: Wendy Wang, Graduate Student, UC Berkeley Facilitator: Daniel O’Neill, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley
Historically, Japan has not made great strides in queer rights, and queer people have long been underrepresented even in literary works. However, in the past decade, LGBTQ+ has gained more visibility in Japanese society, and many literary works depicting queer subjects have appeared on the scene. Emerging as an important proponent of Japanese queer literature, the novelist Li Kotomi, since her debut, has been actively creating a tapestry of stories featuring various queer people, including lesbians. For the talk, Li Kotomi will explore the past, present, and future of Japan’s LGBTQ+ community and queer literature.
Jomon Subsistence-Settlement Practices and Environmental Management: A View from Northern Japan 
April 9, 2025
Colloquium
Speaker: Junko Habu, Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Speaker: Habeom Kim
Co-sponsor: Archaeological Research Facility
Archaeological data from the prehistoric Jomon period (ca. 16000-2500 ca. BP) in Japan provides excellent opportunities to examine continuity and change in subsistence-settlement practices. Of particular interest is the relationship between site location, subsistence/food diversity and the importance of environmental management. In this presentation, we attempt to interpret changes in Jomon settlement distribution patterns in two geographic areas in northern Japan in the context of the discussion of the resilience of human-environmental interaction in historical ecology.
“An Ordinary Person Will Not Survive:” A Preliminary Study of Daiaragyō, The Most Dangerous Ascetic Training in Nichiren Buddhism 
April 9, 2025
Colloquium
Speaker: Simona Lazzerini, Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Scholar, UC Berkeley
Facilitator: Mark Blum, Professor, UC Berkeley
Co-sponsor: Numata Center for Buddhist Studies
Daiaragyō 大荒行 is an ascetic training that allows Nichiren monks to master initiated prayers (kitō祈祷) and a variety of exorcistic techniques (harai 祓い) aimed at healing various ailments, destroying evil entities, and granting protection. The training, which lasts one hundred days, is performed once a year at Hokkekyōji 法華経寺and Onjuin 遠壽院, two temples in Ichikawa (Chiba prefecture). Daiaragyō is an austere and dangerous practice that pushes monastics on the verge of death. For a hundred days monks live in seclusion and are allowed sleep only a few hours per night; eat small meals; perform water ablutions seven times a day; copy sutras and endure long chanting sessions. It is very common for practitioners fall ill and, in the past, people have died. While daiaragyō is not a mandatory practice in the Nichiren school, many monks choose to undergo the training, even more than once, to learn esoteric skills that will allow them to assist and benefit people. As a matter of fact, monastics often describe their training and religious career as following Nichiren’s path and enduring similar hardships to spread the teachings of the Lotus Sūtra. Drawing from my fieldwork in Japan as well as textual and visual materials, in this talk I will present my preliminary findings on daiaragyō, focusing on the mechanisms, main practices, and goals of this treacherous training.
Screens and Songs for a New Emperor: The Reiwa Edition 
April 16, 2025
Colloquium
Speaker: Edward Kamens, Sumitomo Professor Emeritus of East Asian Languages & Literatures, Yale University
Moderator: Dan O’Neill, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley
The Daijōsai is an ancient form of harvest festival observed in modern times, as it was in the past, in the first autumn after the accession of a new Emperor of Japan. This illustrated presentation focuses on the landscape screens, poems, and songs created for and presented in the Daijōe banquets that were held during the Daijōsai of the current Emperor Reiwa, in 2019. Daijōe screens, poems, and songs celebrate both regional locales and cultures as well as the continuous tradition of imperial rule. The scenes depicted in both image and word evoke plenitude, vitality, endurance, and, of course, the cycle of the seasons. This presentation emphasizes how this “edition” adhered to precedent but also introduced some innovative gestures that subtly marked it as an event very much of the present.
A Theory of Resemblances: Mimesis in Folklore and the Folkloresque 
April 29, 2025
Colloquium
Speaker: Michael Dylan Foster, Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Davis
Co-sponsors: Folklore Program, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Center for Japanese Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, English Department
Imitation, sampling, copying and other forms of mimesis are fundamental to the processes and products we call “folklore.” In contrast to this open-source dynamic, popular culture and commercial products—including art, literature, and music—are regulated by copyright, trademark, and patent laws. Through a focus on the Amabie phenomenon in Japan, in which memes of a nineteenth-century legendary creature went viral during the COVID-19 pandemic, this presentation explores the affective powers of replication and the critical moments when folklore becomes something we can call “folkloresque.”
Performing Stillness: Topography, Trace, Gestural Writing 
April 29, 2025
Colloquium
Speaker: Dr. Fusako Innami, Associate Professor, Durham University
Moderator: Miryam Sas, Professor, UC Berkeley
In this presentation, I focus on the idea of “performing stillness.” Freed from wartime suppression, subjects in post-war occupied Japan cultivated a range of “flesh culture” to include picture-frame shows (tableaux vivants)—mostly female models performing stillness on stage. When the recovery of the cityscape relied on the revelation of the flesh, lived bodies both generated ideas and dissolved framing. Amid police regulations and gender commodification, this performed stillness, I argue, gave impetus for bodily movements and verbal traces, forming a part of the postwar cityscape, and thereby bringing forth embodied thought.