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January 13
Elizabeth Dorn, "In the Name of Reform: Christians and Buddhists in the Meiji Period"
The latter decades of the Meiji period witnessed the development of a vibrant and multifaceted reform movement rooted in the teachings and example of Protestant missionaries. Its participants, overwhelmingly native Christian converts with a small number of Buddhists, left behind a wealth of primary materials about their temperance, anti-prostitution, and relief work, to mention three specific outreach areas. Yet, much of their story remains unknown. As part of an attempt to share it, this talk will discuss the origins of the movement against the backdrop of Meiji history and highlight representative activities and reform arguments. In so doing, this presentation will paint a portrait of reformers not as pawns of the state but as citizens active in the making of modern Japan.
Elizabeth A. Dorn received an M.A. in Japanese Studies from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa in 2003. She joined the History Department at Wayne State University in 2001 and, now an assistant professor, has been active in helping to create a major in Asian Studies there. Her current research focuses on moral and social reform movements during the Meiji period in general and activism by women and Christians in particular. She recently guest edited a special issue of Japanese Religions on Meiji Christianity and is revising her manuscript, “For God, Home, and Country”: Reform and the WCTU in Meiji Japan.
January 20
Christopher Hill, "Naturalist Literature and Social Imaginaries"
The naturalist novel traveled rapidly around the world at the end of the nineteenth century, along with "fellow travelers" such as criminology. The treatment of degenerate bodies in the work of Tayama Katai and other authors reveals that the reception of naturalism in Japan affected both conceptions of society and approaches to representing it.
Christopher Hill is an Assistant Professor of Japanese literature at Yale University, where he focuses on the Meiji and Taishô periods. He is completing National History and the World of Nations, a study of the representation of national history in literature, narrative history, and social thought in late nineteenth-century Japan, France, and the United States.
January 27
James Fujii, "Japanese Local Currency Movements and Globalization"
In 1999 NHK aired a TV program featuring Michael Ende, a German writer of fantasy and amateur economist who saw in alternative currency a means to re-humanize social relations. Just two years later, a nation with four local currencies (chiiki tsūka) had become a society with over four hundred. Literature and social movements will help us contextualize this remarkable phenomenon in terms of globalization.
James Fujii teaches modern Japanese literature at UC Irvine. Presently working on a study of metropolitan rail and Japanese modernity, his interests lie in the intersection of textual/cultural representation and social reality.
February 3
John Davis, Jr., "Culture as Phenotype: The Buraku Issue and the Racial Economy of Human Rights in Japan"
Challenging the conventional definition of human rights as rights to which one is entitled “simply by virtue of being human,” this talk examines the shifting relationship between race, culture, and rights within exhibits of Japan’s first human rights museum. Human rights are explored as a discursive field within which diversity is both embraced and rejected. While some exhibits are organized around a multicultural theme aimed at piercing the hegemonic image of Japan as a homogeneous society, the exhibit on the buraku issue at the heart of the museum reaffirms the notion of the Japanese as a homogenous people. Although the museum aims to promote an understanding of diversity within Japan, essentialized notions of culture and identity unwittingly dispel ethnic minorities from the Japanese nation-state by reinforcing ideas of racial and cultural purity.
John H. Davis, Jr. is an assistant professor of anthropology at Michigan State University where he has been active in building a Peace and Justice studies specialization. His research interests include human rights and Japan’s buraku issue, two pillars of a manuscript he is revising, “The ‘Racial’ Economy of Human Rights: The Buraku Issue in Post-Colonial Japan.” He has also initiated a new research project examining the social impact of the resurgence of “scientific racialism” accompanying new genetic technologies.
February 10
Jennifer Robertson, "Talking Feet: Performance and Performativity in Japanese Eugenics"
In fin-de-siècle Japan, the ideal of “eugenic modernity,“ or the application of scientific concepts about and methods of reproduction as a means to constitute both the nation (New Japan) and its constituent subjects (New Japanese), crystallized in the compound space of nationalism and imperialism. Eugenics provided a context within which the agency of “Japanese blood” became a cipher for specifically modern ideas of disciplinary bio-power. Eugenicists were also keen on utilizing the “science of superior birth” as a script for modern “cultural performances” with a cast of millions. Toward this goal they blended the prescriptive and the performative in deploying eugenic—or “scientific”—knowledge both to interrogate traditional institutions impeding the achievement of modernity and to compel new reflexive behaviors and bodily practices on the part of citizens that would demarcate their allegedly inherent superiority as a “race.”
Jennifer Robertson is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is the general editor of Colonialisms, a new book series from the University of California Press, and the author/editor of five books— Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City (1991); Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (1998); Odoru teikokushugi: Takarazuka ni miru kindai Nihon no sei to bunka no shokuminchifu (2000); Ed., Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader (2004); and Ed,, A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan (2005). She is completing a new book, Blood and Beauty: Eugenic Modernity and Empire in Japan (UC Press).
February 17
Katsumi Nakao, "Colonialism and Anthropology in Japan "
Before World War II, Japanese anthropologists performed ethnographic fieldwork throughout Japan’s colonial empire. During the war, the military used these anthropological resources to acquire strategic geographical and ethnographic information about the colonies. This lecture will explore Japanese ethnographies in the context of colonialism and reexamine the historical relationship between the military and academic spheres in Imperial Japan.
Katsumi Nakao is an Assistant Professor at Osaka City University's Department of Literature and Human Sciences and CJS's Winter 2005 Toyota Visiting Professor. His main areas of study are mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and he teaches courses on the Culture of Asian Cities and Social Anthropology. He focuses mainly on studies of community and social structure, historical anthropology, and colonial history. He began his fieldwork in Shangdong Province, China, and has published several monographs. To date, his major publication is a book titled, Political Structure and Social Change in Modern China (1990).
February 24
Cindi Sturtz-Sreetharan, "Who me? Yeah, you!: Japanese men's use of personal pronouns"
Examinations of the differences between Japanese women’s and men’s speech styles have typically focused on features which are used differentially by women and men. Overwhelmingly, the research has concentrated on women’s linguistic practices. Using data comprised of informal, friendly conversations, Japanese men’s use of first- and second-person pronouns is investigated.
Cindi Sturtz-Sreetharan is a linguistic anthropologist (UC Davis 2001) who focuses on issues of language ideology, linguistic practice, gender, and Japan. She is particularly interested in the study of masculinities. She is currently an assistant professor of Anthropology at CSU Sacramento.
March 10
Sally Hastings, "Women, Intellectuals, and Organized Labor: Kamichika Ichiko and Her Tokyo Constituency, 1953-1969"
In contrast to the usual narrative of women’s failures in politics, the legislative career of Kamichika Ichiko (1888-1981) from 1953 to 1969 demonstrates how cooperation between party and individual allowed an exceptional woman to succeed in politics. In her person, Kamichika links the “New Woman” of the Taisho era with postwar politics.
Sally A. Hastings is an Associate Professor of History at Purdue University and editor of the U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal. Her publications include Neighborhood and Nation in Tokyo, 1905-1937 ( Pittsburgh, 1995) and several book chapters and articles on modern Japanese women. She is now finishing a book on the first generation of women legislators in Japan, 1946-1974.
March 17
Gerald Figal, "Military Bases as Tourist Sites in Okinawa"
The presentation “Military Bases as Tourist Sites in Okinawa” is an overview of the planned third part of my current book project. It deals with the thorny issue of mainland Japanese tourist fascination with U.S. military installations, hardware, and personnel in Okinawa from the 1960s to the present.
Gerald Figal (Ph.D., EALC, Chicago, 1992) is Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University and author of Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Duke UP, 1999). His current project, Beachheads: War, Peace, and Tourism in Postwar Okinawa, considers the shaping of physical and cultural landscapes in Okinawa under tourism development.
March 24
Louise Young, "Tokyo-centrism, the Literati, and Provincial Culture"
The formation of intellectual communities and the growth of literary movements in Japanese cities of the early twentieth century took place within a cultural geography shaped by newly established publishing and educational institutions. This process privileged the capital in both material and ideological ways, and gave rise to the distinctions between the metropolitan and provincial literati.
Louise Young is an associate professor of Japanese history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include World War Two in Asia, comparative imperialism, and most recently, local history and urbanization. Her book Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism won the Arisawa and Fairbank prizes.
March 31
Hiromi Mizuno, “Mobilization of Wonder: Scientific Nationalism and Popular Culture in Interwar and Wartime Japan” (new title)
Despite the common image of wartime Japan as unscientific or anti-scientific, the promotion of science and technology was a major concern for wartime Japan. It, however, required special care because of its potential conflict with the imperial mythology. Using interwar and wartime popular science magazines for children and other materials, this talk examines how Japanese science promoters dealt with this issue to foster scientific nationalism.
Hiromi Mizuno is an assistant professor in the Department of History at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, specializing in the intellectual and cultural history of modern Japan. Her research and teaching interests include: imperialism, nationalism, gender & sexuality, cultural studies of science, immigration, citizenship. She is currently completing a manuscript for "Science, Ideology, Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Intewar and Wartime Japan."
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