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September 28
Indra Levy, "Translation, Style, and Gender Representation in the Meiji Literary Field"
Abstract: From the landmark Meiji novels of Ukigumo and Futon to the love story of Shimamura Hôgetsu and Matsui Sumako precipitated by the New Theater productions of New Woman dramas, the figure of the woman with intellectual aspirations played a central role in the development of modern Japanese literature. Through a careful examination of the literary texts and contexts that produced the figure of the female educated elite as the consummate femme fatale of the Meiji period, this presentation will reveal an integral connection between literary translation, the modern Japanese literary style known as genbun-itchi, and gender representation.
Indra Levy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages at Stanford University. Her forthcoming book (September 2006, Columbia University Press) is titled Sirens of the Western Shore: the Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature.
October 5
E. Taylor Atkins, "Ethnography as Self-Reflection: Japanese Colonial Anthropology in Korea"
Abstract: Japanese colonial anthropology in Korea was characterized by two conflicting tendencies, both of which served official colonial objectives only obliquely: ethnographic accounts and images maximized Korean difference to enhance the grandeur of the Japanese empire; but often these descriptions and images minimized Korean difference in accordance with the dictates of the ideology of common ancestry. Though clearly functioning as a means for intelligence-gathering in service to empire and for demonstrating Korean difference, Japanese ethnographies also articulated anti-modern ambivalence, offering concrete images of pre-modern “others” with whom the modern “self” could be readily contrasted.
Taylor Atkins is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of History at Northern Illinois University. His publications include Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Duke UP, 2001; winner of the 2003 John Whitney Hall Prize); Jazz Planet (University Press of Mississippi, 2003); and the "Popular Culture" chapter in the forthcoming Companion to Japanese History (ed. William Tsutsui, Blackwell Publishing, 2006). He is currently working on a book entitled Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze.
October 12
James Bartholomew, "Japan and the Politics of the Nobel Prize"
Abstract: While Japanese elites have been interested in the Nobel Prizes from their earliest years, interest began to intensify in 1981 and has reached a fever pitch during the past five years. Annual symposia with corporate and official sponsorship relating to the Prizes have been held since 1987; books and articles on the subject have appeared. A semi-official declaration of intentions to garner some 30 prizes over the next half century was even published recently. Japan's Nobel successes of recent years have thrown into relief the absence of awards before World War II with allegations of unfairness, racism and cultural arrogance cited to explain earlier failures. This talk draws for context on the "Nobel Fever" of recent years while presenting archival case studies of Japanese Nobel candidacies from the prewar era.
James Bartholomew is a Professor of Modern Japanese History at The Ohio State University. Currently, he has two books in progress with the working titles of Japan and the Nobel Science Prizes: The First Half Century, 1901-1949 and Japanese History Through the Lens of the History of Science.
October 19
William Malm, "Music in the Kabuki Theater"
Abstract: Kabuki was the popular theater of the Edo period and still flourishes. On stage and off stage music fill many functions that will be heard and explained in the lecture.
William Malm is professor emeritus of the University of Michigan School of Music and has been a member of the Center for Japanese Studies since 1960. His interests are in East Asian music, ethnomusicology, instruments, Japanese music and drama, and Japanese socialist music.
October 26
Amy Borovoy, "The Other Self: Japan and the Critique of American Individualism"
Abstract: In postwar American anthropology Japan studies played a key role in denaturalizing individualism and the self-society opposition. In the social sciences, more broadly, Japan has emerged as a compelling site through which to question the universality of social and cognitive structures. The talk will examine how Japan's own response to Eurocentric modernity produced a counter-discourse to American individualism--and how this discourse was used to denaturalize the liberal individual in U.S. Japan studies. It also considers the simultaneous distortions of Japan and the concept of culture itself that have accompanied this project.
Amy Borovoy is an Assistant Professor in the East Asian Studies Department at Princeton University and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (2006-07). Her research focuses on the cultural implications of shifting relationships between family, nationhood, and conceptions of modernity. She is the author of The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependence, and the Politics of Nurturance in Postwar Japan (University of California Press 2005). Her current project explores the role of Japan studies in postwar American anthropology and social thought: Japan Studies and the Anthropology of the Self: Dialogues Between Area Studies and Social Theory.
November 2
Daniel Botsman, "Outcasts, Treaty Ports, and Liberation"
Abstract: This talk explores the background to the Meiji government’s 1871 “Emancipation Edict for Outcasts” (buraku kaihōrei; senmin haishirei), which brought a formal end to the derogatory Tokugawa period status designations, eta and hinin. Specifically, the talk focuses on a single outcast community on the outskirts of the newly opened treaty port of Kobe, and the impact it is supposed to have had on a Tosa samurai named Ōe Taku (1847-1921), who is often credited with having been the main force behind the 1871 edict.
Born in Lae, Papua New Guinea, site of some of the fiercest battles of the Pacific War, Daniel Botsman began studying Japanese at school in Brisbane, Australia. He continued his studies at the Australian National University, Oxford and Princeton, and is currently Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
November 9
William LaFleur, "Research Jitters: The Impact of Pacific War-Time Experiments on Japan's Current Debates About Bioethics"
Abstract: Japan, while highly advanced in both medicine and technology, may be the East Asian nation most skittish about doing the kinds of biotech research some deem “promising.” Why? Although critics of Japan repeatedly refer to a national “amnesia” about Pacific War atrocities, Japanese discussions of bioethics are, in fact, candid about the deeds of Unit 731. Thus, historical experience itself argues for caution, especially where “human subjects” or possible changes to the human species are involved. The contrast with bioethics in the United States is significant—although pressures on Japanese bioethicists today to take a more “relaxed” approach are growing.
William R. LaFleur, the E. Dale Saunders Professor in Japanese Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, taught earlier at Princeton and UCLA. He researches medieval Japanese Buddhism and literature; his recent focus is on comparative social and bioethical questions. Among his ten books are Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japanand (in press) and Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research.
November 16
Lori Meeks, "The Rules Revisited: Medieval Monastic Guidelines for Interacting with the Opposite Sex"
Abstract: Canonical Buddhist texts are known for their admonitions against entanglements with members of the opposite sex. But social obligations, both inside and outside the monastery, required the typical priest to engage in regular interactions with a variety of women: nuns and female novices, local laywomen, wealthy female patrons, and female members of their own families. How, then, did monastic leaders demarcate those interactions required by social or religious obligation from those that might end in the breaking of precepts? Using documents associated with Japan’s thirteenth-century Shingon-Ritsu movement, the speaker will examine the ways in which particular vinaya revivalists attempted to interpret canonical guidelines for relations between the sexes so as to accommodate the realities of lived social practice.
Lori Meeks is an Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. This year she is on a JSPS-sponsored research leave in Japan, where she is finishing a manuscript on Hokkeji and the reinvention of female monasticism in medieval Japan.
November 30
Peter Grilli, "Japan-U.S. Cultural Exchange: Reflections on a Career Spent In-Between"
Abstract: This talk will focus on the speaker's lifelong work as an advocate of cultural exchanges between Japan and the U.S. Mr. Grilli grew up in Japan, and has been a writer, teacher, consultant and filmmaker specializing in Japan. In his work for the Japan Societies of New York and Boston he has been responsible for major presentations of Japanese classical and modern performance events, Japanese film series, exhibitions of Japanese art, and other events. He will speak about his long career in exchanges between Japan and the U.S., and his extensive experience with Japanese artists, writers, actors, musicians, film directors. It is through the arts, he believes, that Japan has communicated best with the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Peter Grilli is President of the Japan Society of Boston, the oldest of more than forty-five Japan-America Societies in the United States. From 1975 to 1986, he was Director of Education, Film and Performing Arts programs at the Japan Society (NY) and from 1996 to 2000, he was Director of The Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University. He is also a writer and consultant specializing on Japan and relations between Japan and the United States, with particular focus on cultural affairs, film, media and communications, film, and cultural exchange programs. In 2003, Mr. Grilli received the Third Class Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Japanese Government in recognition of his activities in cultural exchanges between Japan and the United States.
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