2019
January 18th
Past Futures of Japanese Atomic Power: Civilization, Temporality, and Takahashi Minoru’s Energy Theory of Value
Jonathan Lear, PhD Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley
Japan’s deep engagement with the civil and commercial uses of atomic energy began in the mid 1950s. This development was very much in tune with world trends, occurring more or less coterminously with President Eisenhower’s 1953 Atoms for Peace speech and the 1955 International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. But having been banned from researching atomic energy during the occupation, one of the first nuclear discourses that arose in Japan was one of “backwardness”—specifically, that Japan was “ten years behind” the “advanced countries,” namely the USA, the UK, France, and the USSR. My research takes the postwar re-emergence of the concept of backwardness as a starting point for writing an intellectual history of Japanese atomic power. In my presentation I will briefly go over what I want to accomplish with the dissertation, after which I will introduce one of the actors that I will be writing about—Takahashi Minoru (1916-1999). Takahashi was a Todai electrical engineering graduate who in the postwar era wrote a number of theoretical texts on energy and nuclear power. He eventually came to head the atomic energy section of the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI—a postwar think tank) and was a regular participant in the complex web of Japanese atomic power institutions. A number of themes worth exploring emerge in his work, for instance: the idea that energy is the only concrete source of value in society; that energy, as opposed to race or class, ought to be seen as the foundation for civilization; that the “degree of civilization” (bunmeido) of any given society could be measured and charted based on how much energy it produces; and that atomic energy and only atomic energy, as a theoretically inexhaustible source of power, had the power to keep civilization (specifically Japanese civilization, but also world civilization) going indefinitely. By analyzing Takahashi’s ideas among those of his contemporaries, I hope to explore the tensions that existed in nuclear thought—between nationalist and more cosmopolitan sentiments, between the presence of the wartime past and postwar dreams of a more prosperous future.
February 8th
Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Producing Comparative Area Studies
Yuko Shibata, Research Fellow, Meiji Gakuin University
When considering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, why do different texts become the object of study depending on the discipline? Why do scholars in Euro-American studies disregard Japanese texts written by the hibakusha? Why do they instead examine texts originally written in European languages? What kinds of transboundary horizons emerge, when reading together both the texts written in Japanese and European languages, in conjunction with transnational historical contexts?
This talk purses these questions examined in Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Literature, Film, and Transnational Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018). I take up the texts that have traditionally been excluded from Japanese studies—Alain Resnais’ avant-garde film, Hiroshima Mon Amour and John Hersey’s journalistic account, Hiroshima, as a threshold through which to cross disciplinary boundaries and shed light on neglected fields. While tracing the entangled political threads that link representations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the early postwar period, I discuss what I term “connected divides” existing in knowledge production between Euro-American and Japanese studies. My aim is not only to establish a new type of transpacific studies on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also to expand the possibility of comparative area studies to match the age of world literature.
March 8th
The Konoe Affair: Former Prime-Minister Konoe Fumimaro under fire from the Japanese press
Elsa Gonay, PhD Candidate, Department of East Asian Studies, Geneva University (Switzerland)
The “Konoe affair,” is a smear campaign launched by the major newspapers against Ex-Premier Konoe Fumimaro 近衞文麿 (1891-1945) between October and December 1945. The sharp criticism and intense public hatred expressed during this episode isolated Konoe politically and resulted in his designation as a war criminal. Refusing trial, he committed suicide on December 16th 1945.
The accountability of Konoe for the war has received increased attention in Japan in recent years, although the historic significance of the role of the press in his defamation hasn’t been properly assessed. It is certain that under the occupation, and especially during the period from September 1945 to April 1946, newspapers underwent a firm restructuration. Constrained by a schizophrenic system between modernization and censorship, the first months of the occupation were nonetheless a baffling experience for the Japanese press. My presentation will therefore seek to evaluate the creation of a narrative on Konoe by the three major dailies - Asahi Shinbun 朝日新聞, Mainichi Shinbun 毎日新聞 and Yomiuri Shinbun 読売新聞, as they struggled to adjust their editorial lines in this new environment.
April 12th
Locked up in the Embassy: The Experiences of American Diplomats after Pearl Harbor
Dayna Barnes, Lecturer in Modern History in the Department of International Politics at City, University of London
The attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 came like a bolt out of the blue to most Americans, but events were seen differently by US diplomats on the ground in Tokyo. While the location was unanticipated, the strike was an expected surprise which marked the end of a long, tense, and failing negotiation between the two countries. One staffer wrote in his diary on December 8th that what he and his colleagues felt most of all was an “unutterable relief” that the dreaded and unavoidable had come at last.
He could not know it then, but what followed for the group was a forced six-month internment in the compound of the US embassy, and then a return home to develop US-Japan relations and plan the treatment of Japan after surrender. Drawing on the published and unpublished diaries and letters of diplomats interned at the American embassy in Tokyo, this talk considers the fate of individuals caught at a turning point in history, the legal treatment of diplomatic representatives of a country turned enemy, and how the personal experiences of policymakers effected bilateral relations long after the war.
May 10th
Spectacular Health: Japan at the 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition
Nicole Y. Gaglia, PhD Candidate, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Culture, Duke University
In 1911, the Japanese government sent an architectural model of Tokyo’s Institute for Infectious Disease to Dresden, Germany. This model was part of its entry into the First International Hygiene Exhibition, one of the most important exhibitions for scientifically based concepts of health in the early twentieth century. Japan’s collection of objects, from samples to specimens and diagrams to dioramas, was one node in the complex network of visual culture that represented public health in Japan. In my dissertation, “Visualizing Bodies: Public Health and the Medicalized Everyday in Modern Japan,” I investigate these nodes to explicate the role of images in constructing social conceptions of modern health during this period. I examine images to ask how visuality shaped public discourses on health, the body, and sociality in modern Japan within four distinct spheres: hygiene exhibitions, enlightenment posters, prints of the active female body, and modernist painting. Through the encounter between medical science and the viewer, I address the themes of space, translation, and pleasure. How was public health visualized and transmitted in public and everyday space? How were abstract scientific concepts made legible for public consumption? How did these concepts change through consumption? How did sensuous experience operate within the visual language of public health?
In this conference paper, based on research for the first chapter of my project, I examine the visual apparatus of health constructed by the Japanese government through the lens of the international exhibition. I argue that the simultaneously instructive and titillating sensory experience of health reveals a transformation in knowledge production in the fantastic space of the exhibition. Further, I identify the objects, spaces, and images as agents imbricated in the construction of a medicalized everyday—a scientific rationalization of everyday life rooted in the body.
June 14th
Traversing the Social Landscape of Intellectual Life: Intellectual Networks in Early Twentieth-Century Japan
Andrew Kamei-Dyche, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Saitama University
Early twentieth-century Japan brimmed with a great variety of intellectual networks: groups of writers and artists, salons based in bookstores, student literature circles, and even gatherings of intellectuals sponsored by leading political figures. Many networks were based around a prominent intellectual, an axis who represented a voice of authority as well as a potential avenue to fame for younger members who were often apprentices of the established figure. Because they linked members to colleagues, publishers, and other figures, these networks played a substantial role in shaping careers and reputations. Such networks formed an essential component of the social landscape of early twentieth-century intellectuals in Japan.
Drawing on letters, diaries, and other personal writings, this presentation traces the contours of this landscape by considering how intellectual networks were formed, how they functioned, and what role they served for participating intellectuals, in terms of both concrete benefits tied to their careers and social benefits pertaining to involvement in the intellectual community. It therefore sheds light on an essential context informing the exchange of ideas and the production of literary, philosophical and artistic work in modern Japan.
July 12th
Taishō Enchantment: Between Science and Religion in the Shirakaba Journal
Joshua Rogers, PhD Candidate in Japanese Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University
The Japanese literature of the early 1910s was marked by a tension between science and religion. On the one hand, the materialistic philosophy of thinkers like Ernst Haeckel combined with a surge in popularity of critical writings on Christianity by Friedrich Nietzsche and Ernest Renan pushed many Japanese literati to abandon their Christian faith. On the other hand, these writers' desire for spiritual experience and their skepticism of purely mechanistic worldviews led to a great surge of interest in spiritualism, mysticism, and the vitalism of Henri Bergson.
In this presentation I introduce a selection of the literature and philosophy that was both anti-materialistic and anti-religious written by authors who contributed to, or were greatly influenced by, the Shirakaba (White Birch) journal. Yanagi Muneyoshi was a leading voice in this movement as it jumped from psychical research, pantheism, vitalism, and mysticism. It was also Yanagi who helped forge the connection between spiritualism and a theory of the genius, under which the great artists of the world were equated to religious figures like Jesus and the Buddha. These connections in turn had a great impact on the fiction of writers like Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Arishima Takeo, and Shiga Naoya.
September 13th
Bun and Bu in Meiji Women’s Education
Simona Lukminaite, Osaka University, Graduate School of Language and Culture
In my research, I address the specifics of the “balanced” education proposed by Meiji Jogakkō 明治女学校 (1885-1909), a Japanese Protestant school for girls. In particular, how it chose to resolve, both ideologically and practically, the issues arising while it attempted to find equilibrium between what was considered old and new, religious and secular, physical and mental, and feminine and masculine aspects in education.
As a major tool applied at the school was the bunbu ryōdō 文武両道 ideal, in the Ph.D. thesis I am currently editing, I have allocated a chapter each to the physical (bu 武) and literary (bun 文) education, in which I address the theories and practices developed by the school. I would like to introduce my findings regarding the connection between the school’s curriculum and emphasis on writing/publishing activities and physical education, especially martial arts. I illustrate my arguments with the students’ and teachers’ own accounts of their experiences at Meiji Jogakkō. Other than biographical writing by the students and teachers, I refer to the essays found in the magazines Jogaku zasshi 女学雑誌 (1885–1905) and Jogakusei 女学生 (1890–93), both of which were meant for the female readership that were practically published by Meiji Jogakkō.
September 27th
Creating the Kaikō Kinenbi: Nagasaki’s Founding Myths in a Decade of Crisis, 1930-1941
Jeffrey C. Guarneri, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of History
This paper examines how the global crises of the 1930s shaped the establishment and reconfiguration of city-sanctioned founding narratives of Nagasaki, Japan, from the global economic crash of 1929 to the outbreak of war between Japan and the U.S./European colonial powers in 1941. After decades of economic decline and on the back of the global economic crisis of 1929, business and civic leaders in Nagasaki inaugurated a Kaikō kinenbi (“Port Opening Memorial Day”) in order to create an official civic canon for their city. The resulting holiday was, in turn, charged with rolling back decades of economic decline for this once-vibrant harbor, calling back to the city’s glory days while aiding the city in carving out a new niche in the economic geography of the Asia-Pacific region. However, contrary to the historiographic consensus on Japan in the 1930s, I argue that the city-ism born from the Kaikō kinenbi was not fully subsumed by the rise of right-wing nationalism in 1930s Japan, instead creating a discursive space for Nagasaki that was simultaneously held the city to be a crucial part of, apart from, and uniquely important place within both Japan’s global commercial networks and its expanding wartime empire in East and Southeast Asia. This intersection of city-ism, nationalism, and internationalism created and re-created a founding narrative for the city that accommodated both commitment to the liberal international order and aggressive military expansion over the course of the 1930s, a narrative which survived the deterioration of Japan’s international position over the course of the decade until the collapse of its international relations with the embargoes and, ultimately, war of late 1941.
October 18th
Envisioning the Future: How Blind People Created "Disability" in Modern Japan
Mark Bookman, University of Pennsylvania, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
In 1949, Japanese policymakers and SCAP officials created disability in Japan by drafting the Law for the Welfare of Physically Handicapped Persons. Disabled people themselves were excluded from the drafting process with the exception of five members of the Japan Federation for the Blind. How did leaders from Japan’s blind communities come to occupy this privileged position? And what were the consequences of their actions for individuals with different kinds of impairments? In this article, I take up these questions by tracing how blind people capitalized on historical contingencies and geopolitical circumstances to galvanize social movements between 1868 and 1949.
November 8th
The Police Idea in Japan, 1868-1945
Max Ward, Middlebury College, Department of History
In this paper I explore the translation of the police idea in Meiji Japan and the changing conceptualization of police power at important moments in Japan’s prewar history. Existent studies of the Japanese police have presumed the naturalness of policing and its necessity to secure social order throughout history, an example of what the criminologist Robert Reiner has called in another context “police fetishism.” This paper, in contrast, is premised on the thesis that the concept of the police and the functions and institutions it signifies are of historically modern origin, and that as Meiji leaders began studying the police idea and its various institutional models in the west, they were also conceiving the nature of state power and the formation of civil society. I begin by analyzing how early police leaders first conceived the police’s mandate as cultivating a civic behavior amongst the Japanese population conducive to industry, commerce and patriotic loyalty to the young Meiji state. I then turn to particular periods in Japan’s prewar history in which social, economic, or political tumult provoked officials to re-conceptualize the function of the police. Ultimately, I aim to outline the early coordinates for a conceptual history of the police idea in Japan.
November 29th
Failure or Success? Modern Japanese Painting Shows in Paris During the 1920s
Yue Yu, University of Lille, École du Louvre, and University of Tokyo
With the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan was opened up to a veritable flood of influence from the West. In the field of art, this period was marked by the bifurcation of styles into Western and traditional indigenous, which accordingly engendered the terms yōga and nihonga. In the rush to westernize, the yōga style was officially promoted by the government. However, under the influence of Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Tenshin, Meiji Japan gradually realized the importance of valuing its traditional culture, which led to a revival of the traditional Japanese style of painting. The term nihonga itself evokes a sense of national consciousness – a consciousness of a particular mode of nationhood.
This paper explores the diffusion and reception of nihonga and yōga in France through three major public shows in Paris: at the Salon de la Société National des Beaux-Arts in 1922, the Salon d’automne in 1923 and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in 1929. By examining the selection criteria adopted by the Japanese, how the three exhibitions were perceived by the French, and whether modern Japanese painting contributed to the construction of Japan’s national image, this paper furthers insight into these questions.
December 13th
Between Sacred Decisions: Japan’s Imperial Army and Surrender, August 10—August 14, 1945
Peter Mauch, Western Sydney University
Japan’s Shōwa Emperor delivered his so-called “sacred decisions” to surrender on August 10, 1945, and again on August 14, 1945. Necessitating the second sacred decision was the Japanese army’s volatile opposition to surrender.
This paper seeks to shed new light on the army’s fascination with what it called the “decisive home-island battle.” It pays particular attention to the army leadership, including Army Minister Anami Korechika and Army Chief of Staff Umezu Yoshijirō, as well as the army’s “elders,” including Field Marshals Hata Shunroku and Sugiyama Hajime and Generals Tōjō Hideki and Koiso Kuniaki. It develops what it calls the Anami hara-gei thesis, according to which Anami championed a continuation of the war while actually paving the way for surrender.