2006
January 13th
Dream of a New Order: The State of Art Organisations in Wartime Japan
Maki Kaneko, Doctoral Student in World Art Studies and Museology at the University of East Anglia
Within the annals of Japanese art history, the war-time period (1937-1945) has been broadly characterised by the oppressive cultural control imposed by the pro-military government. Given this generalization, very little has been said about wartime cultural politics, and the exhausted notion of this period as a ‘dark valley’ has been sustained. While I do not wish to downplay the impacts of its oppressive cultural regulations, the Japanese government did not merely rely on coercion to control the art world. Artists sometimes willingly co-operated with the authorities. A close analysis of the processes through which the government won artists’ consent, and an examination of how artists became involved with state-oriented cultural programmes is necessary to deepen our understanding of this controversial period.
To explore the active interplay between artists and the state during the war, this paper focuses on artists’ and authorities’ reforms of art organisations (bijutsu dantai). Through the first half of the twentieth century, art organisations, both private and public, sponsored juried exhibitions. These were important platforms through which artists acquired social recognition while experimenting with new art forms. In the 1930s, competition between several art organisations was recognised by artists as problematic, because it created friction within the art world. When Japan went to war in 1937, the political leaders also addressed the necessity of reform within the art organisations, since the competitive nature of the art world was believed an obstacle to their mass mobilisation policy.
In my talk, I will explore how artists and authorities collaboratively reformed the art organisations, and I will examine the gradual process that led to the consolidation of the entire art world into quasi-governmental art organisations. My paper will also cast light on one unique art group established at the very end of the war, the Art Unit for Promoting the Munitions Industry (1944-1945), whose activities broke a number of conventions by responding to the widespread call for a new kind of art group for the nation and the war.
February 3rd
Edo Haikai Poetry: Daimyo Salons and Commercial Markets
David Cannell, Doctoral Student in the Center for Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine
One of the remarkable and strange things about haikai poetry is the highly social nature of the linked-verse genre. It certainly flies in the face of individualistic conceptions of poetry that abound in our modern world. By design, linked-verse composition arises from a multiplicity of poets gathered together in the same place at the same time for a common purpose in what is usually called the za. Moreover, a seemingly byzantine set of codes called the shikimoku developed to regulate not only textual composition of linked-verse but also the social and interpersonal interaction between the poets. The entry point into this world was generally through the institution of the master-disciple relationship. Clearly, to practice haikai was more than just composing poems because haikai by its very generic nature was as much about linking people as it was about linking verses, which gave it a built-in susceptibility to other social uses (heteronomy). I look at two cases from the Genroku era (1688-1704): haikai centered on daimyo wealth and haikai as a commercial market.
Haikai poets, even the most distinguished among them, were seen as a part of the ukiyo floating world, and haikai itself roughly comparable to kabuki. A contemporary record called Hanamiguruma, or The Flower-viewing Carriage, goes so far as to compare the major haijin of the Genroku period to the various ranks of courtesans of the red-light district. (This was not parody except perhaps in the lightest of senses). So it may come as a surprise to learn that high-ranking samurai such as daimyo and hatamoto really got into haikai, not only participating as poets but also as patrons, and in the case of the Naito of Iwaki han, even forming a salon supported by daimyo funds and largely devoted to haikai activities. Why? For some samurai it can only be described as a kind of “slumming” while for commoner haikai poets the daimyo salon became a means for entering into the samurai estate. The focus here will be on the Naito Salon and its representative haijin Mizuma Sentoku, with some overtures to the urban recluse poet Matsuo Basho.
However, for Genroku haikai poetry and succeeding generations, the daimyo affiliation was only one, and perhaps the lesser, of two developments in the field. The new commercial market that characterized much of late 17th century Japan made inroads into haikai practices as well. For Genroku haikaithe new market was maeku-zuke, a verse-capping variant of the longer linked-verse form that traditionally had been a form of training (keiko) among the master’s ensemble of practices but which now had come into its own as a viable haikai genre. The maeku-zuke market consisted of haikai masters looking for a way to make a living by scoring haikai verse and of new poets from the commoner ranks flush with surplus cash but little background in traditional learning. Maeku-zuke was simple, uncluttered by many of the shikimoku rules that governed linked-verse haikai; it was convenient, in that it didn’t necessarily require poets to be present in one location to compose a poem; and you didn’t have to sign your life away by apprenticing to a master. In the eyes of some this was haikai on the cheap, but what it lacked in formal discipline (even aesthetic quality) it more than made up for in geographical reach. The new footprint of haikai would, after Genroku, extend along commercial networks making sarashi business trips in the provinces something more than just a commercial transaction. One of the haikai masters who tapped into this new haikai market was Kishimoto Chowa, a leading Edo haijinwho at one time was affiliated with the Naito Salon but later fell on hard times and turned to maeku-zuke in order to preserve his haikai career.
March 2nd
Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, and Anxiety in Contemporary Japan
David Leheny, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
In 1999, responding to international concerns about the sexual exploitation of children, the Japanese Diet voted unanimously to ban child prostitution and child pornography. Two years later, in the wake of 9/11, Junichiro Koizumi's cabinet radically shifted government counterterrorism policy toward new military solutions, and away from an earlier emphasis on law enforcement. Although they seem unrelated, these two policies reveal the unintended consequences of attempts to enforce international norms at the national level.
In this presentation about his new book, Think Global, Fear Local, David Leheny posits that when states abide by international agreements to clamp down on transnational crime and security concerns, they respond not to an amorphous international problem but rather to more deeply held and proximate fears.
Although opponents of child prostitution and pornography were primarily concerned about the victimization of children in poor nations by wealthy foreigners, the Japanese law has been largely used to crack down on "compensated dating," in which middle-class Japanese schoolgirls date and sometimes have sex with adults. Many Japanese policymakers viewed these girls as villains, and subsequent legal developments have aimed to constrain teenage sexual activities as well as to punish predatory adults. Likewise, following changes in the country’s counterterrorism policy, some Japanese leaders have redefined a host of other threats—especially from North Korea—as "terrorist" menaces requiring a more robust and active Japanese military.
Drawing from sources as diverse as parliamentary debate records and contemporary film and literature, Leheny uses these two very different cases to argue that international norms can serve as political tools, allowing states to enhance their coercive authority.
More information about the book, including reviews, is available from Cornell University Press. The book can be ordered here.
April 21st
Remixed in Japan
Melody Weinstein, recent MA graduate, School of Journalism, New York University
From its origin in the Bronx, Hip Hop has become a global phenomenon that has taken root in countries all over the world, including Japan. For more than ten years, hip hop has greatly influenced Japanese youth culture, and continues to affect the lives of many young people. Through hip hop, they have been given a voice and a new way to view the world. Through an eclectic cast of characters, this film recounts the explosion of hip hop in Japan and how it has given rise to a new forms of self expression. The film follows, among others, a female graffiti artist from Shizuoka, a popular rapper from Tokyo, an accomplished music producer, and an international hip hop DJ as they explore what hip hop means in today’s Japan.
The list of characters include: DJ Yutaka, Sphere of Influence, Verbal (M-Flo), Scha Dara Parr, DJ Kaori, Shiro, Riko Sakurai, Afra, Big Z, Co-Key, Zulu Nation Japan and more. Some of these people will join us in dicussion after screening the film, which is 52 minutes long.
http://www.remixedinjapan.com/
May 12th
Exporting (Double) Standards and Western Morality: Compulsory Venereal Disease Testing In the Japanese Treaty Ports, 1860-1890
Ann Marie Davis, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles
The first mandatory syphilis exams in Japan occurred during the summer months of 1860 in Nagasaki, following the arrival of a Russian naval war vessel, the Posadnik. Based on extraterritoriality agreements negotiated in the Treaty of Kanagawa (1854), the ship’s captain ordered the construction of an unprecedented brothel with in-house clinics, ensuring medically inspected, “syphilis free” prostitutes. Although bakufu and medical officials were originally appalled by the exams, the system eventually won influential converts who came to recognize syphilis as capable of “destroying the strength of the nation.”
Within a decade, mandatory syphilis exams became an integral component of Japan’s incipient “modern” public health system. Aiming to build a strong military and wealthy nation (fukoku kyōhei), the new Meiji government adapted technologies observed on the European continent and imposed in British Lock Hospitals, built specifically to monitor Japanese prostitutes servicing European sailors. Based on Western parameters for preserving imperial military strength, the Lock Hospital system was eventually implemented in over 150 syphilis hospitals (baidoku byōin) throughout Japan, including ports on the Asian continent acquired by the end of the Meiji period.
My presentation explores how European attitudes and goals regarding the regulation of prostitution fundamentally shaped early Meiji public health strategies. In doing so, I identify ideas and policies that European officials imposed on Japan to stem contagion in ports such as Yokohama, Nagasaki, Kobe, and Yokosuka. By the time the Meiji government had fully incorporated foreign technologies of mandatory testing, human rights movements were abolishing the system in Europe and calling the Japanese version immoral, inhumane, and uncivilized. My research will illuminate how competing spheres of influence mobilized such conflicting discourses and technologies for the surveillance of prostitutes.
June 2nd
A Nation of Landscapes: Shiga Shigetaka and Modern Knowledge in Early Meiji Japan
Nobuko Toyosawa, Doctoral Candidate in East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
My talk will focus on the construction of national space in late nineteenth century Japan—a time when boundaries and relations with neighboring nations were both still in flux. The various topographic writings and maps produced during this time indicate a rising interest in locales as components of an ideal "nation." I will argue that a lively written discourse on definitions of the "national essence (kokusui)" in the 1880s marked an important moment, leading to the emergence of a unified national space by the twentieth century.
A prominent participant in this discursive trend was Shiga Shigetaka (1863-1927), a journalist, geographer, and member of the Seikyôsha intellectuals, who sought to produce a national community through instilling a sense of "nation-ness." Shiga’s publication entitled, On Japanese Landscape (Nihon fûkei-ron 1894), on which I will focus in this talk, presented Japan’s landscape as the most beautiful in the world. Appearing in print as Japan was engaged in the “national” crisis of the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), Shiga’s treatise quickly established itself as a must-read book for the trueJapanese citizen. On Japanese Landscape was part of a concerted—if not always coordinated—movement to create a unified atmosphere of "national" togetherness.
This presentation centers on the analysis of topographic records written during the early Meiji period, specifically on guidebooks or "annai-ki." I examine these annnai-ki in relation to the rise of modern knowledge of “geography” and demonstrate the ways in which Meiji annnai-ki represented a departure from the Tokugawa tradition of famous place texts (meisho zue). By absorbing newly introduced modern knowledge such as physical geography and mineralogy, while considering also the convenience of modern transportation systems, Meiji annai-ki came to introduce the “local” in a new light. It is my contention that Shiga’s Nihon fûkei-ron gathered these many representations of the local into a unified conception of a single nation. Moreover, his method of theorizing the nation’s beautiful landscape took the form of modern, scientific language, appropriate to the ideals of Civilization and Enlightenment.
July 7th
Wang Yiting and the Art of Sino-Japanese Exchange
Walter Davis, Doctoral Candidate in the History of Art, The Ohio State University
Although history has nearly forgotten, China and Japan enjoyed a period of intense artistic exchange during the early decades of the twentieth century. I will discuss the work of one of the most important contributors to this intercourse, the Chinese painter and calligrapher Wang Yiting (1867-1938). A businessman, Buddhist, philanthropist, and civic leader, Wang was recognized by his contemporaries as one of China’s foremost artists, and he applied his managerial talent and social capital to the development of Chinese art. He also vigorously promoted China’s artistic engagement with Japan. He painted for Japanese friends and visitors to Shanghai, exhibited his works in Tokyo and Osaka, and introduced a number of his Chinese contemporaries to the Japanese art world. He was a founding member of several Sino-Japanese artistic societies, and he was instrumental in organizing Sino-Japanese art exhibitions. After his death, however, Wang effectively disappeared from public discourse in China, where many of his associations violated post-war sensitivities. My presentation will reconsider this neglected figure by focusing on the least understood component of his artistic activity, his involvement with Japan. I will argue that Wang’s work was both of and for his time and that today it enables us better to grasp China and Japan’s interwoven cultural history during the early twentieth century.
August 4th
Deferred Benefits, Romance, and the Specter of Middle-Aged Divorce
Allison Alexy, Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology, Yale University
In recent years, anxieties about the state of Japanese marriages and families have crystallized in a new direction. Instead of the decades-old worries about young people who are refusing or delaying marriage and children, public and media anxiety shifted to focus on marriages between middle-aged people. Previously understood as problematic but stable, these marriages are suddenly symbols of the problems in Japanese relationships, and the potential for familial changes to radically reshape society.
Two events immediately exacerbated these new worries. In the winter of 2005, Asahi television broadcast a program called "Middle-aged divorce" [Jukunen rikon], taking the title from the phrase commonly used to describe divorces later in life. The show was a surprise hit, receiving almost a twenty percent share, and told the story of a family in which a middle-aged mother divorces her husband on the very day he retires. Asahi and other networks capitalized on the popularity of this show with a spate of broadcasts concerning similar topics, which ran the gamut from pseudo-documentaries about middle-aged married life to advice shows where an all-male audience was asked to stand and pledge to change their actions in order to avoid divorce ("I will say 'thank you' and really mean it!").
The popularity of such shows can be understood in the context of pension law changes passed in the Diet in June 2004, which makes it possible for ex-spouses to access up to half of their former partner's pension. Reflecting the gendered patterns of work in Japan, this means that divorced housewives will be able to petition for a substantial part of their ex-husband's pension, making divorce more financially feasible. Critically, although this pension change has already been passed, it will not go into effect until April 2007. Thus we are all left waiting, wondering how and when the specter of middle-aged divorce might become manifest.
In personal terms, these questions have changed what is possible and desirable for many couples close to retirement age. Although money and financial independence are often catalysts for considering divorce, they are far from the only concerns. Instead, conversations about middle-aged marriages often revolve around ideas about selfhood, commitment, romance, fun, obligation, communication, and fatigue. Based on ethnographic interviews with both men and women, and participant observation in multiple support groups, this presentation considers how people are thinking about themselves and their marriages at a moment when none of us know what's going to happen.
September 1st
Rabble with Rifles: Military Reform and Status in Bakumatsu Japan
D. Colin Jaundrill, Doctoral Candidate in History, Columbia University
Just before its collapse in 1868, the Tokugawa bakufu effectively demolished one of the main pillars of its administration: distinctions among its own samurai. The bakufu's band of direct retainers contained over a dozen smaller units, each of which had once fulfilled a particular military role in Tokugawa Ieyasu's 17th century army. However, over the course of the next two hundred years, many of these roles became more bureaucratic than military. The perceived emergence of a western threat in the 19th century changed everything. Calls for military reform raised the specter of more sweeping social change. Seemingly procedural questions about the utility of extant military technologies and the possibility that commoners might play a supporting role in operations led to more fundamental questions about the applicability of status to the battlefields of the modern era. In 1867, with its very existence on the line, the bakufu took drastic measures by abolishing many of its samurai status groups and organizing them into rifle companies patterned on Western models.
These steps were the culmination of nearly a decade of military reforms. Beginning in the 1850s, the bakufu and several domains (han) embarked on a course of military modernization that gradually undermined the justification for distinctions within the samurai estate and the distinction between samurai and commoner. This presentation explores how the military reforms enacted by the bakufu and the various domains during the Bakumatsu period (1853-1868) grew from the mere technological improvement of samurai musket units (teppôtai) to the rejection of the samurai's centuries-old status as the sole practitioner of warfare.
October 20th
Describing Multiculturalism, an investigation of Buraku politics
Joseph Hankins, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago
My project examines how the conditions of possibility of Buraku political action are structured in present-day Japan. I am currently one year into a proposed year and a half of fieldwork researching two forms of internationalization with respect to this primary question. One form of internationalization is the neo-liberalization of industries that have historically underpinned Buraku discrimination; and the other is the internationalization of a multicultural discourse of human rights and minority group rights.
The Japanese government's present relationship with the Buraku liberation movement has made the government hesitant to accede to international and WTO pressure to liberalize industries such as leather production. However, as the 2005 Hong Kong meeting of the WTO made evident, cries for exactly this type of free-trade agreement are increasing in magnitude, and large concessions are being made. Tanneries are either being replaced entirely with imports from abroad, or they are being filled with foreign workers, who are immune to the Buraku label. As a result, the criterion of occupational association, by which someone might be recognized as Buraku, is becoming increasingly mediated by other such identifying criteria as spatial or familial ties to Buraku stigma. In this process more and more people do not have any idea that they might be 'Burakumin' because their great grandfather once worked in a tannery. A Buraku liberation organization then finds itself trying to mobilize a population that increasingly may not recognize itself as Buraku and furthermore may reject that recognition entirely.
On the other hand, due to successes of the Buraku Liberation League and partner organizations in India and Bangladesh, in 2002 the UN introduced to its list of recognized forms of discrimination a new category of discrimination - "discrimination based on work and descent." What exactly this discrimination is, how it will be investigated, and how it will be addressed are currently topics of heated debate among affected communities and within the UN. Similarly, this past February, the UN special rapporteur on racism released his first report on the cultural status of minority groups, racism, and xenophobia in Japan. These UN-level moves are but two of several indications, at many levels domestic and international, of the rising stakes of a certain multicultural mode of recognizing minorities. More specifically, they are indications of the rising stakes of a certain multicultural mode of recognizing minorities in a heretofore 'homogenous' Japan.
My research aims at exploring the presumptions, effects, and the stakes of this incitement to multiculturalism (and to a certain kind of minority-ness) within Buraku political argument as it comes up against populations who find themselves progressively more, and in different contexts, able to pass as non-Buraku. In getting at this question, I am particularly interested in the role the state, social norms, and kinship come to play within political argument, the ways in which pain is marshaled as evidence of discrimination, and the types of freedom emergent in these arguments. Pulling parables from my fieldwork with a tannery and with a Buraku-founded human rights NGO, my presentation will touch on a combination of these issues. I will also discuss the complications that researching a movement with a prescriptive political project raises for a discipline with claims to a blankly descriptive method.
November 10th
Families Coping with Mental Illness: Stories from the US and Japan
Yuko Kawanishi, Associate Professor at the International Student Exchange Center, Tokyo Gakugei University
When a loved one, family member, spouse, or close friend develops a mental illness, the profound changes to the afflicted person resonate through the family with unique and life-altering consequences, often with as great an impact on them as on the person suffering with the illness. Family members have to adapt and make changes to lifestyles and future plans, and often face depression, stress, and other secondary issues, as they learn to cope with a new situation. And today, despite immense medical and political progress and open debate on mental disorders, attention is still overwhelmingly focused on the treatment of the patient, while family members are relegated to adjunctive roles in treatment, and sometimes even viewed as barriers to effective therapy and recovery. Seemingly in contradiction with the interpersonal nature of most mental disorders (not to mention the social stigma that affects the family as well as the individual), a patient-centered approach to treatment remains the most common perspective.
This talk will approach these issues from the perspective of the family members, giving a voice to the experiences of families coping with such a profound change to one of their own. It will look at how families initially react to a diagnosis, how they struggle through shock, anger, and trauma, adapt to new circumstances, and cope with their situation. Material is drawn from my own original research and work with families in the United States and Japan, and presents a cross-cultural comparison of families' experiences in both countries. While there are of course variations in the experiences of American and Japanese families, I find that there is considerably more in common. Thus the talk will present a series of potentially universal themes of human resilience, ability to adapt and cope with significant trauma and tragedy to the family, and the strength of the family unit.
December 1st
Guerilla Warfare in Postwar Japan: The Ogouchi Sanson Kosakutai, 1951-1952
Kenji Hasegawa, Assistant Professor, Yokohama National University; Doctoral Candidate in the History Department, Stanford University
In the early 1950s, as war raged on the neighboring Korean peninsula, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) traded its postwar pursuit of peaceful revolution in favor of a military line. Molotov cocktails were tossed on city streets, and JCP members of the sanson kosakutai (mountain village mobilization troops) entered mountain villages to mobilize for a Maoist revolution. In the summer of 1955, shortly before the formation of the “1955 system,” the JCP repudiated its military line in its Sixth Party Congress (rokuzenkyo).
Although the economic effect of the Korean War has been much discussed, narratives of postwar Japanese history tend to treat violent JCP tactics as a minor footnote to the period. This is not surprising. Even specialized histories focusing on groups that conducted these activities—the JCP, leftist zainichi Koreans, and the student movement—have denounced and disowned this period. It was, in the words of standard leftist histories, the “dark” period of “extreme leftist adventurism” wherein the irresponsible leadership of the JCP, blindly following the Cominform’s mistaken orders, misled the party rank and file into pursuing suicidal tactics.
Such an understanding is simplistic and misleading. My talk will show how this is so by recuperating experiences from the sanson kosakutai of Ogouchi village.