June 11th
Short Circuits and Missed Connections: The Confucian Origins of Agricultural Science in Modern Japan
Scott Ma (University of Zurich & Waseda University)
Science is typically understood within the historiography of modern Japan as the introduction of Western ways of knowing that either replaced, fused, or overlaid traditional Japanese ways of knowing. This paper uses the example of the modernization of agricultural science in nineteenth-century Japan to argue to the contrary: firstly, that modern science was institutionalized and understood through native categories, and secondly, that these “native” categories through which modern agriculture was translated were self-consciously derived from the Sinitic literary and philosophical tradition. To make this case, it first considers how early-modern Japanese thinkers understood the meanings of agricultural knowledge as an economic, political, and colonial tool. It then provides a revision of our standard narrative of Hokkaido’s colonization—modern science, settler colonialism, American advisors—to show how the “science” was promoted for traditional purposes, the Americans were mired in their own disputes surrounding the proper means of agricultural education, and a traditional East Asian variant of settler colonialism remained the best explanation for colonial decision-making. The ideological confusion of the early Meiji, coupled with the felt imperative to learn rapidly from a “West” that was hardly united in its own right, enabled not a radical overhaul, but a revision and in large parts a preservation of traditional structures of knowledge. The paper will also discuss the Komaba Agricultural School and the definitive formalization of the imperial agricultural extension apparatus at the turn of the twentieth century.
June 22nd
Women Artists in Action: Visualizing the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movements
Kanako Tajima (Columbia University)
This paper focuses on the work of transnationally active women artists whose feminist engagement with artmaking served an integral role in negotiating the intersecting currents of the Japanese and American Women’s Liberation Movements. As part of the global feminist movement of the 1970s, the Japanese Women’s Liberation Movement (Ūman Ribu) engaged in dialogue with the U.S. Women’s Liberation Movement. Public events, women’s spaces, alternative magazines (mini comi), feminist meetings, and intimate gatherings served as a productive discursive arena for cross-regional networking and transnational information exchange between women. As a strategic means for building solidarity across borders, women’s visual practice played an operative role in elaborating women’s issues as locally specific yet globally resonant, and staking their position in this moment of feminist radicalism. In this paper, I highlight how the video work of women artists, who have engaged with both movements through their transnational experience, unfolded within and alongside the discussions in feminist publications and photographs. Read through the narrative specific to the discourses of the Women’s Liberation Movements, their expansive feminist activity reveals an underexplored yet critical global interconnectivity between art and activism, artists and activists, and aesthetic method and feminist strategy that surfaced in 1970s Japan.
July 16th
Fūkei Film Locations and Knowledges
Shayne Bowden (University of Sydney)
This paper will discuss dissertation fieldwork undertaken during the first half of 2026 in Tokyo. My dissertation research is concerned with the creation of an intersection between rephotography, cinephilic pilgrimage, and fūkeiron (landscape theory). The fieldwork involved revisiting and rephotographing a select number of locations associated with fūkeiron, particularly locations associated with two films that have become synonymous with fūkei cinema, Ryakushō: Renzoku Shasatsuma (1969) and Tōkyō Sensō Sengo Hiwa (1970). Using the methodology of rephotography, the fieldwork sought to assess the spatial changes occurring within the said locations evident by way of a comparative imaging of stills and sequences from those films and how these variations complement the main tenet of fūkeiron, that all banal space is saturated with the invisible power dynamics of the state.
In dissertation chapters on rephotography, film pilgrimage, and landscape theory, those topics were introduced as respective methodologies, spectatorial practice, and activist theory that are complementary by way of commonalities, the recognition/discussion of which has mostly been lacking from respective discourses and research. During this presentation, I want to consolidate these three factors and discuss how these parts were exercised in the field, in actual film locations associated with fūkei cinema, in order to demonstrate how these pieces or components complement and work as theoretical and practical visual means to measure how film locations spatially transition through time. By doing so, this may substantiate or conflict with fūkei cinema as a proposed measure of power dynamics in space, as well as with the rephotographical possibilities of observing and measuring spatial change, and how visiting film locations is also a reconciliation of spectatorial trauma.