Modern Japan History Workshop

 Upcoming Talks

March 31st, 2025 -- ONLINE @ 18:00 JST

Meeting ID: 869 2232 1071

Passcode: Will be posted in the banner at the top of this page from March 28th onwards

A noisy engagement: Analysis of the cultural engagement in Japanese noise music

Luca Proietti (SOAS)

Since its experiments in post-war Japan, Japanese noise music has served as a unique conduit for cultural engagement, connecting avant-garde experimentation with deep-rooted traditions and contemporary subcultures. From the early experiments of Group Ongaku to the radical performances of artists like Akita Masami (Merzbow), Sachiko M, and Toshimaru Nakamura, noise music has functioned as both a medium of artistic exploration and a space for reinterpreting Japanese cultural narratives. This engagement manifests through diverse stylistic approaches—some artists evoke the energy of traditional festival culture (matsuri), as seen in the work of Ōtomo Yoshihide and Pika, where ritualistic intensity and sonic chaos mirror communal celebrations. Others integrate noise into contemporary pop culture, such as Hijokaidan’s collaborations with idol groups like BiS and Vocaloid Hatsune Miku, bridging underground experimentalism with the mainstream and expanding the audience for noise. By embracing the dynamic interplay between tradition and modernity, Japanese noise music challenges aesthetic conventions while fostering new cultural dialogues. Through its ability to navigate and reinterpret Japan’s artistic, historical, and social landscapes, it emerges as a form of engagement that transcends musical boundaries. This paper explores how noise music functions as an evolving cultural force, engaging listeners with sound in ways that are immersive, provocative, and deeply embedded in the Japanese artistic experience.

April 14th, 2025

“National” Culture as Power: Travel, Internationalism, and Development of State-led Cultural Relations for the Japanese Empire and Nation, 1910s-1930s

Jason Butters (Columbia University)

This paper examines how foreign tourism to Japan and state-led efforts to promote it shaped the use of culture and cultural relations for state power. It represents an extract from the first half of the author’s ongoing dissertation project. In it, the author demonstrates his reexamination of the Imperial Japanese Government’s Japan Tourist Bureau (est. 1912; JTB) as an early experiment in the use of state-led cultural relations with significant ramifications for the more widely remembered and well-studied cultural diplomacy and propaganda institutions of the 1930s and after such as the Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai (1938 Showa Kenkyūkai, (1933-‘40), Imperial Rule Assistance Association (1940-’45). It shows how Japanese government officials working on tourism drew from contributors and audiences across cultural, national, and imperial boundaries, using a multinational network of non-state groups and individuals while appropriating the methods and aims of cultural internationalism and transnational cultural relations for nationalist and imperialist aims. Its findings relate to recent scholarship on internationalism, cultural relations, and state power in the global twentieth century, to the history of cultural diplomacy and of foreign political thought in this period, as well as to the international history of Japanese cultural nationalism and state-led uses of culture for power across the twentieth century.

May 12th, 2025 -- ONLINE

Tatiana Sulovska (UCLA)

June 2nd, 2025

Exploring the Roles of Mizunoe Takiko and Kasagi Shizuko in Shaping a Female-Driven Post-War Popular Culture

Michael Furmanovsky (Ryukoku University)

Mizunoe Takiko (1915-2009) and Kasagi Shizuko (1914-1985), born within 6 months of each other in the third year of the Taishō era, both experienced a period of around 2-3 years in which they were arguably the most well-known woman in Japan. Despite being members of the same entertainment organization, the Shochiku Girls Opera Company and occasionally working together, the two women’s careers took quite different trajectories. Today Mizunoe, raised in Tokyo, is generally accepted as the inventor of the otokoyaku (cross-dressing male) role in Japanese musical theater history while Kasagi, from Osaka, is the known for being the first Japanese swing jazz vocalist as well as the woman whose Boogie Woogie songs and comedy roles in movies, “cheered up” Japan in the immediate post-war years. While Kasagi’s life and impact on Japanese popular culture recently received an enormous boost from NHK’s 2023 Asadora (Morning Drama) fictionalizing her life, Mizunoe is today less well known despite an extrordinary career as one of the first female film producers in Japan and the woman who brought Ishihara Shintaro Ishihara's two pioneering new wave movies Taiyō no Kisetsu (Season of the Sun) and Kurutta kajitsu (Crazed Fruit) to a mass audience in the mid-1950s. This presentation will examine their careers as part of the presenter's larger study of the role of women in Japanese pre- and post-war music, film and fashion.

July 7th, 2025 -- ONLINE

Mapping a Lost Era’s Techno-Imagination and Cinematic Visions of the End of the World: An Anthropological Exploration of Japanese Bio-Apocalypticism in the Ushinawareta Nijūnen Sci-Fi Media (1988 – 2002)

Imen Bouziri Boullosa (Complutense University of Madrid)

During the ushinawareta nijūnen (lost decades), a period of economic recession, geopolitical turmoil and ecological disasters for Japan, we witnessed the surge of a wave of deeply apocalyptic and eco-critical Japanese media. These worlds and narratives, ascribed to speculative science fiction (cli-fi and postapocalyptic fiction), have moulded some of the first techno-imaginaries of the 21 st century on a global scale.

We present G.A.I.A.: Great Atlas of Apocalyptic Images; a colossal cartographic mapping of the morphology of this disaster imagination where the main symbolic and mythical formations -themes, figures and motifs- that constantly ensure its reproduction -as well as its historical evolution- are thoroughly radiographed and minutely dissected revealing the inner workings of a complex ‘biologized’ cinematic imagining we have coined as ‘Bio-apocalypticism’. The rich readings that the ATLAS unlocks ultimately reveal the existence of a common system of onto-epistemological assumptions which deeply permeate these catastrophic representations inherited from a long tradition of Eastern Asian thought and philosophies and their cyclical, open, processual, relational, and non-dual conceptions of Being and Reality. Ultimately, at the very core of the research is the fundamental anthropological issue of imagination as we propose a ‘media archaeology of knowledge’ or a ‘media epistemology’ attained in and through images.

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/