2009
January 9th
“The Invention of Tradition” in the East Asian Context: Japanese Colonialism and Korean Customary Law
Marie Seong-Hak Kim, PhD, JD, Professor of History, St. Cloud State University
There has been much debate in colonial historiography on the topics of the “invention of tradition” in Africa and the “myth of adat” in Indonesia. The European imperial powers introduced law of European origin as the general law of the colonial territories but allowed the continuance of indigenous legal practices and local institutions. From various and often contradictory decisions and representations made in the native courts, colonial officials tried to ascertain fundamental rules of colonized peoples and labeled them “customary law,” but what was enforced in colonial courts was far from a reflection of immemorial traditions in pre-colonial reality. Following the imperial trend, the Japanese recognized the legal force of “custom” to govern most private legal relations among the colonized subjects in Korea. Yet Japan's approach to native custom and the justice system differed from the European approaches in several important aspects. In colonial Korea, indigenous customary rules were interpreted and implemented exclusively by the state court judges who decided customary law cases according to the metropolitan legal procedures with little participation of the native population. This “judicial customary law” was often at variance with what was actually followed in Chosun society, and in this sense a sort of “invention of tradition” did take place, but it was attempted with a clear goal of integrating native custom into the general law of the land and the legal system of the colonial state. By attempting a comparative discussion of the construction of customary law in European and Japanese colonies, this article aims to expand the analytical framework in studying Japanese colonialism.
February 6th
Dregs of Empire: Stubborn Remnants of "Japanese-ness" in "Liberated" Southern Korea, 1945-1950
Prof. Mark Caprio, Dept. of Intercultural Communication, Rikkyo University
Few Koreans believed that the Japanese Emperor’s August 15, 1945 broadcast that announced Japan’s decision to end the Pacific War would immediately sweep away all traces of Japan’s four decades of colonial rule. Had not the temporary occupations arranged by the victorious Allied powers been arranged for that purpose? Yet, few Koreans imagined at this time that months later they would still be able to read in their newspaper editorials deploring the fact that Shinto shrines still remained standing, or in the following year editorials demanding that “Japanese imperial dregs to be swept away.” Nor could Koreans anticipate that in December 1949 they would find their media debating whether the United States aimed to “revive Imperial Japan.” Japan had accepted the unconditional terms of the Potsdam Declaration that listed as its goals military disarmament, imperial rollback, and political transformation. The end product was to be a Japan that was “peaceful and responsible.”
The Emperor’s broadcast did not immediately sweep away Japanese imperial residue from southern Korea. Nor did the three years of U.S. occupation. “Japanese-ness” in different shapes and forms demonstrated a stubborn resilience that accompanied the formation of a sovereign Republic of Korea and into the bitter Korean War. Indeed, it was not until after the Cold War had ended that South Koreans could seriously begin to address one of its most important components—colonial-era collaboration. This presentation examines the dynamics of “Japanese-ness” under U.S. military rule over “liberated” southern Korea. At a global dimension considering this history contributes to our understanding of the effect that Cold War politics had on decolonization in general. At a local level it contributes to our deeper understanding of the factional divides that perpetuated civil unrest, and eventually armed combat first in southern Korea and eventually across the Korean peninsula. Finally, our consideration of this history offers new interpretations to contemporary issues that continue to plague relations among Northeast Asian states and peoples.
March 6th
The Human Pavilion of 1903: Learning about Empire through the Lives of Fushine Kôzô, Nakamura Kame, Uehara Ushi, and Yû Kasei
Kirsten Ziomek, PhD Candidate, History, University of California, Santa Barbara
In 1903, during the Fifth Domestic Industrial Fair held in Osaka, an exhibit called the Academic Human Pavilion (gakujutsu jinruikan) was held, in which living humans were showcased alongside their dwellings and traditional goods. Among the people displayed were Okinawans, Ainu, three races of Taiwanese people, a Turk, an African, a Javanese, as well as several South Asian Indians. Protests from the Chinese led to the canceling of the display of Chinese people. Protests from the Koreans and Okinawans also resulted in their respective displays to be canceled, although both groups had been displayed for a while. Up until now, the Human Pavilion has been analyzed through the lens of exhibition studies, where world fairs are treated as being simultaneously sites of imperial display. Also, specifically within Okinawan studies the Human Pavilion has become the keystone to a rallying point around discrimination and the crystallization of the ambivalent location of Okinawans both inside and outside of the naichi, even today.
However, in all these analyses the people themselves who were displayed were never the focal point of concern; it was sufficient to the leave them faceless, as representatives of racial groups that were being discriminated against. In a story of Japanese oppression, the victims were inconsequential as the narratives were told in terms of gaze, Japanese orientalism, the West, and the Other, where the displayed peoples’ position as spectacle (misemono) became further entrenched with the commensurate lack of attention afforded to them as individuals. In the case of the Human Pavilion, if we examine the people on display as individuals who were not static objects, but living people who moved within the display and for some, continued to live changing and diverse lives after their display, we can challenge one-dimensional views of the display as a mere imperialist showcase. In addition, scholars have up until now focused on analyzing the Okinawan and Chinese protests to the Human Pavilion, and have not explored the range of coverage and criticism by Japanese newspapers. By analyzing this content, I will argue for the push to place Hokkaido and Okinawa within analyses of Japan’s empire as colonies, and not as territories whose inclusion into the nation-state of Japan were mere boundary reaffirmations. While the idea of Hokkaido and Okinawa’s place as colonies within Japan’s empire is not new within Okinawan studies or studies on the Ainu, discussion of these regions in historical analyses of Japan’s empire have been limited. In this talk, I will argue for the necessity of broadening our view of Japan’s empire, namely arguing for an examination of the lives of people often forgotten to be a part of Japan’s empire: the Ainu, Okinawans, and the Taiwanese and Micronesian Aborigines.
April 10th
Influence and Historical Continuity in Japanese Animation: Ghibli and Its Historical Roots
Eija Niskanen, PhD Candidate, Film and Television, Helsinki University of Art and Design
Studio Ghibli has risen to the position where it not only takes in the biggest annual domestic-box-office income in the Japanese film industry, it also receives critical success both in Japan and abroad. The studio prides itself on standing apart from the rest of the Japanese anime industry, which is mostly TV-oriented, with its theatrical-length releases and high production values. The recent international critical attention paid to theatrical-length animation can be partly credited to Ghibli.
Ghibli did not just emerge from nowhere, however; its principal directors, Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao, had long careers with Toei Doga (presently Toei Animation) starting in the early 1960s and later in the 1970s in several smaller animation production companies, establishing Ghibli Studio in 1985. Toei Doga, influenced by Disney, was instrumental in creating the concept for long animated theatrical film, and in raising the level of technical and stylistic output. Besides the Toei period, my research centres on the post-Toei Doga period (late 1970s and early 1980s), when the pair worked for several companies and even for the Italian national television broadcaster RAI. For example, the European-flavoured settings of many Ghibli films (Porco Rosso, Kiki's Delivery Service) can be traced to this period. Many of the Ghibli character types, such as the girl characters, as well as the character of Totoro, have their prototypes in this pre-Ghibli period's works.
The Ghibli creators claim to be more influenced by European art animation than the Japanese anime industry, and are sometimes posited as an heir of the early pre-war, wartime, and immediate postwar manga eiga, and even of such narrative pictorial arts as emaki. Ghibli's enormous popularity, however, points more towards such high-production-value, entertainment animation as is created by Disney, Pixar, and Aardman Animation.
How can we discuss influence and historic continuation of stylistic/thematic/production values in animation? What is Ghibli's role in defining Japanese animation to the world? This presentation is part of my dissertation on Studio Ghibli, which centers on the stylistic features, mode of production, and auteurism in Studio Ghibli.
May 15th
Carnival War in China, 1937 – 1938
Benjamin Uchiyama, PhD Candidate, History, University of Southern California
The 1937 Hundred Man Killing Contest has been a topic of great controversy in the war responsibility debate as either a symbol of the cruelty of Japanese militarism on the eve of the Nanjing Massacre or a media fabrication that unfairly led to the postwar execution of the two officers allegedly involved. However, this paper will examine the Contest and its cultural context to argue for a new framework to understand Japanese wartime imperialism. As Japan mobilized for total war in China in the fall and winter of 1937, deviant and potentially destabilizing forces were unleashed in mass culture. At first glance, the early coverage of the China War seemed to merely reproduce or, at best, amplify the earlier Manchurian Incident war fever, with the mass media and state propaganda both trumpeting selfless sacrifice, hyper-patriotism, and seriousness of purpose in a time of crisis. However, as war correspondents hunted for more and more stories in the battlefront and then joined Japanese soldiers in the race towards Nanjing, new media-constructed phantasms emerged in mass culture such as killing contests, “thrilling” Shanghai street fighting, and the curious phenomenon of “raucous carnivals.” By altering the very language of total war through a whimsical celebration of the grotesque and nonsensical, these phantasms both enriched and warped the state’s national mobilization project. Government authorities publicly and privately expressed frustration and even alarm over media coverage distorting the promotion of total war, however fleetingly, into the spectacle of carnival war for Japanese consumer-subjects. Carnival war was fueled in part by technological innovations collapsing notions of time and space and also by the media’s near-insatiable hunger for “reportage” stories, which blurred the lines demarcating news, literature, and entertainment. In this way, by the time Nanjing fell to Japanese forces on December 13, 1937, total war came to be promoted in mass culture as a riveting experience celebrating transgression in the name of patriotism. These developments were specific to Japan’s military invasion of China but also reflected the synergy between national mobilization and mass culture found in all modern industrialized societies waging total war in the early twentieth century.
June 5th
Taking Yakuza Film Seriously: Critique and Consensus in Film Criticism
Philip Kaffen, PhD Candidate, East Asian Studies, New York University
The study of cinema faces a crisis that once plagued cinema itself. The latter began as a crisis of cinematic form, where cinema's ability to produce new experiences abated beneath the spread of new image technologies. Though cinema seems to have survived the crisis of its imminent demise, the study of cinema has now found itself on shaky ground. Shifts in its institutional assumptions and politics; the emergence of new technologies that allow for a proliferation of cinematic critique that threatens the privileged position of academic experts; and the sense of exigency that we face in the current moment demanding the rationalization and legitimation of humanities based knowledge, all point to the question of the legitimation of the field as a whole, explicitly raising the question: What role should the study and critique of cinematic images play?
As this crisis unfolds, a new interest in Japanese film theory and the role of film criticism in Japan, once marginalized, is growing within academic film studies as well as journalistic writings. Largely occurring under the aegis of archival and empirical work within a research paradigm, the impulses and outcomes of these explorations are decidedly unclear. What is at stake in this historical investigation of image critique in Japan and how might it contribute, if at all, to the problems outlined above?
My proposal is to explore this problem through an examination of the history of criticism centered on yakuza film. Some recent writing in Japan has suggested that film criticism was at its most vigorous during the late 1960s and revolved around yakuza film before withering away along with the studio system itself. Yakuza film is often treated as a repository of national cultural values of giri, ninjo, and jingi, (i.e. various terms of social obligation and hierarchy rooted in a national tradition). My interest, however, is in thinking of yakuza film as a field of exploration for a critique of romanticism. It is also an index of the studio system in crisis as its dominant generic form. Defining romanticism provisionally as the desire to be free of all systems, I will argue that the study of yakuza film reveals a shifting relationship between images and the studio system within film criticism, raising questions for contemporary discourses on the aesthetics and politics of cinematic images.
July 3rd
Imaging Manchuria in 1930s Japanese Art Photography
Kari Shepherdson-Scott, PhD Candidate, Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, Duke University
This talk examines the work of renowned art-photographer Fuchigami Hakuyô and that of the group he founded in Manchuria in 1932, the Manchuria Photographic Artists Association (Manshû Shashin Sakka Kyôkai, hereafter referred to as the MPAA). Their work, building upon the photographic languages of pictorialism and constructivism, imaged the new supposedly sovereign state of Manchukuo (1932-1945) as both a romantic, exotic frontier and a dynamic space of urban modernity. Fuchigami and the Japanese photographers of the MPAA were among the many designers, artists, photographers, writers, and architects invited to the continent as tourists or emigrants. Companies such as South Manchuria Railway Company (or Mantetsu) had promoted Manchuria as a sublime, distant frontier overflowing with romantic inspiration – a cultural destination – to artists and writers for several decades. Fuchigami, invited by Mantetsu to work in the Public Relations Division of the President’s Office, moved to Dalian with his family in 1928. There, he established the monthly graphic magazine Manshû Gurafu (1933-1944) for which he acted as editor until 1941 when he returned to Japan. He was also a leader in the art-photography movement on the continent. Through the financial support of Mantetsu, Fuchigami and the MPAA published regular photographic compendia. They also gained international attention, holding exhibitions in Manchuria, Japan, the United States, and France.
In this paper, I investigate the multi-faceted roles that these works fulfilled. First, they acted as evocatively artistic propaganda for their Mantetsu sponsors. Lauded by American art-photographer Edward Steichen as “objects of beauty,” they worked to obscure the problematic military and political activities of the Japanese on the continent. Also, featured in “art-photography” postcard collections, photographic annuals, special issues of Manshû Gurafu, and exhibitions, the photographs helped to legitimize Manchuria as a site of great artistic expression, thereby emphasizing its importance as a cultural destination. Second, I argue that these works were also deeply personal forms of artistic expression that Fuchigami likely understood as separate from the imperial goals of Japanese interests in Manchuria. This disconnect begs closer scrutiny as it points to the ambiguous politics of Fuchigami and the MPAA and how they may have used Mantetsu as a vehicle to promote their work. A critique of these images and photographers facilitates a richer understanding of both the relationship between individual artists and imperial apparatus of Mantetsu, as well as how these artists conceived of themselves and their work on the continent.
August 7th
Technologies of Protest and the 1960 US-Japan Security Treaty Crisis
Nick Kapur, PhD Candidate, History, Harvard University
The 1960 protests against the revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty, or “Anpo,” were by most measures the largest and longest protest movement in Japanese history. And yet, as we look around us at the Tokyo of the today, it is hard to even imagine such a massive and violent protest occurring in the peaceful, acquiescent Japan of the present, or that well within living memory, more than 16 million people nationwide took to the streets and in Tokyo alone, as many as 350,000 people besieged the National Diet compound on a single day.
As we approach the 50th anniversary of this upheaval, an entire generation of Japanese, encompassing both sides of the political spectrum, continues to call themselves the “Anpo Generation,” and to view the 1960 protests as a defining moment of their lives. Nevertheless, the 1960 Anpo protests remain an understudied topic, in English and even in Japanese. In particular, while it is quite common to speak of the 1960 Anpo protests as a turning point in postwar Japanese history, existing scholarship has little to say about precisely what changed in relation to the 1960 protests, how, and why. Accordingly, my research, rather than closely examining the daily course of the protests themselves in June of 1960, focuses instead on their immediate aftermath in the early years of the 1960s, in an effort to uncover what sort of immediate impact the 1960 Anpo protests had on both US-Japan relations and Japanese society itself, including politics and social movements, as well as literature, film, and the arts. Ultimately, I hope to offer the beginnings of a potential answer to the question of how we got from the Japanese society of 1960 to one existing now.
In this talk I will focus on ways in patterns of popular protest in Japan shifted in response to the 1960 Anpo protests, with particular emphasis on three examples of what I like to call “technologies of protest”: the “Diet petition demonstration,” the “people’s council,” and the “snake dance.” These three technologies were iteratively developed over the course of the 1950s based on a combination of prewar models and postwar practical experience. All three reached their apogee during the 1960 Anpo protests but would rapidly fade from the scene thereafter. I will attempt to draw a distinction between a large body of previous research, which has attempted to portray the 1960 protests as representative of a new type of “spontaneous” citizen activism, and my own findings, which suggest that 1960 protest were more representative of an older model of extra-parliamentary political action.
September 11th
From Beirut to Kyoto: Travels of a Secular Missionary College Model, 1860-1900
Aleksandra Majstorac Kobiljski, PhD Candidate, City University of New York
Dōshisha University opened in 1875 in Kyoto with eight students, two teachers and the backing of the oldest and richest US missionary board. How did an orthodox Protestant organization like the American Board for Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) decide to fund an institution of higher education with a largely secular curriculum? How did this decision change the face of American missionary establishment in the decades to follow? In Japan, Dōshisha seemed the work of one man – Niijima Jo, first Japanese to graduate Amherst College and Andover Theological Seminary, and the first to be ordained Protestant pastor. However, the unprecedented decision of an evangelical body to build, in the 1870s, a secular college like Dōshisha is in large part a result of the establishment of the American University of Beirut by a group of renegade ABCFM missionaries a decade before.
Unforeseen by the elders in Boston, these missionary colleges grew to be, not triggers of conversion, but vehicles for learning English language, politics, journalism, public speaking, and medicine. For their part, missionaries had to reinvent themselves from proselytizers to teachers, embrace modern science, and learn to tolerate religious diversity. Thus, the zealous evangelizers of the 19th century became liberal Protestants of the 20th in such unexpected places as Beirut and Kyoto.
October 2nd
From the Philosophy of Origins to the Science of Action: Behaviorism, Existentialism, and the Negation of Philosophy in Early Postwar Japan
Adam Bronson, PhD Candidate, History, Columbia University
The early postwar years in Japan, the US, and Western Europe witnessed two opposed intellectual developments: a surge of interest in behaviorist, analytical methodology in the social sciences and a growing existentialist sensibility in literature and philosophy. In Japan, social scientist Maruyama Masao made his explosive debut into the world of criticism with his essay "Logic and Psychology of Ultranationalism" in 1946, just one year before the publication of the first volume of the recently-deceased Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitarō's collected works caused long lines of hungry students to form outside of bookstores throughout Tokyo.
Social psychologists, analytic philosophers, and left-leaning critics, including Maruyama Masao, criticized the Kyoto School for philosophical obscurantism and political sycophancy. The psychologist Miyagi Otoya analyzed the Nishida boom as a mere fad for "deep" yet vacuous jargon. For these young thinkers associated with the postwar journal Science of Thought, this critique was animated by a pent-up desire to, in the words of Tsurumi Shunsuke, "negate philosophy" entirely due to the perceived failings of intellectuals during the mobilization for total war in the late thirties and early forties. The legacy of the intellectual community 30s and 40s was also at stake in positive appraisals of the clarity and practicality of American pragmatism, behavioral science, and analytic philosophy.
Although the Kyoto School was relentlessly criticized for its role in creating a dangerous atmosphere of linguistic indeterminacy across the war, there also existed a convergent postwar interest throughout the social sciences, philosophy, and existentialist literature onto the problem of action, both as an object of scientific analysis and as a pressing issue for the individual standing at a crossroads between opposing political forces. The semantic ambiguity of the term kōdō, which can be rendered as either "action" or "behavior" in English, contributed to an intellectual environment in which readers could, on the one hand, project political engagement onto "value-free" social scientific analyses, and on the other hand view existential themes in literature and philosophy, which tended to focus on anxiety and choice, as an experiential supplement to the truth of social scientific materialism.
Through an examination of texts by the social psychologist Minami Hiroshi, and the philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke, and the author/critic Sakaguchi Ango, I will argue that the "negation of philosophy" in postwar Japan took the form of a shift of emphasis from crisis-prone essences, origins, and foundations (whether "Eastern" or "Western") to observable, yet philosophically neglected and degraded, appearances. Through this movement intellectuals, writers, and critics articulated a vision of postwar democracy at the endlessly disputed boundary between thought (shisō) and action (kōdō).
November 6th
Collage Modernity: Women, Machines, and Surrealism in the Paintings of Koga Harue
Chinghsin Wu, PhD Candidate, Art History, UCLA
As an avant-garde artist, Koga Harue’s (1895-1933) most well-known art works are his Surrealist-style paintings from 1929 to 1933, which are often considered representative of the early stage of Japanese Surrealist art. By examining the context of the reception of Surrealism in Japan, and Koga’s theory of Surrealism, this paper examines how French Surrealism, especially Andre Breton’s theory, was not only incompletely imported to Japan but harshly criticized by some Japanese critics at this time. These critiques, most from the Proletarian view, questioned the purpose of art or the value of art in Surrealism and its relevance to society. Responding to this criticism, other critics created an indigenous version of Surrealism, so-called “Scientific Surrealism,” which sought to apply rationality and science to Surrealist art. Koga Harue, however, emphasized art’s independence, or "art for art's sake," which he believed could transcend class or any social value.
On the other hand, Koga Harue largely gathered contemporary images from popular magazines, science magazines, or postcards and arranged them on his canvas, creating a collage that differed from the traditional genre of fine art, blurred the distinction between fine arts and popular art and simultaneously brought the contemporary social issues into his paintings. The main components of this series are images of women and mechanical objects. These female images, including nudes, women in traditional Japanese clothes, and western-style female figures, embodied both the artist’s inner feeling or emotions as well as externally-oriented hopes or expectations for an internationalized modernity. Similarly, mechanical objects, which are efficient, rational, and practical, represent an optimistic and progressive image of a new age. At the same time, however, the merging of, or conflict between, these two themes tempers the optimism with overtones of anxiety and uneasiness toward modernity.
December 4th
From Ideological Protection to Subjective Production: The Categorical Function of Kokutai in the Peace Preservation Law
Max Ward, PhD Candidate, Department of History, New York University
The Peace Preservation Law was established in 1925 with the explicit purpose of suppressing the relatively small communist and anarchist movements in Japan. It was initially constructed on a binary logic between dangerous foreign thought (i.e., communism) and domestic objects requiring protection – namely, the kokutai (national polity) and the private property system. However, legislators struggled to clearly define the categories signifying the objects of preservation and thus what exactly constituted a threat against them. As the law expanded into an extensive system of surveillance and unlimited detention in the mid-1930s, legal analysts and Justice Ministry officials continued to deliberate over the substantive meaning of these categories and the law’s ultimate objectives.
In this paper, I explore how the central category identifying the Peace Preservation Law’s ostensible object of preservation – the ‘kokutai’ – was left juridically undetermined, allowing for a transformation in the law’s operation by the late 1930s. Conventionally translated as the ‘national polity,’ kokutai was vaguely understood by legislators as designating both the location of sovereignty in the eternal unbroken line of the imperial household as well as a transcendent ethical value mediating the bond between national subjects and the emperor. I argue that the legal contradiction that the term kokutai initially expressed was not necessarily between these two designations, nor that the term was simply ambiguous, but rather, that the legislative debates on the Peace Preservation Law gesture to a much more fundamental aporia immanent to the question of sovereign power and constitutionalism. I contend that this paradox allowed for the later transformation of the Peace Preservation Law, wherein kokutai shifted from designating an object of ideological protection against dangerous foreign thought, to a mechanism for the production of national subjects in the state’s later tenkô policy. This paper begins with an analysis of the original 1925 Diet deliberations, moves through various legislative and legal analyses of the Law in the mid-1930s, and concludes with a close reading of the writings of thought-guidance officials who were responsible for inducing and maintaining tenkô-consciousness. In each moment, kokutai was conceptualized in radically different ways, indexing the slow transformation of the law’s operation over its twenty-year history.