2003

Regarding talks given prior to December 2005:

Abstracts for most talks given prior to 2005 have not been preserved. If you are in possession of information regarding these talks and would like to have it posted here, please contact the current organizer of the workshop.

May 2nd

Practices of Violence, Choices of Interpretations: The Vigilante Massacre Trials of Post-Earthquake Imperial Japan

Jin-hee Lee, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Violent experiences have powerful consequences for the transformation of culture and history. The Great Kantô Earthquake of 1923 brought unprecedented material destruction as well as cultural rupture and social violence to the prewar Japanese empire. The disaster soon became subject to human interpretations and political manipulations. The traumatic experiences of both natural and social violence—the massacre of over six thousand Koreans triggered by rumors of arson, murder, and rebellious riots undertaken by them immediately after the earthquake—opened unusual space for contested discussions over the meaning of a "Japanese public" that was to be protected and promoted in the metropolis. In an attempt to understand the dynamic forces at work in creating and sustaining such social

controversy, I explore the cultural discourse violently brought to imperial Japanese society by the massacre and the subsequent legal prosecution of the vigilantes. I examine discussions on the in/excusibility of the massacre through an inter-contextual reading of primary sources that reflect post-quake contestations over the vigilante trials. I also examine key cultural idioms that frequently appeared in various trial-related records. This study sheds light on, first, the dynamic impact of the presence of the colonized in the metropole, and second, the power of human imagination in practicing and interpreting collective violence.