2004

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.

February 6th

Death By Association - Burial Societies and the Buddhist Sects

Mark Rowe, Ph.D. Candidate in Religion, Princeton University

This project explores Buddhist responses to the radical transformation of contemporary Japanese burial practices. The ongoing public debate over the status, treatment, and location of the dead brings into sharp focus Buddhism's efforts to maintain its institutional legitimacy amidst major societal changes. A central premise of my work is that changes in burial practices do not merely reflect societal shifts, but may also be the very arena where social norms are first contested.

I am particularly interested in "burial societies," groups created by temples from each of the major sects to cater to the growing number of Japanese who refuse to be interred in family graves, cannot afford their own plots, or lack the requisite descendants to maintain them. Based on bonds of friendship and intent, these societies are challenging established notions of social relations (both pre and post-mortem) and revolutionizing Japanese temple Buddhism.

March 12th

Between Nation and Empire: Imagining the Region in Early 20th Century Tohoku

Hoyt Long, Ph.D. Candidate in Japanese Literature, University of Michigan

For some time now, the theme of "region" has been a subject of intense interest in discussions of Japanese history, economy, and political geography. Owing perhaps to the malleability of the term itself, "region" has served as a useful means to rethink other categories of spatial identification (e.g., nation, empire). My current research, which brings the discussion into the field of literature, uses region to think about how lived spaces have been imagined discursively in terms other than simply urban and rural, center and periphery. Framing this inquiry is the fiction of Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933).

In late 1924, Miyazawa published a collection of children's fiction under the title The Restaurant of Many Orders: Tales from Iihatov. This "Iihatov," a rendering of Miyazawa's native Iwate prefecture into Esperanto, served as the imagined literary region within which his curious narratives unfolded. To what did this puzzling toponym actually refer? What historical ground made such an imaginary region thinkable? My talk will be exploring these questions from two complementary angles. First, I will look at ways in which Iwate and the larger Tohoku area were discursively constructed in newspapers, local publications, and other non-literary material of the Taisho period. Second, I will trace the process by which the concept of Iihatov emerged in Miyazawa's fiction and discuss its relationship to the surrounding discursive and historical context.

Along the way, I hope to speculate on the function of regional identification in the process of nation and empire building, the effects on cultural production of a Tokyo-dominated literary marketplace, and the reasons for why Iihatov has become such a commercial success in present-day Iwate.

October 18th

Capital and Water: The Role of Rivers in Tokyo City Planning, 1880s-1940s

Roderick Wilson, Ph.D. Candidate in Japanese History, Stanford University

For many years now, Tokyo has been much maligned for its lack of greenery and waterside spaces. Typically, blame is cast on the influence of industry and a succession of Kafkaesque bureaucrats and city planners during the city s rapid industrialization from the 1890s onward. But, while the city indeed industrialized, society changed, and the environment suffered, Tokyo also remained a city of canals and rivers through the 1950s. And, these waterways teemed with barges, lighters, and rafts--more than twenty thousand of them in 1920--hauling the fuel and food that fed the city s factories and people. Thus, it was because of, rather than in spite of, the interests of industry and commerce that successive generations of city planners both retained and maintained the city's vast network of waterways.

At November's Modern Japanese History Workshop, I will present my ongoing research about how Tokyo s city planners sought to harness and control the city's waterways for economic growth. This work is part of a chapter in my larger dissertation project entitled Riverwork: A Social and Environmental History of Tokyo s Sumida River, 1850s-1950s, where I show how industrialization produced new social and environmental relations along the city's waterways. Moreover, by showing how Tokyo has always been both more and less than the capital city of Japan--a metonymical place for all things national, I use the history of Tokyo and its rivers to show how the city worked as a nexus amidst several layers of cultural, social, and economic networks--local, regional, national, imperial and international. Specifically, in November's presentation, I will use this approach to show how transnational ideas and technologies about urban planning and civil engineering were institutionalized at a national level and applied locally with dramatic consequences for the entire Kanto region.

December 10th

Staging Noise

Lorraine Plourde, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology, Columbia University

In the early twentieth century, noise came to be viewed as a negative outcome of rationalization and industrialization; a putative symptom of urban and moral decay to be regulated and suppressed. Alongside these anti-noise discourses however, was the adoption of noise by the avant-garde as a new musical aesthetic. The Italian Futurists in particular, seized these new sounds, noises and energies of the modern, particularly those generated by industrial machinery and the technologies of war, in order to liberate music from the structural confines of European classical music. Their fascination with the visceral sensations of war and urban machinery led them to lyrically express these sounds through noise orchestras, concurrent with their actual participation in war. And yet, how is the Futurist legacy, including their Fascist allegiances, maintained, if at all, and how is it taken up by the contemporary avant-garde musical scene in Japan -- a country which is most often invoked as the primary inspiration and source of the contemporary genre of noise (noizu)? This presentation will attempt to untangle this history by examining two moments: the 1913 publication of the manifesto, 'The Art of Noises,' and a 2002 noise orchestra performance at Tama Art University in Tokyo, which featured replicas of the original Futurist noise intoners (intonarumori).