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.
October 1998
Women, Youths, and Men: Male-Male Eros and the Age/Gender System of Tokugawa Japan
Greg Pflugfelder, Columbia University
November 27, 1998
Books, Bags, and Bones: Midwifery and the Emergence of a Modern Culture of Childbirthing in Early Twentieth-Century Japan
Julie Rousseau, Columbia University
January 1999
Gender, Cosmopolitanism, and the Diplomacy of Empire: The 1920s
Michael Schneider
February 26, 1999
Politics by Association in Meiji Japan: Agitating Advocates and Associations of Advocates
Darryl Flaherty, Columbia University
March 26, 1999
A Battle over History: The Nanjing Massacre in Japan
Takashi Yoshida, Columbia University
April 1999
A Tale of Two Domains: The Trade and Diplomacy of Satsuma and Tsushima, 1840-1875
Robert Hellyer
May 28, 1999
Private Academies for Chinese Learning (kangaku juku) in the Meiji Period
Margaret Mehl, University of Stirling
June 25, 1999
The Geisha's Cousin: Memoirs of a Japanese Peasant Woman from the Thirties to the Seventies
Simon Partner, Duke University
July 23, 1999
Seals, Mirrors, and Swords: On the First Five Centuries of Writing in Japan
David Lurie, Columbia University
October 1999
Marriage, Family and the State: Codifying Divorce in Meiji Japan
Harald Fuess
November 29, 1999
Imperialism and the Bunmei Kaika: The Case of Japan's 1874 Expedition to Taiwan
Robert Eskildsen, Smith College
January 2000
Shoemon's World: Community and Conflict in a Nineteenth-century Japanese Village
Ed Pratt
February 2000
Commuting Gazes: A Close Look at Female Students, Salarymen, and Electric Trains in Late Meiji Japan
Alisa Freedman
March 24, 2000
The Forgotten Postwar: Lessons of Japan's Post World War I Experience
Paul Dunscomb, University of Kansas
April 2000
Translation, Mediation, Appropriation and Mori Ogai (1862-1922)
Tim Wixted
May 26, 2000
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Front: Japanese Comedy and the Pacific War
Barak Kushner
June 23, 2000
The Last Samurai: Saigo Takamori and the Demise of Traditional Japan
Mark Ravina, Emory University
July 2000
The New Economy of the 19th century: IT (International Trade) Revolution in Kanto Villages
Yasuhiro Makimura
September 22, 2000
When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation in Japan after WWII
Lori Watt, Columbia University
October 2000
Dress Codes: Making Meanings and Breaking Rules in Early Meiji Japan
Leila Wice
November 24, 2000
Farewell to the Soil: The Disappearance of the Peasantry in Twentieth Century Japan
Simon Partner, Duke University
January 26, 2001
The Orphans on the Estate: Sawada Miki and the Elizabeth Saunders Home for 'Mixed-Blood' Orphans, 1947-1955
Robert Fish, University of Hawaii
In October 1947, Sawada Miki, the eldest daughter of the main branch of the Iwasaki family, founders of the Mitsubishi zaibatsu, established the Elizabeth Saunders Home. This orphanage for "mixed-blood" children (a literal translation of the then popular term konketsuji) stood on the grounds of the former Iwasaki summer estate in iso-town (Kanagawa-ken, Japan). Before her death in 1980, Sawada had raised or facilitated the adoptions of more than two thousand children. This talk treats the history of this Home as a case study to help answer the following questions: How did public policies of both the United States and Japanese governments affect the lives of "mixed-blood" children born in Japan? How did ideologies about race affect these children? How was the exaggerated image of "mixed-blood" children in Japan, as a pariah class despised by both Americans and Japanese, created?
I will address specifically four interrelated topics about "mixed-blood" orphans. First, I examine the relationships that produced the children. Second, I consider what kind of impact American immigration policies and Japanese social welfare policies had on them. Third, I analyze the debate about the entrance of these children into public schools in April1953, and especially how this debate related to the children in the Saunders Home. Finally, I explain how Sawada Miki viewed the "mixed-blood" children in Japan, often using the media to publicize her ideas in order to raise money for the orphanage and to lobby for the liberalization of American immigration laws. This talk aims to raise discussion about how large policies and world events in postwar Japan affected people's daily lives as well as to reconsider the impact of "race," "racial purity," and racism within postwar Japan.
February 23, 2001
Proto-National Identity in Japan and East Asia
Ethan Segal, Stanford University
In 1191, two Japanese boat captains along with their crews were expelled from China for involvement in a murder. The Chinese Court sent official notice demanding that the Japanese government take action against the offending captains, and the matter was quickly brought to the attention of Japanese Regent Kujo Kanezane. Kanezane's intriguing response to the crisis, recorded in his diary Gyokuyo, suggests that early medieval elites had a strong sense of Japanese identity that resembled modern conceptions of nationality and yet differed greatly from the basis for national membership found in Japan today.
Most scholars consider nationalism to be a phenomenon exclusively identified with the modern nation state. They tend to dismiss broad-based collective identities in other contexts as either lesser, or categorically distinct phenomena. Recently, however, scholars have begun to explore broad-based collective identities in premodern settings where the nation-state is either absent or nascent. This paper will critique the ways in which Western scholars of nationalism have addressed identity in East Asia and focus on the precursors of Japanese national identity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A wide range of sources, including diaries, government decrees, and building inscriptions, reveal links in the early medieval Japanese mind between land, people, and administration. The Japanese defense against the Mongol invasions further strengthened a sense of shared Japanese identity that warrants comparison with Benedict Anderson's idea of imagined communities and Eric Hobsbawm's discussion of "proto-nationalism".
Marchi 23, 2001
Yasuoka Masahiro and the National Mainstay Society: Conservative Visions of Reform in Early Shōwa Japan
Roger Brown, University of Southern California
April 27, 2001
Selective History, Left and Right
Earl Kinmonth, Taisho University
This talk will focus on Saito Takao, but in a general context of demonstrating that "left, liberal, or progressive" historians have, in their own way, been at least as selective as "right, conservative, or reactionary" historians in leaving things out of the historical narrative.
October 26, 2001
"If you don't read the plot, what else is left?": Reading the Chinese Novel in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Jonathan Zwicker
November 30, 2001
Policing Edo's Borderlands in the Early Nineteenth Century
Jason Creigh
February 22, 2002
Where Were You Mother? Women, the Old Left, and the Vietnam War
Christopher Gerteis
March 29, 2002
When the Gaimushô had Guns: Japan's Consular Police in Northeast Asia, 1880-1945
Erik Esselstrom
June 28, 2002
Killing Moga: Female Offenders, Male Detectives, and the Rise of Criminology in Modern Japan
Sari Kawana, University of Pennsylvania
With crime on the rise in the ever-expanding city of Tokyo during the late Meiji to Taishô periods, the need arose for modernization in the criminal sciences. This entailed the reorganization of the police force, the development of forensic science [hôigaku], the compilation of more sophisticated crime investigation techniques [called sôsa gaku], and the establishment of criminology [hanzai kagaku]. These disciplines were dedicated to the question of not just whodunit, but also howdunit,
and, most controversially, whydunit. Though other facets of the crime-fighting enterprise made “progress” in many ways, criminology lagged behind in dealing with the original question of why certain individuals commit crimes.
The clumsiness of such an endeavor becomes most apparent when criminologists focused their theorizing upon female offenders. Starting with the autopsy in 1878 of Takahashi Oden, a so-called poison woman notorious for having killed a man, criminologists of the period placed undue emphasis on female gender and sexuality in attempting to solve the mystery of female criminality. In fabricating this pseudoscientific discourse, such criminologists (invariably male) unwittingly revealed the limits of their preconceived notions of who-does-what-and-why.
These attempts met with skepticism from another group concerned with the motivations behind criminal behavior: creators of detective fiction. Two works in particular, Edogawa Ranpo’s “Injû” (1928) and Hamao Shirô’s “Satsujinki” (1931), showcase how the genre, perhaps closest to the science of crime, turned the findings of these criminologists upside down and transformed them into fodder for fiction.
September 27, 2002
Warring Internationalisms: Multilateral Thinking, 1933-1945
Jessamyn Abel
October 26, 2002
Boredom, Tears, and the Pleasures of Reading in Nineteenth Century Japan
Jonathan Zwicker