2005

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 13th

Pinning Down the Floating World: Prostitution and Politics in Tokugawa Era Niigata

Amy Stanley, PhD Candidate, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

The image of prostitution in Tokugawa Japan has been dominated by the outsized presence of the Yoshiwara, the famous walled-in pleasure quarter in Edo. As a result, we are often left with the impression that prostitutes and the pleasure quarters occupied their own physical and conceptual space, separate from everyday life and distinct from the rest of the city, where prostitution was ostensibly forbidden.

In contrast, in the port town of Niigata, there was no designated pleasure quarter, and brothels stood side by side with other businesses. Since brothel owners did not enjoy a monopoly in any district of the town, various forms of prostitution flourished in different neighborhoods. This presented a dilemma for officials in Niigata -- should they attempt to change the status quo and limit prostitution to one area, or should they continue on their path of non-interference?

In my talk, I will examine the debates over prostitution in Niigata, which engaged brothel owners, civic-minded commoners, town elders, domain administrators and eventually bakufu officials. In their arguments, they took into account the economic interests of the port, brothels' obligations to their neighbors, the proper place of women, and Confucian ideals of good government. During the Tempo reforms, when Niigata became a bakufu territory, these questions took on an added significance in an atmosphereof intense political pressure. In examining these debates and their eventual resolution, I will reflect on how officials and commoners balanced idealism and pragmatism, and how they considered prostitution as part of the everyday (nichijoteki) social and economic life of the town.

July 8th

Fastest, Highest, Strongest: Science and Technology at the Tokyo Olympics

Paul Droubie, PhD Candidate in History, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign

The 1964 Tokyo Olympics were a crucial benchmark for Japan's return to the international community. It was the first Olympiad in Asia (no one counted the Melbourne Games as Asian) and is widely viewed as a great success. One of the main tropes for these Games was science and technology. They were the first to be broadcast live, in color, across the world via satellite. The Shinkansen, the world's fastest train, was completed in time for it, as was the first mass-transit monorail. The New Otani hotel, constructed at breakneck speed for some 60,000 foreign spectators, was Asia's largest. Sports themselves were increasingly becoming scientific in training methods, as can be seen in Japan's "Athlete Strengthening Policy". The Tokyo Olympics are thus a perfect lens through which to explore Japan's self-identity as it relates to science and technology during the period of high growth and reemergence on the world stage.

In this paper, I will be exploring science and technology as a crucial aspect of Japanese national identity. I use a wide variety of official documents, events and planning, but more importantly, the popular discourse concerning the Olympics. Drawing on theories of nationalism, identity, and discourse, I hope to demonstrate that science and technology was one of the uncontroversial themes that linked Japanese across political and ideological barriers, and thus formed part of a Japanese national identity.

August 5th

Getting A Head: A Tokugawa Martyr and Local Identity in Modern Japan

Michael Wert, PhD Candidate in History at the University of California Irvine

Shortly after the Meiji Restoration three villagers sneaked onto the grounds of the Fumonin Temple to steal the decapitated head of their former fief lord and okugawa official, Oguri Tadamasa. Oguri had previously joked with one of his retainers, "If I end up like Ii Naosuke, my hope is that my body and head will be buried together." In early twentieth century different entities in the Kanto region claimed possession of Oguri' head, and with it, the right to appropriate and create Oguri's legacy. Oguri was similar to other figures who died during the Restoration years whose absence from the political realities of Meiji Japan allowed later generations to portray them as models for contemporary society.

Oguri was one of the most active reformers during the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate, and many of his projects were later adopted by the Meiji government. As a leader of the hawk faction within the shogunate, however, he had many enemies, and was thus one of the few major shogunate figures killed by the Meiji loyalists.

This paper contextualizes the competing, and sometimes cooperating, attempts to use Oguri's image as a form of local identity from the pre-war period to contemporary Japan. In particular, I argue that current Oguri supporters are trying to establish Oguri as a national historic figure thus providing an alternative to the pro-Meiji Restoration view of history. In doing so they are laying claim to a vision of national history that provides opportunities for regional variation within a larger, yet diverse, whole.

December 2nd

Peasants into Japanese? The Japanese Village in the Russo-Japanese War

Simon Partner, Associate Professor of History at Duke University

Eugen Weber, in his classic work “Peasants into Frenchmen,” describes the integration of France's diverse regional cultures into a national whole, in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. In the case of Japan, the Russo-Japanese war (1904-5) is often portrayed as a turning point in the absorption of the Japanese people into a national community. The successful prosecution of the war is prima facie evidence for the existence by this time of a nation of patriotic citizens willing to sacrifice for the national cause. But to what extent had the lives of rural Japanese (accounting for 80% of Japan's population) actually been transformed by the forces of industrial modernity and state-led nation-building? The standard analysis - Weber's and others' - points to a handful of factors in the process of integration: industrialization and the concurrent pulling of villages into the consumer and producer culture; communications and transportation, particularly the railways; organized religion; conscription; compulsory education; and the printed word, especially newspapers. In my talk, I will examine some of these factors, and try to draw some conclusions about the relationship of rural citizens to the modern state.