September 13th
Kunié Sugiura, "Shadow & Ephemera"

Abstract: Photograms are interesting for their open process and experimental nature. But, gradually through experience with them, the esthetics of Japan comes through them. The outline of flowers is attractive and easy to recognize, moreover, they represent the ephemeral qualities of flowers. The same is true when looking at living creatures such as cats, frogs, and fish. Their fragility and their dependence on us is a warning to us. Life is short. We must pay attention to it, not waste it, and enjoy every day.

Kunié Sugiura (BFA, School of the Art Institute, Chicago) is an artist who chooses the medium of the photogram to preserve the shadows of flowers, creatures, and living beings. Born in Nagoya, Japan, Ms. Sugiura resides in New York.

(Co-sponsored by the UMMA and the Japan Foundation.)

September 20th
Albert Stunkard, M.D., "Tokyo after the War: A Young Officer and an Old Philosopher"

Abstract: From 1946 to 1948, Dr. Stunkard served in the army in Japan. During this time, he met several impressive people. As a Medical Officer at Sugamo Prison, he encountered a number of former members of the imperial army. One of them, a young major in the Kempei Tai, stood out in his mind as an example of the dedication of these men. He will discuss the year during which he had very close contact with this officer. In addition, during his stay in Japan, Dr. Stunkard made the acquaintance of Diasetz Suzuki, and studied with him over a period of 18 years. Dr. Stunkard will discuss Dr. Suzuki - both his influence on Buddhism in the United States as well as their personal relationship.

Albert Stunkard, M.D. has been a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania since 1976. His research interests include: genetic, psychological, therapeutic and developmental studies of human obesity and eating disorders. However, it is his experience as a Medical Officer at Sugamo Prison after World War II that brings him to speak at CJS this year.

September 27th
Izumi Nakayama, "Periodic Struggles: Labor, Science, and Menstruation Leave in Modern Japan"

Abstract: In 1947, the Japanese Labor Standards Law enacted menstruation leave, which allows menstruating women to take several days off from work. This unique legislation, found only in a few countries worldwide, remains controversial today, with debates over its medical necessity and discriminatory potential. How did it come about? In the 1920s, Japanese labor unions began demanding menstruation leave (seiri kyūka) for its female members. This talk focuses on labor disputes in Tokyo involving menstruation leave around the late 1920s. By analyzing the material cultures of menstruation and industry-specific concerns, the talk will complicate the narratives of the working women who embodied both productive and reproductive labors.

Izumi Nakayama teaches Japanese history at Furman University in South Carolina. She focuses on Japanese labor and gender history, with particular interest in examining the interconnectedness of capitalist systems and biological reproduction. Her dissertation (Harvard 2007) explored the history of menstruation leave (seiri kyūka) in Japan.

October 4th
Toshio Yamagishi, "A Joint-Societal Experiment of Cross-National Trust in East Asia: Japanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese"

Abstract: Laboratories at Sapporo, Zhuhai, and Taipei were connected via the  Internet, and participants (students at Hokkaido University, San Yat-sen University, and NTU) played a trust game with their compatriots and participants from the other societies. We found: 1) the Japanese did not change their behavior depending on the partner’s origin, whereas the Chinese changed their behavior depending on their partners’ origin, 2) the Japanese participants’ trust of their compatriots and their reciprocation to trust was much lower than the Chinese participants, 3) the Chinese treated the Taiwanese as if they were their compatriots, whereas the Taiwanese trusted the Chinese less than they did the Japanese.

Toshio Yamagishi is a professor of social psychology in the Graduate School of Letters, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Research in Social Sciences at Hokkaido University, Japan. His major research interest is in the analysis of human behavior in terms of their adaptation to social institutions, which he defines as self-sustaining systems of beliefs and incentives.

(Co-sponsored by the U-M Research Center for Group Dynamics.)

October 11th
Karl Friday, "Martial Ways, Whys & Whens: Military Science & Martial Art in Traditional Japan"

Abstract: Scholars and practitioners—particularly Western scholars and practitioners—of Japanese martial art have long-cherished a distinction between bujutsu, training for proficiency in combat, and budō, a process by which such training becomes a means to broader self-development and self-realization. Conventional wisdom tends to cast bujutsu and budō as divergent categories, opposing goals, or sequential achievements in martial training, with significant implications for conceptualizations of what bugei ryūha are and how they function. Ironically, however, popular notions concerning the relationship of bujutsu to budō, stem largely from—and are often rationalized by—a fundamental misunderstanding of the historical development of organized martial training (ryūha bugei).

The familiar story of budō history relates that ryūha began to take shape during the late medieval period, as veteran warriors codified their knowledge and experience, and systemized methods for passing on essential battlefield skills. With the onset of the two-and-a-half-century Pax Tokugawa, the motives and goals underlying bugei practice were recast. Samurai, who no longer expected to spend time on the battlefield, sought and found a more relevant rationale for studying martial art, approaching it not simply as a means to proficiency in combat, but as a means to spiritual cultivation of the self.

Recent research on medieval strategy and tactics, however, casts doubt on some of the key premises underlying this account. This lecture reexamines the evolution of schools and systems of martial art in light of new discoveries concerning the conduct of warfare in Japan. It argues that the connection between martial art and military training is far more tenuous than the received wisdom suggests. Ryūha and the pedagogical devices associated with them, it asserts, did not originate as instruments for teaching prosaic battle skills; their purpose, from the start, was to convey more abstract ideals. There was, in other words, no fundamental shift of purpose in martial art education between the late 16th and mid-17th centuries. Ryūha bugei, I contend, has always centered on budō, and needs to be understood accordingly.

Karl Friday (Ph.D., Stanford, 1989) is Professor of History, Instructional Coordinator, and Associate Head at the University of Georgia. His work on Japanese military institutions and traditions includes Hired Swords: The Rise of Private Warrior Power in Early Japan (Stanford, 1992); Legacies of the Sword: the Kashima Shinryu & Samurai Martial Culture (Hawaii, 1997); Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan (Routledge, 2004); The First Samurai: the Life & Legend of the Warrior Rebel Taira Masakado  (John Wiley & Sons, 2007); and numerous shorter works. 

October 18th
Jonathan Zwicker, "Playbills, Ephemera, and the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Japan"

Abstract: In 1815, Shikitei Sanba wrote manuscript prefaces for two privately produced books: a scrapbook in which he had collected ephemera and broadsheets related to the history of Edo’s raconteurs and a much more ambitious compilation, a sixteen volume collection of playbills that traced the history of the city’s licensed kabuki theaters, the earliest examples dating back a century to the 1720s. As physical objects, both books are deeply suggestive: each is a manuscript comprised entirely of printed matter, a unique object fashioned from the mass produced. These collections are constituted of ephemera, of the commercial and the mundane, but ephemera are here prized not as commerce but as history. Professor Zwicker's talk uses these collections to think about the status of the historical imagination in the early decades of the nineteenth century, a time when the theater loomed large as a metaphor for the broader social world and a time when that world came increasingly to be defined by print and commerce. Yet even as Sanba’s scrapbooks are themselves born of this world of print and commerce, they seek to create a separate register of historical experience - preserving, recording, and recounting a world that was gradually disappearing even as it was being produced.

Jonathan Zwicker is an Assistant Professor of Japanese Culture in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. He is the author of Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama the Novel and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Harvard Asia Center, 2006) and has contributed essays to The Novel (Princeton, 2006) and The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel and Novel Criticism (Blackwell, forthcoming 2009). Professor Zwicker is currently writing a book on “Stage and Spectacle in an Age of Print: Drama and Cultural Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Edo.”

October 25th
Consul General Tamotsu Shinotsuka, "Japanese Diplomacy - Japan U.S. Relations and East Asia Issues"

Abstract: Both the United States and the East Asian countries are vital pillars of Japan’s foreign policy. Tamotsu Shinotsuka, Consul General of Japan in Detroit, will present an in-depth look at the political, economic and cultural aspects of the bilateral relationship which exists between Japan and the United States as one of those cornerstones. He will then turn  to the East Asian pillar, and focus on several current issues concerning Japan’s neighboring countries.

Tamotsu Shinotsuka began his diplomatic career with Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in April 1975 after graduating from Keio University, Faculty of Law. His thoughts and insights stem from the more than thirty years of vast and varied experiences through his foreign service – both abroad and in Japan.

(Co-sponsored the the Consulate-General of Japan in Detroit.)

November 1st
Jennifer Robertson, "Robo sapiens japanicus: Humanoid Robots and the Posthuman Family"

Abstract: Japan accounts for nearly 52% of the world’s share of operational robots and leads the postindustrial world in the development of humanoid robots designed and marketed specifically to enhance and augment human society. Innovation 25, Prime Minister Abe’s visionary blueprint for remaking Japanese society by 2025, with the aim of reversing the declining birthrate and accommodating the rapidly aging population, emphasizes the central role that household robots will play in stabilizing core institutions. In addition to exploring the cultural logic behind the development of autonomous, intelligent, evolutionary humanoid robots, I argue that new bio- and robot technologies are being deployed to reify old or “traditional” values, such as the patriarchal extended family and socio-political conservatism.

Jennifer Robertson is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Native and Newcomer: Making and  Remaking a Japanese City (1991), Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (1998; Japanese trans. 2000), and editor, Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader ( 2004) and A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan (2005). Robertson created and edits the book series, Colonialisms, and is completing a book on eugenic modernity in Japan.

November 8th
David Matsumoto, "The Emotional Expressions of the Japanese"

Abstract: What lies behind the expressions of the Japanese? Do they show the same emotions as others, or are they indeed inscrutable? Cross-cultural research in psychology over the past 40 years has shown how Japanese facial expressions of emotion are both universal and culture-specific. In this presentation, I will present the evidence from previous studies documenting the fact that, when emotions are aroused and there is no reason to modify their appearance because of social circumstances, Japanese display the same facial expressions as do all other people around the world; but depending on context, the Japanese, like all others, learn to modify and manage their universal expressions according to cultural display rules. I will present evidence from recent studies examining spontaneously produced expressions that demonstrate how universal and culture-specific expressions occur rapidly in temporal sequence when emotions are aroused, and describe how naïve observers miss important cues to the emotional states of many. I will also describe findings from recent studies in which Japanese endorse more emotional displays than westerners in some social contexts. Collectively, these studies show that, contrary to popular belief, the Japanese are highly emotional and live a rich and textured emotional life.

David Matsumoto is an internationally acclaimed author and psychologist. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in Psychology and Japanese. He subsequently earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently Professor of Psychology and Director of the Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory at San Francisco State University, where he has been since 1989. He has studied culture, emotion, social interaction and communication for 20 years, and has approximately 400 works in these areas. His books include well-known titles such as Culture and Psychology: People Around the World (Wadsworth; translated into Dutch and Japanese), The Intercultural Adjustment Potential of Japanese, The Handbook of Culture and Psychology (Oxford University Press; translated into Russian), and The New Japan (Intercultural Press; translated into Chinese). He is the recipient of many awards and honors in the field of psychology, including being named a G. Stanley Hall lecturer by the American Psychological Association. He is the series editor for Oxford University Press’ series on Culture, Cognition, and Behavior. He is also an Associate Editor for the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and is on the editorial boards of the Asian Journal of Social Psychology, Asian Psychologist, Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, Motivation and Emotion, Cognition and Emotion, and Human Communication.

November 15th
Maki Fukuoka, "Photographic Immortality: General Nogi, Shizuko, and Their Iei"

Abstract: Around 8pm on September 13th, 1912, the funeral procession for the Emperor Meiji was beginning to leave the Palace, where his body had laid since July 30th. With the sound of the cannons notifying the public of the departure, General Nogi and his wife Shizuko committed suicide, leaving behind words that explicitly stated that they were following the Emperor to his death. This talk focuses on the iei images of the Nogis, which circulated widely in Taisho and Showa Japan; specifically, I will analyze how texts and images interact in different contexts and examine the way in which the effectuated prose and thus the connotative tone of the portraits vacillate despite the fact that the photographic images of the Nogis remain “fixed” and static.

Maki Fukuoka teaches history of visual culture in modern Japan in the U-M Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. She is broadly concerned with the process of building and sharing knowledge through the use of images in 19th and 20th century Japan.This talk is a part of a new project that examines how values of life and death were translated and formulated by the uses of photographic images.

WINTER 2008 SCHEDULE

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Center for Japanese Studies
The University of Michigan
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Phone: 734.764.6307, Fax: 734.936.2948, E-Mail: umcjs@umich.edu