2022

February 11 (Online Meeting; Video available here)

Navigating Development Financing in the Waning Cold War: India, World Bank and Japan in Economic Liberalisation, 1981-1991

Reiko Kanazawa (Nagoya University, Graduate School of International Development)

From 1989 to 1991, India was in the middle of two crises: political instability with the assassinations or resignations of prime ministers or finance officials, combined with a mounting economic balance of payments crisis. After a series of negotiations with World Bank and other actors (still surrounded by rumour), in July 1991, Manmohan Singh, Finance Minister under P. V. Narasimha Rao's Prime Ministership, declared India would embark on reforms and fully liberalise its economy. Policy analysts focus on the rationale behind India's management of national finances. Development historians focus on the skills in economic diplomacy of Indian finance officials. International relations scholars focus on India's close relationship with World Bank and increasingly assertive negotiation tactics with other donors. Significant questions remain for broader global histories of development in the 1980s. What was the state of development financing after the oil shocks and floating exchange rates? What new actors are involved in development financing and for what reasons? And why did India have a relatively smooth liberalisation transition despite a major political crisis?

This paper tries to answer the above questions by re-telling India's path to formal economic liberalisation, paying attention to the trajectories of three key actors: India (emerging economy), World Bank (development financing institution) and Japan (donor and lender). A critical aspect is making sense of Japan's increased interest in expanding economic relations with India in the 1980s, most successfully in the Maruti-Suzuki venture, and how this impacted upon the politics of negotiating liberalisation. Bringing together new archival material, it considers how historians understand and make meaning of this period of economic liberalisation/structural adjustment in the 1980s. It would be grateful for feedback from Japanese history experts.

February 25th (Online Meeting; Video available -- please contact speaker at pnrtemocin@hotmail.com)

Civil societies mobilizing for socio-political and environmental issues: A cross-country analysis and implications for Japan

Pinar Temocin (Hiroshima University)

In the early 2010s, there was a global mobilization for social change and calls for governments to alter policies such as the 2011–2013 student protests in Chile, Occupy Wall Street in the United States, Arab Spring in the Middle East, Anti-austerity movement in Spain, Gezi Park demonstrations in Turkey, pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine, and later the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Those mobilizations drew attention to the diverse manifestations of civic contention toward socio-political, economical, and environmental issues across the globe. Seen within the larger picture of these major contentions and mobilizations, an understanding of how the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident was a trigger for civil society engagement and dialogue on energy and environmental management in Japan, requires a closer look at the evolution of civil society (shimin shakai) prior to the disaster.

The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, also known as the Great East Japan Earthquake (Higashi Nihon Daishinsai) occurred on March 11, 2011, and caused a nuclear accident in the Fukushima Daichii nuclear power plants in the following days. The Fukushima issue went beyond a technical nuclear energy issue and became a nationwide socio-political issue. The government’s decision to restart nuclear reactors, which had been shut down following the Fukushima accident, and the focus on nuclear energy for the country’s future energy portfolio (20-22%) intensified the debate among environmental organizations and civil society and the Japanese government. ECSOs have started to pursue a goal of a nuclear phase-out (datsu-genpatsu) along with a nuclear-free policy (hikaku seisaku), criticizing the government’s energy strategy put forward by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), widely known for its pro-nuclear stance.

This talk will focus on Japanese civil society, with a particular focus on the environmental civil society organizations (ECSOs) based in Japan. It will also adopt a comprehensive analysis of civil society mobilizations processes and their involvement channels in several countries, such as Turkey, New Zealand, and India.

April 28th (Online Meeting; Video available here)

Contextualizing Central Asian migration to East Asia: The case of Uzbek new comers to Japan

Timur Dadabaev (University of Tsukuba) & Sonoda Shigeto (University of Tokyo, Tobunken)

This seminar will focus on the Central Asian migration to East Asia by presenting the outcomes of the survey on the case of new comers from Uzbekistan to Japan. It will introduce the main points outlined in the recently published book titled The Grass is Always Greener? Unpacking Uzbek Migration to Japan (Edited by Prof. Timur Dadabaev, Palgrave, April 2022), which is the first study focusing on the phenomenon of education and language migration from Central Asia to Japan. This study unpacks the motivations, migration channels and adaptation strategies of migrants to the realities of Japan.

May 12th (Online Meeting; Presentation available here)

Distant cousins, or What You Will - Deconstructing a subcultural belief in the history of Japanese-Hungarian Bilateral Relations

Gergely Tóth (Independent Scholar)

The world is full of alternative notions, and there is one peculiar alternative notion in the history of Hungaro-Japanese relations, too. In this presentation, we are going to investigate the historiography of the alternative belief of Hungarian-Japanese kinship. Where is it coming from? How is it being interpreted in contemporary Hungary? Why is it still being used in certain political-ideological spheres?

June 9th (Online Meeting; Presentation available here)

From Punjab to Kantō, and back again: Puran Singh, Swadeshi Internationalism and Japan as a site of scientific education, 1890-1920

Francesco Paolo Cioffo (University of Turin)

In this presentation I argue that between 1890 and 1920 Japan was integrated within the geographical imaginaries and the global networks of travel established by the Swadeshi movement. During this time, Japan became for many South Asians one of the main centres of scientific and industrial education, as well as one of the key hubs of global anti-colonial activism. This paper aims to go beyond historical narratives that theorise modernisation and modernity as trickle-down processes springing from the West to the rest, and instead affirm the importance of inter-Asian interactions and exchanges in the formation of ideas about an “Asian” modern.

I take as main case study Puran Singh (1881-1931), one of the towering figures of Punjabi literature, who studied industrial chemistry in Japan between 1900 and 19004. My goal is to contextualise Puran Singh in the broader flows of his time and to locate his experience among those of many other students from the Subcontinent who went to Japan for scientific and industrial education.

The presentation will be divided chronologically in three main sections. First, I look at Puran Singh’s early life and education. Here I will analyse the idea of Japan as an industrial and scientific site circulating in South Asia, and then move to look at the grassroot systems of financial support that sent Indian students to Japan. The second section will discuss Puran Singh’s time in Tokyo. I will contextualise his experience in the broader trajectory of Indian students towards Japan by looking at the institutions they studied in, which subject they picked and what they did while in Japan. Furthermore, I will show how the experience of studying in Japan was for many of these students a moment of political radicalisation. Lastly, I will discuss the return of Puran Singh in India and his activities until death. The two main issues in this section will be the fulfilment of the dream of Swadeshi and the setting up of local industries by those who returned from Japan. As well as the anti-colonial activism of Puran Singh and others using their experience abroad to bring more students and revolutionaries in Japan.

July 14th (Online Meeting)

The 8 p.m. Battle Cry: The 1923 Earthquake and the Korean Sawagi in Central Tokyo

Kenji Hasegawa (Yokohama National University)

“Chōsenjinsawagi” (Korean commotion), the contemporaneous naming of the rumor-driven mass agitation and massacres following the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, has been shunned by scholars of the massacre due to its dismissive and obfuscatory nature. As Andre Haag has pointed out, the label of Korean sawagi served to shroud the massacre in ambiguity. The term referred to rumored activities as diverse as rioting and carnivalesque merry-making, and Korean sawagi could refer to the rumored acts of violence carried out by Korean people, the violence by Japanese that resulted, or both. Due to this problematic ambiguity, “Korean Massacre” (Chōsenjin gyakusatsu) has become the accepted naming and object of inquiry in Japanese language scholarship, while “Korean Panic” has become the most common translation for the broader social responses of the Korean sawagi in English language scholarship. Yet, “Korean sawagi”was how the realities of the rumor-driven commotion and massacres were staged and enacted in the terror-filled days after the 1923 earthquake. As such, it requires critical re-examination.

The Korean sawagi was staged by state authorities from the initial aftermath of the 1923 earthquake targeting two complementary policing signs that have generally been misconstrued as oppositional: “unruly Koreans” (futei senjin) and “rumors” (ryūgen higo). The sawagi was preemptively inversive, aimed at forestalling a mass sawagi against the state by inciting a wave of collective violence that was not completely controllable but that was, more importantly, contained within the framework of joint security operations against enemies of the state expressed in these policing signs. It achieved its aim through agitational and silencing effects, and through the integrated process of spreading and quelling rumors of Korean attackers. These mutually constitutive elements of the sawagi manifested themselves in differential configurations and chronologies depending on local circumstances. An exceptionally early display of the agitational-and-silencing effect of the sawagi was the 8 p.m. battle cry (toki no koe) exercise of September 2 in the heart of the imperial capital.

August 11th (Online Meeting)

The Strata of Identity: Umehara Takeshi and the Postwar Valorization of the Jomon Period

Tim Strikwerda (University of Oregon)

This presentation examines the life and thought of philosopher and nihonjinron theorist Umehara Takeshi (1925-2019). Long viewed as a scholar representing the Japanese intellectual far-right in Anglophone scholarship, Umehara has often been cited as a figure espousing some of the most preposterous claims about Japanese identity and culture in the postwar era. In particular, Umehara’s claims that the Jomon period was the foundational epoch of Japanese history and that Jomon culture remained a latent, unacknowledged facet of modern Japan have been frequently singled out as nationalist obscurantism. Paradoxically, however, Umehara himself defined his study of the Jomon period (sometimes termed ‘Jomonism’ or ‘Jomonology’) as an intellectual endeavor that opposed theories of Japanese homogeneity (tanitsu minzoku) and pre-war ultranationalism. Similarly, the postwar discourse surrounding Jomon and Japanese identity has often dominated by figures such as avant-garde artist Okamoto Taro and fellow philosopher Ueyama Shunpei who reached back to prehistory in an attempt to avoid the pitfall of nationalism when studying Japanese identity and culture.

This presentation aims to not only critically unpack the claims behind Umehara’s Jomonism, but also elucidate how Umehara’s earlier work as a philosopher and religious studies scholar engaged in Continental philosophy and the study of Japanese Buddhism informed his ideas about the Jomon period. Through closely reading relevant texts from Umehara’s career published from the 1950s through the early 1990s, I will explore some of the common ideas about civilization, modernity, nation, and indigeneity running through his work that ultimately led him to the Jomon period. This analysis will also show how Umehara’s approach toward studying the Jomon period differed from alternative interpretations such as those put forward by Okamoto Taro and Ueyama Shunpei. Finally, in addition to explicating the genealogy of Umehara’s thought, this presentation will highlight how theories about the Jomon period have comprised an understudied aspect of postwar Japanese intellectual history.

September 29th (Online Meeting)

Toward a Global History of Abe Fortas's Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience

Eraldo Souza dos Santos (Panthéon-Sorbonne University)

This talk draws on current research on the global history of United States Supreme Court Justice Abraham “Abe” Fortas's 1968 book, Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience. Published months before a scandal that would eventually force Fortas to resign from the Supreme Court, the book criticized the use of civil disobedience by activists opposing the Vietnam War. Drawing on largely overlooked archival materials, the paper reveals how the debate about the limits of civil disobedience the book sparked had repercussions beyond the United States and played a key role in American foreign policy during the Cold War era. With support from the U.S. government, the book was translated and published in countries such as Brazil, France, and Japan—and played an important role in shaping debates about civil disobedience in the context of international struggles against student radicalism. In this talk, Eraldo Souza dos Santos explores the Japanese reception of the book.

October 20th

Limit of systems: MITI's social systems projects in the 1970s

Yize Hu (Johns Hopkins University, Department of History of Science and Technology)

Between the early 1970s and the mid-1980s, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) planned and funded the development of various computer-based systems with the help of systems engineers. MITI officials called them “social systems (shakai shisutemu)” and expected them to solve social problems such as environmental pollution and the unbalanced distribution of medical resources. How were these systems developed? How were social factors considered in the design and building of systems? The chapter aims to reveal the gap between the plan and reality of MITI's social system projects and the impact of this gap on the way how people viewed and applied the systems approach. I argue that the limitations of social systems exposed by MITI’s projects dwarfed systems researchers and government officials’ dream of building optimized social systems and stimulated them to reevaluate the systems approach’s effectiveness in solving social problems. By revealing how engineers and allies in the government thought about the complexity of social issues and tried to solve them with a comprehensive approach, this study contributes to the studies of engineering culture, technocracy, and the relationship between computer technology and society.

November 24th

Disciplining Religion on the “Frontier” of the Japanese Empire and Beyond: A Case Study from Early Twentieth-Century Manmō

Daigengna Duoer (University of California, Santa Barbara)

This paper discusses how religion, specifically Buddhism, was regulated and disciplined through law in the region of manmō (“Manchuria-Mongolia”) by the lawmakers of Manchukuo (1932-1945) and Mengjiang/Mōkyō (1939-1949), two political entities that have often been referred to as the “puppet states” of the Japanese Empire. Unlike bukkyō, the kind of Buddhism in the manmō region of the Empire was mostly referred to as ramakyō (“Lamaism”). In contrast to the Buddhist traditions in Japan and China, ramakyō was understood as spatially, temporally, racially, and even morally distinct in the legal languages of Manchukuo and Mengjiang/Mōkyō. More specifically, ramakyō, with its maintenance of politically powerful reincarnated lamas and a large monastic population, was deemed “backwards,” “superstitious,” and even morally “degenerate.” As a result, laws were proposed to govern ramakyō as a (bio)political-economic issue. On the one hand, lawmakers aimed to exploit ramakyō for their multiethnic nation-building and empire-building projects. At the same time, lawmakers strived to discipline the religion as an “ethno-religious” issue that needed to be depoliticized and reformed. Lastly, this paper makes the case that the disciplining of religion on the “frontier” of the Japanese Empire followed a legacy of lawmaking in the Qing Empire and Republican China, and that both the Republic of China and states in the Japanese Empire made claims over “Manchuria-Mongolia” and created competing policies towards disciplining Buddhism in the region, which later informed how “ethnic frontier” policies of the People’s Republic of China would be built in the postwar.

December 8th (Online Meeting; Video available here)

Modern Girl, Modern Geisha: Interwar Popular Entertainment and the Geisha of Kyoto

Gavin Campbell (Doshisha University)

In 1927 a new building cast long shadows over the tiled roofs and narrow alleys of Kyoto’s Pontocho geisha district. Four stories framed by steel girders and clad with fashionable yellow bricks, the building dwarfed tea houses of wood, tile and paper. Inspecting it from across the river, an observer would have quite naturally wondered how much longer Pontocho’s narrow streets would echo the shamisen’s twang, the geisha’s song, and the quiet rustling of kimono over candle-lit tatami mats.

But in fact Pontocho geisha were thrilled. After all, they were the ones who had built this startlingly modern kaburenjo as a multi-purpose entertainment hall. It housed a large theater to showcase their district’s annual “Kamogawa odori,” it gave geisha and their maiko apprentices space for classrooms, and it boasted a large hall the public could rent out for dances, banquets or other fun. This new kaburenjo, then, was one prominent way Pontocho’s geisha adapted to a rapidly changing popular entertainment landscape.

Scholars of interwar Japanese culture have largely overlooked geisha in favor of department stores, cafes, and movie palaces, and the cabaret dancers, actresses and “modern girls” that all seemed to be making the geisha obsolete. Focusing on Kyoto’s Pontocho geisha district, this paper instead argues that geisha creatively adapted to new forms of mass spectacle and popular entertainment. Geisha are, in short, a fascinating and overlooked constituent in the emergence of “the modern.”