2010
January 8th
A 'Holy War' for the Glory Above – The Fall of Hong Kong Documented through the Memory of a Japanese Pastor
May-yi Shaw, PhD Candidate, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
This paper attempts to explore how history may be written or documented in the form of memoir writing through the case of Samejima Moritaka’s A Reminiscence of Hong Kong (Hong Kong kaisou ki). The fall of Hong Kong under the Japanese invasion in December 1941 and the subsequent three-and-a-half-year Japanese occupation have been largely overlooked in the study of Japan’s “Greater East Asian War”. A Reminiscence of Hong Kong, written nearly two decades postwar by Samejima Moritaka, a Christian pastor sent to Hong Kong shortly after its fall, relies primarily upon memory alone. It documents the nature of Japan’s occupation in Hong Kong and offers details about the lives of the civilians under the Japanese rule. It also identifies Samejima’s decision to go to Hong Kong as more than just a patriotic response to the nation’s call for a “holy war” (seisen). Rather, it reflects an answering to a higher, religious mission to unite local churches and help the Chinese believers in Hong Kong. On one hand, Samejima’s memoir confirms the unique role of personal memory in the task of writing about war, offering a perspective of “the people” often absent in wartime official documents restricted by censorship or propaganda. On the other hand, this memoir challenges us to think critically about how writing about war through the process of “recalling” may still be tainted with personal prejudice and memory biases and needs to be examined with greater caution and scrutiny.
February 5th
Tomimoto Kenkichi's "Linkage" (renkan) to Kenzan in the History of Modern Japanese Ceramics: Amateurism, Transnationalism, and Rebellion
Meghen Jones, PhD Candidate, Art History, Boston University
Although no other twentieth-century ceramist has been the subject of as many exhibitions and scholarly publishing in Japan as Tomimoto Kenkichi (1886-1963), his pioneering role in the history of modern Japanese art has not been fully attributed to his self-described "linkage" (renkan) to Ogata Kenzan. This presentation will analyze Tomimoto's writings and ceramics which demonstrate such historical and conceptual connections to both the famed Edo artist Kenzan I and the Meiji-Taisho professional ceramist Kenzan VI. In 1911, Tomimoto first met Kenzan VI (Urano Shigekichi, 1851-1923), who played an important role in his first raku ceramics work. Their precise student-teacher relationship has varying accounts; some histories have described Tomimoto as Kenzan VII, but Tomimoto himself vehemently rejected the lineage-based system of education. Instead, he highlighted his transnationalist role as translator for Kenzan VI's student, British artist Bernard Leach, who later claimed the name Kenzan VII . Although Tomimoto expressed ambivalence towards the Meiji-Taisho Kenzan, it is clear that he looked to the Edo Kenzan as a significant conceptual and stylistic model. For Tomimoto, Kenzan I embodied the erudite ideal of amateurism, and both artists privileged the painterly potential of the ceramics surface, particularly with combinations of texts and images. This examination of the iterations of the relationships between Tomimoto and the Kenzan lineage reveals Tomimoto's nostalgia for a literati ideal, his engagement in the dynamic London and Tokyo design and arts communities, and his insistence on creating modern crafts as art objects according to original, individualistic aims. As Tomimoto's discourse and praxis demonstrate, amateurism, transnationalism, and rebellion were instrumental forces setting into motion the emergence of ceramics as an elevated form of modernist Japanese artistic expression.
March 5th
How to Pick a Fight over Prostitution Regulation (in Meiji Japan)
Craig Colbeck, PhD Candidate, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
The apparatus of modern prostitution regulation formed in Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century around the maintenance of registries of female prostitutes and the periodic examination of registered women for sexually-transmitted disease. Not outdone, the Meiji government instituted such a system while regulation was on the upswing in European nations and their colonies. This was circa 1870. Likewise, Protestant Japanese began agitating for the repeal of this system—around 1890—on the same schedule as their international cohorts. These “regulationists” and “abolitionists” spent the next several decades arguing over the proper point of the state’s role in sexual practice.
My presentation will center on a close reading of one Japanese text from each camp that dates from the beginning of this debate. My presentation will provide a snapshot of thought on the nature of prostitution—its foundations, its intransience, its desirability; because here, then, these opponents staked out initial positions and sized each other up to start a contest that would span the next six decades and that would prove pivotal in defining new rhetorical roles for human nature in social policy and critique.
April 2nd
Wartime Visions of Order in East Asia: Japan and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
Jeremy Yellen, PhD Candidate, History, Harvard University
The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was a child of war. On August 1, 1940, in the wake of Germany’s lighting-fast victories in Europe, Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yôsuke declared the establishment of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, which aimed to “link Japan, Manchuria, and China based on the great spirit of the Imperial Way.” The Co-Prosperity Sphere ultimately expanded to include the farthest reaches of Japan’s wartime empire—from Sakhalin in the north to the Dutch East Indies in the south, from the Philippines in the east through Burma in the west.
Calling for a Co-Prosperity Sphere was a means to view the future international order at a time of global uncertainty. It allowed many to envision a radical reordering of world politics, creating an Asia free from Western colonialism. Once they declared the Sphere’s creation, however, Japanese policymakers had to figure out exactly what this Co-Prosperity Sphere actually was. My presentation deals with such visions for international order. I will discuss different and changing understandings of this international order among the Army, Navy, and the Foreign Ministry. I seek to highlight the contested nature of Japan’s wartime empire even on the domestic front, and to show some possible legacies of Japan’s changing notions of international order.
May 7th
Animation Before the War: Nation and Modernity in Japan since 1907
Annie Manion, PhD Candidate, East Asian Studies, University of Southern California
Although Japanese animation has been a popular topic of research since the 1990’s, studies that address the history of Japanese animation from before the advent of television in the postwar period are few and far between. Those histories that do exist provide useful timelines of the development of animation and motion picture aesthetics or technology in Japan, but rarely more. Internationally, Japan was one of only a handful of nations that developed an animation industry in the early 1900’s, and there is still much to be learned about the position that animation occupied in the larger media landscape of the pre-war modern period, and the role this particular entertainment medium may have played in the production of Japanese modernity in the first half of the 20th century.
In my presentation, I will briefly summarize Japanese animation history before 1945, looking at the objects and technologies that are considered precursors to industrialized animation and the terms used to refer to animation in the pre-war period. Both the telling of animation history and the content of the films themselves reflect a pre-occupation with origins and cultural identity that relates not only to the formation of the Japanese nation-state but also to definitions of animation and film form. In this talk I hope to illuminate some of the key issues that surround this pre-occupation as well as showcase films and filmmakers from this early period in Japanese animation.
June 3rd
Environmental Music and the Rise of Amenity Culture in Japan
Paul Roquet, PhD Candidate, East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Berkeley
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, “environment” (kankyo) emerged in Japan as both the latest horizon of management psychology and as a central component of everyday selfhood. In business, a new era of “environmental music” promised accessible mood regulation aimed at increasing productivity and smoothing over fatigue. In marketing, atmospherics offered enhanced opportunities for emotional branding and demographic alignment. And in spaces surrounding the human body, environmental design merged with changing ideas of health and healing to become a central component of self-care.
Building on recent work on the development of “emotional capitalism” in the United States, in this talk I will use environmental music to trace out the transition in late-Showa Japan from an emphasis on productivity and efficiency to a new fascination with comfort and lifestyle design (what I am terming "amenity culture." From here we will move to track how avant-garde and popular music have engaged with these shifting contexts, noting how they both absorb and question the commercial emphasis on mood regulation and comfortable space. Of special concern here will be the Eric Satie “boom” in the late 70s, and its legacy in the ambient, new age, and healing styles that followed in its wake.
In each case, my focus will be on the way environmental music and amenity culture transform notions of selfhood and community: what happens when, through the reflexive sensory design of self and space, the kankyo ningen disperses itself across the landscape.
July 2nd
From Fukeizai (heresy) to Fukei (disrespect), and those who complicated both notions, Kita and Mishima
Jeffrey DuBois, PhD Candidate, Asian Studies, History, Cornell University
The Chrysanthemum taboo, which places a stigma on critique of the emperor in the postwar period, can be seen in a sense as a de facto continuation of the prohibition on critiquing the emperor or imperial household, called lèse majesté (fukei-zai), established in Meiji-era criminal law. Critique in the postwar has in cases been met with hostility and violence, and yet without the legal mandate forbidding it, critique of the emperor, unless blasphemy, can be no more than disrespect (fukei). My basic questions are: What is at stake in the critique of the postwar emperor and symbolic emperor system? What are the limits -- or even impossibilities -- of that critique, and how can we differentiate it from prewar/wartime critique?
After establishing a basic historical context of fukei-zai and its demise, I will offer tentative answers to these questions through a discussion a particular type of critique coming from two iconoclastic thinkers writing half a century apart and who span pre- and post-war, Kita Ikki and Mishima Yukio. Both critical of their contemporary official versions of the emperor's status and relation to the national body (kokutai), and indirectly and directly related to coup d'etat that sought to eliminate the impediments to imperial power, they manage to disrespect the emperor/emperor system only to elevate him/it.
July 30th
"Anti-history" of the Individualization of Life in the Meiji Era
Sean Callaghan, PhD Candidate, East Asian Studies, University of Toronto
What would it mean to develop a critique of life itself? For the most part, if the term life finds itself within the mechanism of a critique, it is usually that which is mobilized to give expression to the critique. Thus, Michel Foucault develops theories of power which mobilize life as "bios" to critique modern forms of subject production, or Giorgio Agamben writes life as bare life to reveal the brutal limits of modern forms of state governance. Outside of these few exceptions, life itself is usually taken as that which exceeds all critique, precisely because of its assumed privileged status as that which exceeds all value systems. Suzuki Sadami, a contemporary Japanese literary scholar, turns to notions of Taisho Vitalism and Japanese life-views (seimeikan) as conceptual apparatuses that would help us "overcome modernity." In abortion debates, debates on climate change, or debates surrounding the morality of stem cell research, definitions of life always take as their precondition life's status as that which exceeds all measure. The task in these debates is never to determine its value - since that would be crude - but to attempt to think about when it begins and how it will end. Meanwhile, in our everyday lives we are constantly confronted by injunctions to make ourselves live through liberal uses of hand sanitizer, the consumption of the right kinds of food, and the proper management of life-styles. In this environment it seems impossible to think, let alone speak a critique of life itself. Despite all attempts to think life as that which defies valuation, however, an entire multi-billion dollar industry has derived profits from doing precisely this: calculating the value of a life. This, of course, is the life insurance industry.
In this paper, I will be using the development of the life insurance industry in the Meiji era to ask the question of how a concept such as life (or in this case, seimei) which is supposed to be beyond all measure could come to be given definite value. In asking this question, I hope to come to an understanding of the limits and conditions of possibility for thinking forms of life/seimei in a particular historical context, and in doing begin to open up ground for rethinking forms of political engagement which are not organized according to the inherently moral and contradictory categories to which the concept of life itself inevitably gives rise.
September 3rd
(Mis?)adventures in Quinine: Japanese Drug Companies, Utopian Visions, and Colonial Taiwan
Tim Yang, PhD Candidate, History, Columbia University
On April 30th, 1934, the founder and president of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, Hoshi Hajime, pinned the future of his company on a presentation held in the ballroom of the Taihoku Tetsudô Hotel. The topic was Hoshi's proposal to cultivate cinchona (kina) -- the raw material for the anti-malarial drug, quinine -- in aboriginal reservations in the mountains of Taiwan.
In the early twentieth century, quinine was one of the world's most important drugs. Roughly ninety percent of the world's supply came from Dutch plantations in Java, and its production and distribution was controlled by a monopoly known as the Kina Bureau, which had its headquarters in Amsterdam. Hoshi Hajime wanted to break that monopoly.
My presentation examines the connections between Japanese drug companies, scientists, and colonial bureaucrats by tracing Hoshi Pharmaceuticals' involvement in quinine production in Taiwan in the 1930s and 1940s. Known for employing slogans like "Kindness is Number One (Shinsetsu daiichi)" as he built Hoshi seiyaku into one of Japan's leading pharmaceutical companies, Hoshi Hajime pitched a "humanitarian" vision of quinine self-sufficiency for Japan's empire, centered on providing indigenous tribes with food and education in exchange for their land and labor. Supported by doctors who endorsed the widespread use of quinine for living in tropical climes as well as botanists who compared the fertility of Taiwan's highlands to the fields of Shikoku and Kyûshû, this vision appealed to a wide range of actors including colonial authorities who wanted to "tame" the aboriginal population; major firms like Taiwan Development Company (Taiwan takushoku), who dreamed of exploiting the untapped potential of the island's tropical environment; and military interests concerned with the supply of quinine as Japan's empire expanded into Southeast Asia. Competing drug firms like Takeda and Shionogi also followed suit with similar investments and plans. But like Japan's colonial project itself, Hoshi's utopian vision of a "Greater Cinchona Empire (Dai kina teikoku)" proved to be an untenable venture in the end.
October 1st
Going to the Philippines is like coming Home? Japanese pan-Asianism and the Philippines from the Meiji-era until the Wake of the Pacific War
Sven Matthiessen, PhD Candidate, Japanese Studies Joint Degree Program, University of Sheffield and Tohoku University, Sendai
The presentation covers mainly the second chapter of my dissertation titled “Japanese pan-Asianism and the Philippines: from the Meiji-era to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”. The focal point will be the diverging views within the Japanese pan-Asianist community on the possibility of including Southeast Asia and in particular the Philippines into a Japanese-dominated regional bloc.
Throughout the Meiji-era the vast majority of Japanese pan-Asianists took only little interest in the Philippine archipelago. Whereas nationalist organizations like the Tôhô kyôkai (Far Eastern Society) and the Nan’yô kyôkai (South Seas Society) emphasized the importance of Southeast Asia and the Philippines for Japan’s own national security and worked out detailed plans for colonisation of the islands, early pan-Asianists in organizations as the Kôa-kai (Society for Raising Asia) and the Ajia kyôkai (Asia Society) put an emphasis on Asian solidarity and refused to interfere in foreign countries’ domestic affairs. Even though follow-up organizations like the Tôa Dôbun-kai (Common Culture Society) and the Kokuryû-kai (Armur Society) advocated for Japanese intervention in China and claimed a leading role for Japan in Asia, their vision of Asia hardly went beyond the Sino-centric region. One notable exception was Miyazaki Tôten (1870-1922) who supported the Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) in his struggle to topple the Quing-government in China. Through Sun he was introduced to the Philippine revolutionary Mariano Ponce (1863-1918) and immediately sympathized with Ponce’s cause. However, all efforts to lend support to the Philippine independence movement were of little success and Miyazaki’s stance remained exceptional among Japanese pan-Asianists.
Throughout the Taishô-era (1912-1926) pan-Asianism gained more and more popularity in Japan even though it still stood in opposition to the Realpolitik of the government. The terms Dai-Ajia shugi (Greater Asianism) and Dai-Nihon shugi (Greater Japonism) came up implementing the liberation and unification of all Asia under Japanese leadership. The unification of the Sino-centric core of Asia was to be the first step on the road to world unity under the slogan of hakkô ichiû (The whole World under one Roof) and it was a mission that Japan had to accomplish. Nevertheless, it took until the late 1930s until Japanese pan-Asianists started to concern themselves in great detail with Southeast Asia and tried to prove a kinship between the region and Japan.
November 5th
The Move to Improve: Improvement Movements in Rural Miyagi, 1895-1908
Christopher Craig, PhD Candidate, History, Columbia University
In the years after the First Sino-Japanese War, a fever for rural improvement swept across Japan. Rural poverty, social stratification in agricultural communities, and the emergence of so-called distressed villages drove citizen groups and government agencies in a quest to strengthen the countryside economically and to preserve social order. In the Home and Agriculture and Commerce Ministries, bureaucrats drafted plans to coordinate improvement efforts into overarching movements and distributed them to agricultural villages throughout the country. The implementation of these movements fell to local notables (chihō meibōka), the locally influential stratum of rural landlords who had long served as the unofficial local agents of the central and prefectural governments.
This paper explores the social ramifications of improvement (kairyō, kaizen) activities in rural villages in northern Miyagi prefecture (Senboku) in the late Meiji period. A number of factors combined to chart a distinctive path for improvement in this area. Environment and landholding patterns gave rise to single-crop rice production and directed improvement efforts towards its increase, landlord-led reform efforts remained small in scale and nakedly self-interested, the prefectural government forced compliance with the landlord vision of improvement under force of law, and natural disasters drove tenants and smallholders into desperation even as it accelerated the land accumulation of large landlords (ōjinushi). Disputes broke out following 2 years of crop failures in 1905 and 1906 that saw governmental authorities stand by as leagues of tenants and smallholders forced landlords to acquiesce to their demands. This victory and its widespread influence heralded the beginning of a change in Miyagi, laying the roots for a shift in village leadership from large landlords to resident smallholders and tenants and pointing to a change in the nature of local notables and their role in village society.
December 3rd
Hansen's Disease, Testimony, and Modern Japanese Literature
Kathryn Tanaka, PhD Candidate, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
In 1930s Japan, writings by patients with Hansen's Disease (leprosy) became popular enough that critics referred to it as a distinct genre, Hansen's Disease Literature. My work explores the purposes and consequences of this genre for patients, the hospitals, and their readers, as well as the effect of including such a distinctive genre within the received literary history.
In this presentation, I look at the works of patients hospitalized in the 1930s and reconsider the conditions under which the literature was produced and how the works can be read as literature. I also consider the literature's connections to acts of witnessing, or testimony. Does thinking about the ways testimony and literature are produced give us new ways to think about connections or distinctions between prewar and postwar writing? By exploring these connections, I examine the relationship of the category of patient writing to dominant literary genres as well as testimony. Restoring the genre as a part of Japanese literary history will help to demonstrate some of the ways in which certain social and political concerns have been occluded (and continue to be occluded) from the so-called main stream of literary categories.