Modern Japan History Workshop
CALL FOR PRESENTERS: Details here. For more information, please contact the organizer.
Upcoming Talks
Thursday, July 18th (ONLINE) @ 18:00 JST
Miyazaki Tōten and Naniwabushi: The Popular Performance of Dissent during the Russo-Japanese War
Joel Littler (University of Oxford)
Meeting ID: 836 9159 6545
Passcode: Please see banner at the top of this page
Joel Littler discusses his latest article, ‘A Song of Fallen Flowers: Miyazaki Tōten and the making of naniwabushi as a mode of popular dissent in transwar Japan, 1902–1909’, published in Modern Asian Studies. The popular genre of sung and spoken performance—naniwabushi—was the biggest ‘craze’ during the first decade of the twentieth century in Japan.
In this talk, Joel uncovers how Miyazaki Tōten (1870–1922), a revolutionary and thinker who became a naniwabushi balladeer, was instrumental in the rise of naniwabushi as a popular art form constituting a democratic site of dissent during the Russo-Japanese transwar period (1902–1909). He uses a transwar frame to examine how Miyazaki Tōten created ‘new’ naniwabushi to deliberately link the techniques and rhetoric of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement from the 1880s to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Tōten used naniwabushi to articulate his concepts of autonomous freedom, nihilism, and anarchist communitarianism in a time udsually characterized by the heavy suppression of dissent. The study of Tōten’s naniwabushi performances counters the impression of the wholesale embrace of nationalism and support for Japanese imperialism and shows how Japan’s urban poor engaged in political discourse through popular entertainment that was critical of Japanese expansion.
September 2024
Lance Pursey (Waseda University)
October 2024
Simon Partner (Duke University)
November 2024
Emily Lu (Florida State University)
Directions to the Workshop
MJHW meets in Building 10, Rm. 301 at Sophia University's Yotsuya Campus.
The closest station is Yotsuya on the JR, Tokyo Metro Namboku or Marunouchi Lines. For more information on access see: https://www.sophia.ac.jp/eng/aboutsophia/access/campus/