Book of Abstracts

Are the long sixties still “contemporary”? What, if anything, remains of them in art? My presentation reflects on the relevance of the long 1960s to contemporary art practice in Japan (and more generally the contemporary moment), through my ongoing research on the process-based work of artist Enokura Kōji (Tokyo, 1944-1995). 

Working across various media—including painting, print, installation, video, photography, and performance—Enokura articulated an ambitious body of work that relies on ephemeral interventions to query the individual’s encounter with the world. Enokura achieved this through his deployment of what I call “the stain”—which functions not simply as a visual marker, but rather as an operative trace of time, acting on the surface, or meeting point between two bodies. Enokura’s work, like that of his colleagues, resonated with art created abroad. Particularly intriguing is the formal similarity with experimental practices such as those developed in the context of Arte Povera in Italy. 

Enokura’s practice began in the aftermath of the contestations of 1968. He responded to his immediate context, but in some ways he helped extend these concerns into the following decades, both through his artistic practice as well as in his role educating a younger generation of artists. One possibility is to think about this continuity. But maybe there is also another way of thinking about the permanence of the sixties in art. I suggest that the stain remains latent: it expands and illuminates another way of thinking about historical memory. 

 Marco DEL BENE

SAPIENZA University of Rome

The history of the second part of the 20th century is, for today's younger generations, largely "terra incognita." In Italy, a series of reforms of the education system, promoted by various ministers of education, starting with Giovanni Berlinguer in 2000, have established that in the last year of high school, only twentieth-century history should be taught. However, professors only rarely manage to cover the period after the end of World War II, partly because of the considerable complexity of the topics and the few hours of class time available. Italian High school history textbooks, which are very thick (some over 600 large-format pages) and rich in documents and images, are designed more as reference material from which to draw topics to be studied in depth than textbooks to be studied in full.

Even in Japan, the teaching of history in high schools has recently been reformed but with a different approach to the text and, more importantly, definitely fewer pages. If not from schools, where can young people get information and news about the long 1960s? In part, apparently more in Italy than in Japan, from family members, particularly parents or grandparents. Another source may be popular culture, such as television series, movies, comic books.

The heterogeneous nature of the sources might be one of the reason why the knowledge of the long 1960s among young generations is episodic and discontinuous, rather than part of a coherent and organic comprehensive narrative, something that appears to be confirmed by the first responses to a survey on the knowledge of the long 1960s compiled by students of Tohoku and Sapienza Universities.

 Female bodies are seldomly directly mentioned in Japanese courtly romance tales (ōchō monogatari), often represented by the ladies’ perfumed sleeves and tangled hair, as for the words of Professor Pandey. Nevertheless, in the Yoru no Nezame (“Wakefulness at Midnight”, ca 1060-1080) the narrator directly refers to main character Naka no kimi’s lack of a body (mi mo naku) twice. Furthermore, both occasions in which Naka no kimi’s body is mentioned happen in the first part of the story, when she has no control whatsoever on her life, and before her first childbirth. On the other hand, after the third maki of the monogatari, when she is depicted as having acquired a certain degree of political and economic power as a widow and the sole manager of her family and estate, her body seems to totally disappear from the narration even though she has already given birth to two of her three (or four, depending on the textual variants) children, thus achieving a deeper sort of body awareness otherwise unobtainable.
While scenes related to childbirth had also appeared in earlier tales, such as the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari), they arguably acquire here a specific role in shaping both the identity and social status of the female protagonist, albeit they seem to counterintuitively make her body disappear from the narrative. 

Therefore, in this paper I discuss how the direct mentioning of a body in Yoru no Nezame is in itself proof of the insubstantiality of the social and personal identities it represents, thus reversing the meaning of the absence or presence of female body in the narrative. I also consider how the depictions of her body engaged in pregnancy and childbirth, defining factors of both physical entity and female social identity in the system of late Heian, function as the catalyst for the protagonist’s personal growth and social empowerment. Finally, I argue that the significance of pregnancy and childbirth in this tale seem to equally reflect their importance as social acts at the Heian court and at the same time anticipate what would later become the medieval sōryō household system, predominant in feudal Japanese society since the Kamakura period (1185-1333).

 It is no wonder that in “Izu onsen ki” Kawabata claims that onsen are the realm of the tactile sense, considering that while bathing naked it is possible to fully enjoy the various consistencies of the many varieties of hot springs, compared by the author to the skin of women. However, most importantly, Kawabata seems to praise the scent of hot springs and women, which persists in the nostrils even after the departure. He also reminds that onsen simulate the sense of hearing through the whistles coming from the horse-drawn carriages and the songs performed by itinerant artists. Finally, he does not overlook the sense of sight, triggered by the lavish landscape of the southern provinces of Izu and beautiful women with white skin and raven hair.

This contribution aims to provide an insight into Kawabata’s literary works about onsen through the lens of the body as an essential means to the perception of reality. Specifically, the purpose is to illustrate how female sensuality is represented by Kawabata through the depiction of the various bodily perceptions stimulated by hot springs. In fact, by drawing references from Kawabata’s numerous literary essays about the topic, it becomes possible to better understand the role that the body plays in his novels related to onsen. Particular emphasis will be put on the analysis of “Yukiguni” and “Onsen yado,” which more than other works insist on the physical dimension of their female characters.

 In the aftermath of World War II, Okinawa was occupied by the United States. The expropriation of indigenous land by the US army and the building of military bases – which are still present on the territory despite Okinawa being returned to Japan in 1972, changed the natural landscape of the island and impacted the lives of human and extra-human beings. The ongoing construction project of a new military base in the Henoko-Oura Bay risks permanently damaging the marine biodiversity of the region, also known as one of the most critical remaining habitats for the Okinawa dugong, an endangered species of which as few as three individuals are said to survive around Okinawa currently. Whereas the indigenous protests, their cultural and socio-political contexts, and the discourses surrounding environmental protection and the interrelatedness between human beings and autochthonous flora and fauna are largely discussed by scholars (Tanji 2008, Chibana 2013, Palz 2021), the literary representation of the natural landscape and its intimate relationship with human indigenous communities is underexplored territory. 

Through a visual and textual analysis of The Sea Where Dugongs Return (Jugon no kaeru umi, 2021), a children’s picture book written by Japanese ecoactivist and author Urashima Etsuko and illustrated by Nakachi Shizuka, this paper analyses how the interdependency between human and extra-human is narrated in view of the Okinawan war legacy. It scrutinises the relationship between humans and dugongs, the role of dugongs in indigenous storytelling and worldview, and poses the oceanic environment as a colonial body whose internal cohesion and functionality are disrupted by the military activities of external authorities. In posing The Sea Where Dugongs Return as an example of ecocriticism in the East Asian context, this paper illuminates an instance of postcolonial ecological literature that re-elaborates Okinawan indigenous storytelling and war legacies as a method of protest against the American military activities and re-centre the traumatic experience of the (extra)human body as a post-colonial site affected marine pollution. 

The story of Miminashi Hōichi (Earless Hōichi) is well known thanks to the narrative gathered by Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo) in his famous anthology Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904). However, it is possible to find some previous versions in collections of ghost stories (kaii-shū) dating back to the first half of the 17th century, and one of its versions appears to have been recited by the biwa hōshi performers at the end of medieval period, spreading largely throughout Japan where folklorists like Yanagita Kunio recorded some local variants still pertaining in rural areas in the beginning of the 20th century. In numerous versions, this famous story strongly highlights the body of the storyteller as a ritual medium, his body being covered by Buddhist inscriptions in order to get free from ghosts, and it is this main feature of the narrative I would like to address in my talk.

 Among the largest businesses on the global level, the Japanese beauty industry has been spreading aesthetic ideals to an increasingly wider public for the past decades. The industry, in strong connection with the capitalist development of Japan, has produced and disseminated depictions of flawless bodies, presented as the ideal standard that the users must aspire to become. Resulting from combined dynamics of gendered stereotypes and influences of globalization, these standards focus in particular on female images, which, not differently from other social and cultural contexts, exhort women to fix or to hide those details that are commonly considered not attractive.

In my presentation I will show and discuss a series of images realized by female photographers who started emerging on the Japanese art scene since the Nineties. In different ways, these photographs manifest the artists’ desire for a counter-reaction to the conformity of aesthetics conveyed by the beauty industry. Towards a visual culture saturated with representations of tall, slim, young, healthy female bodies, the photographers oppose alternative visions that overturn gendered roles and, at the same time, shed light on the painful experiences endured by most women. The artists’ works inspected here aim to subvert the taboos surrounding images of female aging, disability, illness, but also share reflections on life and death, concepts that are usually kept hidden by the media.

 Veronica DE PIERI

Senior Researcher & Adjunct Professor in Japanese Studies
Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna

This study focuses on the female body and its symbolic deconstruction that occurred following the double atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945) as well as the more recent nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant (2011).

The atomic event represented a social stigma for surviving Japanese women, causing their discrimination in the first decades after World War II. At the heart of the household, caring for the home, the elderly, and children, women are still regarded by Japan's traditional, strongly patriarchal culture for their auxiliary role as wives and mothers. In this sense, the atomic bombs represented a revolution. The irradiated female body, whose variation of menarche was evidence of biological corruption, was the object of ostracism and rejection in the wake of Hiroshima's annihilation: a physical and metaphysical exclusion from the public space that found its foundation in associating the hibakusha woman (a-bombing survivor) with the Shintō concept of kegare (impurity).

By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective that intertwines van der Kolk's psychopathological approach to the body and the post-feminist theories proposed by Braidotti, Butler, and Haraway, this study questions the testimonies of survivors of radioactive contamination by re-reading the experiences of hibakusha women in light of radiophobia. In doing so, the media case of the so-called "Hiroshima Maidens" and the literary production of Nagasaki survivor Hayashi Kyōko are presented.

The investigation then turns the focus to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident that followed the Tōhoku triple disaster in 2011. The nuclear fall-out brought attention to the issue despite the different nature of the radioactive exposure. Among others, the film director Sono Sion interpreted the theme in his 2012 film Kibō no kuni (Land of Hope), which portrays a woman, no longer very young, grappling with a much-desired pregnancy. After the evacuation from the fictitious location of Nagashima (a mixture of Nagasaki and Hiroshima), Ono Izumi must deal with the radiophobia that is turning her everyday life into a gruelling struggle.

Hayashi and Sion's productions, which denounce radioactivity agency in deconstructing the female body as a mere reproductive resource, propose an emergent vision of its reconstruction as a woman-individual, claiming her inclusion in the public sphere by considering her post-exposure diversity no longer as a threat to herself and others but as an constitutive part of her new identity. 

 Shuwen DING

PhD Student, Tohoku University

"Kokin-Wakashu," or simply "Kokinshu," is the first anthology of poems published under imperial authority. The Daigo Emperor ordered poets Ki no Tomonori and Ki no Tsurayuki, among others, to compile it in 905. As everyone knows, the Heian court, acting on the advice of Sugawara no Michizane, abolished the official envoys to the Tang Dynasty China at the end of the 9th century. This led to a prosperous period for Japan's national culture, known as "Kokufu culture," of which "Kokinshu" is the representative work from the early 10th century.

However, the Japanese missionaries to Tang China during the Heian Period brought back aspects of Tang civilization that had a lasting impact on Japanese society. Apart from economics and religion, Chinese classic poetry, Kanshi漢詩, influenced Japanese literature. Because of this, it has been quite challenging for the Waka to fully eliminate the influence of the Chinese Kanshi in such a situation. As a result, in addition to discussing the unilateral adoption of Chinese literature, we need to look at the historical situation of "Japanese-Chinese" contacts and how "re-creation" relates to Japanization in the study of Kokinshu.

In my presentation, I will focus on the No. 225 poem of Kokinshu as follows.

The silv’ry dewdrops that in autumn light 

Upon the moors must surely jewels be; 

For there they hang all over hill and lea, 

Strung on the threads the spiders weave so tight. （translated by Frederick Victor Dickins）

My research indicates that the previous Chinese Kanshi contains instances of this scenario. Upon close examination, I discovered that the "dewdrops strung on a spider's thread" depicted here are not merely a type of landscape but also a metaphorical incorporation of a Chinese folktale of Qixi (or Tanabata in Japanese). I believe I can only revive the poets' imaginative notion at that time by exploring these possible allusions. Using this study as a portal, I think the East Asian cultural exchange route can provide a means of learning more about Japanese sensibilities in East Asian Studies.

 Sonia FAVI

University of Turin

My paper will discuss the travel guidebook titled Sekai ryokō bankoku meisho zue (“Illustrated guidebook of all the nations, for travel around the world”), published in seven volumes in Japan between 1885 and 1886, and the way it represents foreign bodies as a tourist spectacle. 

In the 1880s, Japan had grown to be one the highlights of touristic world tours – an unmissable leg for both individual travelers and travelers in package tours. Japanese authorities and the Japanese business world growingly invested in the development of tourist facilities, and, in turn, Japan came to be immersed in the culture of globetrotting. A growing public curiosity towards that culture was the background for the publication of Sekai ryokō bankoku meisho zue. Using the ‘traditional’ format of meisho zue, this guidebook led the reader in a virtual tour of the world, including African and Asian destinations rarely touched by ‘real’ Japanese travelers.

One of the many interesting features of this guidebook is the way illustrations, a dominant element of the meisho zue genre, are planned within its seven volumes. While the volumes focused on North American and European nations are dominated by landscape illustrations, volumes featuring countries that were less frequented by Japanese travelers give more relevance to the representations of ‘natives’. Natives are presented as an embodiment of the place – as tourist attractions in their own right. Much as in contemporary international exhibitions, their bodies are presented as one element of the experience of the ‘exotic’, while the ‘standard’ bodies of ‘Westerners’ are not deemed as curious enough to appear. Looking at these aspects of the guidebook, my paper will reflect on the relationship between the tourist gaze and the representation of the bodies of so-called ‘others’. 

 Luna FREZZA

PhD Student, SAPIENZA University of Rome

As is well known, in some case self-harm is used by people who suffer from mental illnesses to send indirect messages to society in order to explain their invisible disease. The focus of this presentation is on how contemporary literature can use depiction of the body as a device to express and make visible some aspects of psychological distress of the characters. The Literary character suffering from depression can be represented using visible and invisible aspects. Visible  ones are related to self-injury, such as deliberately cutting or injuring the body to emphasise and make real invisible pain; Invisible ones are symbolized by the pain that cannot be seen, but which emotionally hinders the characters.

The author I will discuss is Kobayashi Eriko (1977-), a Japanese writer whose autobiographical novels depict the violent familiar context causing the main protagonist traumas during both childhood and adulthood. In her narrative production, Kobayashi repeatedly mentions how during her life, she deliberately hurt herself in blatant ways (and also repeatedly attempted suicide) in order to use her body to display the pain and emotional upheavals that were locked inside her and make it visible. A remarkable aspect is represented by the changing in description and use of body in Kobayashi’s production: in the first novel her body is mostly mentioned as an obstacle, in spite of it becoming a powerful expressive device in later production.

I argue that this evolution in her approach to the body is related to some factors. For example, discovery of feminist movement, through which becomes aware of familiar context, in which has developed traumas and that represents the main cause of her body-rejection in the past, and the influence of post-covid literature which talk about depression. Therefore, I consider the descriptive changes perpetrated by the author as an important case study in order to understand some aspects of the development in contemporary Japanese literature and how the theme in object can influence current literally production. 

 Luciana GALLIANO

The radical avant-garde in Tokyo in the 50s, which was instrumental for the birth of the international movement Fluxus, was also a radical turning to the body as an element of the artistic and aesthetic discourse. It sparked furious controversies on the concept of individuality (shutaisei), a compound of the characters shu (subject, sovereign), tai (body, substance), and sei (quality, feature) coined by the Kyōto School. The progressive role of the iconoclastic naked body is impressive in the works of the time, performed in numerous installations at a level unknown in parallel contemporary manifestations of radical art in the West - a diffuse presence of the body as the element that can most concretely offer an experience, rather than a self showing its own expression. The body was on the scene in the most combative experimental and iconoclastic sense: the body dreadfully devastated by the first use of the atomic bomb; the body depicted with tragic deformity in the paintings of Yamashita Kikuji (Totem, 1951) or those of Hamada Chimei (Elegy for a new conscript ‘Mausoleum’, 1952), or carried to the extreme in the butō dancing of Hijikata Tatsumi. Yoshimura Masanobu’s installation at the third Neo-Dada group exhibition in 1960 centered on the body of the artist surrounded by everyday objects.

In the 60s the body turned in a musical instrument, as often shown by the title of the works. In Anima 1 (1961) Kosugi Takehisa wound string around his entire body; in Anima 2 (Chamber Music) (1962), after getting inside a zippered bag, he stuck parts of his body out, thus making sound. Nam June Paik interpreted Composition #10 1960 by LaMonte Young (“Draw a straight line and follow it) in Zen for Head respecting the score’s directions with the radical action of following the line with his whole body.

The use of the body often comprised some aspect of sacrifice, as in Cut Piece or Blood Piece by Yoko Ono or in some performance by Red High Center like Clothespins Assert an Agitating Action or Shelter Plan. 

 Sinai HAREL

PhD candidate, Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University

This research explores the interplay between body, emotions, and sexuality within the discourse of Japanese women-teachers. Although the educational arena inherently involves the body and emotions, their presence and significance are often marginalized within the disciplined space of the school. On the other hand, scholarly work has increasingly recognized the role of the body and emotions in education. This paper engages with Hochschild's (1983) theory of emotional management, specifically examining emotional work and labor, as scholars have frequently done to scrutinize the practices and roles of teachers.

In an ongoing debate regarding the applicability of emotional labor to teachers, a prevailing argument asserts that teachers' emotional work is not explicitly mandated but rather offered voluntarily, propelled by a sense of purpose. Furthermore, existing studies grounded in Hochschild's theory, in the Japanese context among others, tend to focus on emotions as internal and individual psychological processes, fostering a discourse on emotional management as a skill. Such approaches often overlook the structural dimensions of emotional labor, particularly the gendered and class-based constructs inherent in Hochschild's theory. Notably, the role of the body, especially the sexualized and gendered body, is frequently neglected.

This paper presents insights from a qualitative study exploring the career histories and gender consciousness of women-teachers in Japanese senior high schools. Drawing on interviews with 12 women in their 20s-40s, this paper aims to investigate teachers’ discourses of the body, particularly within the context of their interactions with students and colleagues. The concept of emotional labor is employed as a lens to elucidate how women-teachers articulate legitimate and illegitimate expressions of embodied, gendered emotions in their professional lives.

The findings underscore that women-teachers employ body discourse to delineate the teaching and guidance (shidō) styles available or unavailable to them. The body, intertwined with implicit notions of a/sexuality, becomes a tool for performing and rationalizing emotions, defining boundaries, and reinforcing gender ideologies.

By giving voice to the discourse of body and sexuality in education, this study illuminates the intricate role of emotions in teachers' work and the underlying structures that shape them. Understanding these dynamics sheds light on the perpetuation of gender ideologies and performances, and as such, fostering a pathway towards increased openness and equity within schooling environments.

 Marta IBÁÑEZ IBÁÑEZ

PhD Student, University of Salamanca

Can a woman maintain a relationship with a man and still pursue her freedom? This question appears to be at the heart of Enchi Fumiko's early work, "Onna no fuyu" (1939) (女の冬). This short novel delves into the lives of three female dancers as they navigate the inherently patriarchal world of the arts, striving to make a livelihood from their dancing skills.

Within this sphere dominated by the male gaze, the women endeavor to focus on studying the arts while being compelled to cater to this male perspective. The body plays a significant role in this narrative, manifested through three variations embodied by the main characters: the damaged body, the aging body, and the still-young body. As the characters work diligently to comprehend dancing traditions and stories, they face constant challenges from the male gaze, which demands the transmission of "flowery arts" through their bodies. To sustain their livelihoods in the arts, these women find themselves continuously subjected to this male gaze.

This paper aims to analyze the strategies employed by these three female characters to both appeal to the male gaze and distance themselves from the conventional housewife figure. They seek to lead economically independent lives through their art while navigating romantic relationships with male partners and exploring the resulting consequences.

 Fusako INNAMI

Durham University

Through their performance activities around World War II, dancers’ bodies connected sites in Asia and beyond. Among the Japanese dancers and troupes who crossed borders in the 1940s demonstrating Japan’s cultural activities or comforting Japanese soldiers abroad, Eguchi Takaya played a pivotal role interconnecting his earlier experience in Europe and shaping Japan’s postwar dance scene. Eguchi was a rare dancer who theorized about dance through his continuous work concerning “Buyō sōsaku hō” [the Method of Dance Creation], with reference to Rudolf von Laban’s icosahedro—a convex polyhedron with twenty faces. Eguchi’s idea of moving trace or dancing trace (called “yōseki”) aims to establish a manner of tracing bodily movements in space from the beginning to the end of a dance work, especially when dance is a composite of multiple moving bodies. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of corporeal memory as “peopled” with memories, I explore performance at the intersection of the human network and the shifting features of surfaces that reflect humans’ passing and inhabitation. Referring to contemporary re-enactments of Eguchi’s works originating in the 1940s and 1950s, this paper examines embodiment as mobility across bodily, temporal, and media borders instead of dwelling within one’s nation.

 Josef KYBURZ

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

If we compare the representations of the human body that the culture clusters at both ends of the Eurasian continent have produced over the last two and a half millennia, we cannot but notice some fundamental differences. Differences so deep-rooted, embedded in the unconscious as they are, so subtle that attention must pointedly be drawn to them to awake us to their existence at all.

Comparing a series of pictorial representations from European and Far-Eastern cultures, one of the basic differences we are able to discern is that, on one side, the physical body seems to be regarded as an object in itself, self-contained and independent of its spiritual component, whereas, on the other hand, the body as such does not appear to play a distinct role. In Japanese portraiture the body is hardly more than a support of the face wherein resides the person, whereas in classical Greek sculpture, quite to the contrary, the facial features are impersonal and conventional, there to set off an ideally built body which (one is tempted to say who) is the real subject of portrayal.

A number of other differences amount to the same distinction in the role the body plays in the person. In practically all of Western civilization, the body serves the mind as an instrument built and honed to achieve a precise purpose, physical as in sports and games, warfare, crafts and some arts, but also spiritual, mental, religious, moral, social and, last but not least, aesthetic. Purposes most of which, if at all, are of secondary importance in the Japanese historical context.

Neither can we neglect the essential difference between East and West from the point of view of what we may call the scientific gaze, in the way the physique is conceived and depicted in Western and Sino-Japanese medicine for example, typically in the all-importance assigned to anatomical structure here, a feature unexpressed in Far-Eastern renditions. We may add the particularity of the Eastern body pictured as seen on a flat, two-dimensional plane, in contrast to the characteristic Western, plastic, presentation, shaped in the round.

Among the other essential distinctions in the perception of the physical body, not unrelated to whether or not it is considered as a self-contained object, is the portrayal of the Nude, as idiosyncratic of Western art as, historically at least, non-existent in Far-Eastern cultures (the so-called shunga notwithstanding).

If these assessments are, however faintly, discernible on the surface, other distinctions escape the grasp of conceptual form and must therefore be considered in the light of cognitive anthropology. As is the case of the absence of grammatical male/female gender distinction in traditional Japanese and other Far-Eastern languages, manifest in pictorial descriptions of the physique (again, shunga notwithstanding). 

Chisato MAKISHIMA

PhD Student, Tohoku University

Even since the first ethnography of drag performers by Esther Newton, drag, a form of performance often used as a synonym for cross-dressing, has lacked a clear definition as a subject of study and has been treated as a given in the academic sphere. There have been many forms of subversive gender performance in Japan, such as josōka, and this cultural background contextualises drag in a more multi-tiered manner. Another issue is that the scope of past literature centred around studies of sexual minorities and has overlooked its artistic and theatrical aspects. In the past, the artistic aspect of drag has been overlooked because it was, or looked like, a phenomenon only specific to the queer community. While this may be arguably true, it is no reason to ignore drag as theatrical art. This shows that the academic attitude towards drag studies and the reality in Japanese drag scene do not agree with each other; thus, drag demands a new framework.

The drag performers physically take up space in theatres with props and break the concept of the body as a physical unity. As instances from fieldwork show, a drag queen shot lasers as an expansion of their body towards spectators in order to have control over their corporeality. Another performer changed from a set of suits to a harness and trousers made of leather and turned a chair into a motorbike. The bodies of performers transfigure, expand, and multiply to occupy more space in theatres and to reveal the instability of body as a physical unit.

From how performers present their artworks, there are three factors presented in this presentation; transfiguration, expansion, and having multiple bodies. Among these three factors there are two traits that juxtapose drag and other forms of theatrical art with gender performance, and possibly from any other theatrical art, which are the way drag performers occupy space in theatres and how they break the unity of the social body. 

 Lorenzo MARINUCCI

Associate Professor, Tohoku University

 This presentation analyses the complex role of olfactory sensations in relationships between Japan and Europe in the Meiji and early Taishō period. A sense bring together individual and community, human bodies and environment, scent has also a unique relationship with assuefaction, which often makes it recede into the unconscious (where, however, it exerts a fundamental effect on emotional and existential conditions); that also means that scent as an embodied cognition comes to play an especially relevant role in moments of shift and crisis, in which an open, breathing body becomes the site of a meeting – peaceful or tense – between self and other.

Japanese modernization, especially from Meiji to early Taishō, is a uniquely rich field to study this tension: Japan’s own rich olfactory heritage, itself the result of a layered interaction between China, the Asian continent and autochthonous developments, is exoticized by foreign noses (Lafcadio Hearn, Pierre Loti), cast as a sign of refinement and barbarity at the same time, as Orientalist discourse likens the scent of Japanese women, confused with that of Japan itself, to that of an “exotic flower“, able to drive Pinkerton “mad” before Butterfly. Loti’s case is exceptionally interesting, since a analysis of olfaction in Madame Chrysanthemum reveals the fundamental ambiguity of his attitude towards Kiku and Japan: to be acquired as a flower or plaything when seen, but also risking to swallow him whole when they envelop and seep into him as a perfume.

At the same time, however, the influx of Euro-American technologies and ways of production transforms the smellscapes of Japanese cities at a vertiginous rhythm, as the hygienic and ideological diktat of deodorization, arisen in Europe and North America together with the bourgeoisie and industrialization, arrives in Japan as a sudden shift in codes and etiquette, often reflecting a cultural and social anxiety, in which the loss of one’s own olfactory sensitivity could also mean a loss of one’s self. Among the many sources of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s short story The Nose, we can recognize the recast of Ambrose Bierce’s “Some Privations of the Oncoming Man”, a satirical history of the olfactory appendix that concludes “the incompossibility of civilization and the human nose.”

The way in which such an olfactory crisis can lead to a loss of the self is shown in a traumatic manner in Natsume Sōseki’s accounts of his experience of England. The painful isolation and uprooting in the foreign environment lead Sōseki to a state of olfactory hypersensitivity (also described by H. Tellenbach in his olfactory psychiatry), culminating in sent hallucinations. This role of olfaction in the embodied determination of identity and emotion will later be discussed in his Theory of Literature, and resurface often in his own works, as Sōseki, like Proust had became (painfully) aware of the role of olfaction in representing somatic memories. 

Matilde MASTRANGELO

SAPIENZA University of Rome

In Mori Ōgai’s novels and short stories set in the modern period, the body is narrated through metaphors; it is the object of delicate depictions, in a way that suggests it is more respected in its intimacy. Starting from the romantic description of Elise’s “light golden hair [which]flowed down from under the scarf around her head” in Maihime (The dancing girl, 1890), Ōgai uses prose that is more allegorical than realistic in novels such as Vita Sexualis (Vita Sexualis, 1909), too. In his short story Densha no mado (The tramcar window, 1910), the main character watches a beautiful yet sorrowful woman waiting for a tramcar, and, imagining her thoughts, he has her say: “(...) you can understand that I have some sadness in my heart. But what is in my heart is not something that anyone can comfort me for. [...] Therefore, do not look at my face. It is not good”. To a certain extent, in his modern works, Ōgai’s depiction of bodies appears to be as discreet as required by the female character in Densha no mado.

On the other hand, in his historical novels set in premodern periods, bodies are ‘unfiltered’, described in terms of the mortification of punished men, suffering women, and the bodies of children bearing the marks of affliction. It is not simply a matter of scenes played by samurai, in which blood spurts from human bodies wounded by the sword, but also a pitiless description of the ugliness of Chūhei, in Yasui fujin (The wife of Yasui, 1914), a short, dark man with only one good eye, marked by smallpox and mocked by those calling him ‘monkey’.

Considering that his medical studies provided Ōgai with the appropriate language and knowledge to write about the human body, this paper aims to explore why he adopts distinct approaches to representing bodies contingent on the historical periods in which the narratives are set.

Tatsuya MITSUDA

Associate Professor, Keio University
Visiting Researcher, Center for Metropolitan Studies, Technische Universität Berlin

As Tokyo rapidly urbanized in the twentieth century, the urban body was subject to intensified heat and humidity in the summer—a consequence of the so-called urban heat island effect. Focusing on shifting thermal norms among Tokyo residents, the paper explores how the body negotiated the heat and humidity through an analysis of various sites of coolness and heat. It reveals how the “hot” body tried to endure and then escaped “heatscapes”, looks at the conflicts surrounding how people should eat, exercise and dress for the summer, considers the various strategies that were cultivated to cool down the body, and analyzes how technologies eventually became indispensable for the body to be healthy and productive in the metropolis.

Joshua MOSTOW

University of British Columbia

Premodern Japanese visual culture had a surprising number of genres that involved the embodiment of waka in human form. Byōbu-uta, or “screen poems,” were a very important genre in the development of what is known as the Kokinshū-style in the late 8th century and beyond. Here, poets would assume the persona or personae of human figures depicted on a folding screen and compose poems from their perspective. Some have argued that the practice of byōbu-uta contributed to the development of kyokō 虚構, or “fictionality,” and the literary court romance (monogatari).

At the other end of the spectrum—in a number of senses—is the genre of kasen-e 歌仙絵, or imaginary portraits of exemplary poets. Again, groupings of notable poets start with the Kana Preface of the Kokinshū and the Six Poetic Immortals (Rokkasen). The Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals (Sanjūrokkasen) were selected by Fujiwara no Kintō around 1007-1009 and the poets were depicted in the Satake-bon Sanjūrokkasen emaki attributed to Fujiwara no Nobuzane (1177?-1266?). In the Edo period, this led to depictions of the One Hundred Poets of Fujiwara no Teika’s Hyakunin isshu. Here, however, the inclusion of depictions of the poets encouraged all the poems to be understood as in the voice of the poet him- or herself, despite the fact that a number of the included verses were on set topics, such as the “waiting woman” (matsu onna) where the male poet would compose in a feminine persona. In other words, unlike byōbu-e, kasen-e discouraged the idea of fictional personae. This presentation will explore this curiously contradictory aspect of embodiment. 

Sharalyn ORBAUGH

University of British Columbia

Graphic depictions of the painful injuries and deaths of soldiers are ubiquitous in one of the most widely disseminated and widely viewed forms of Japanese mobilization propaganda in World War II: kamishibai (literally, paper plays). The realistic style and vivid colors of the illustrations of kamishibai plays make the sufferings of Japanese soldiers palpable, raising questions: how could such depictions be intended to encourage soldiers to enlist, or to encourage those on the home front to continue their backbreaking labor to support the war effort? This presentation will explore the strategies of persuasion that relied on depictions of male bodies in pain for the purposes of propaganda.

Iga RUTKOWSKA

University of Warsaw

Ritual nudity is probably one of the most common elements in the diverse world of matsuri. I don't mean only the so-called hadaka matsuri, but also other festivals or rituals in which the undressed body is symbolically deprived of social status and/or becomes the medium of kami. From the point of view of classical cultural anthropology, it is an element that is extremely grateful for interpretation and research, but its presence in Japanese culture nowadays encourages us to look at it differently and rethink the role of nudity in traditional performances. Analyzing primarily the example of the tayuburumai ritual, which aims to choose the repertoire of Kuromori kabuki, amateur kabuki theatre, from the city of Sakata, in my presentation I would like to focus on the importance of the undressed body not only as an element of a religious ritual but also as a carrier of memory and tradition in the 21st century.

Paride STORTINI

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Ghent University

Recent scholarship has shed light on the experience of Japanese migrant sex workers across the Pacific (ameyuki-san) and to Southeast Asia (karayuki-san) in the context of modern capitalist and colonial networks. Scholars have focused on representations of the bodies of these women as a site for racial, moral, and gender role debates, considering both the exploitation and potential agency of the sex workers. However, this scholarship has disregarded an important aspect of the experience of these women that can shed further light on their agency: religion.

This presentation will analyze a collection of rare photos of karayuki-san preserved in a pagoda at the Buddhist temple Taishidō in Shimabara, Nagasaki Prefecture. Built in 1909, the pagoda commemorates the pilgrimage to India of the temple’s head-priest, Hirota Gonshō, but also the migrants that the priest had met and that had made the construction of the pagoda possible through their donations. The photos Hirota took of the karayuki-san after performing memorialization rituals provide a rare glimpse into the role of religion in the experience of Japanese migrants in Southeast Asia. The presentation will specifically analyze the way the priest and the sex workers are represented in the photos as embodiment or religious practice, and hypothesize the kind of identity and message this embodiment might have tried to communicate.

Asumi SUZUKI

Ph.D. Student, Department of Linguistics,
Graduate School of Arts and Letters, Tohoku University

We embody language through social interaction. A typical example is the utterance-final particle (UFP). The UFP is a characteristic part of speech in East and Southeast Asian languages, and is attached to the end of a sentence to provide emotional information and define the relationship between the speaker and the listener. It is a linguistic expression that relates not to the objective content of "what" we convey, but to the speakers’ mental attitudes and interpersonal considerations of "how" they convey it. In other words, the speakers symbolize the emotional and cognitive state of individuals in terms of which and how many UFPs they use. This study aims to reveal that the richness of the sense of what is going on in their bodies is linked to the use and understanding of the UFP. To this end, we utilized standardized psychological indices such as the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20) and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), which are known to reflect well an individual's sense of bodily internal receptivity, that is, interoceptive awareness. Interoceptive awareness is closely related to an awareness of one's own feelings. When we feel emotions, our bodies undergo various changes (e.g.: faster heart beats, increase in body temperature, etc.). The ability to be aware of these physical reactions plays an important role in the perception of emotions. We examined the correlation between these psychological properties of native Japanese speakers and their uses of UFPs in the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation (CEJC), a linguistic database containing a large sample of daily conversations. A comprehensive analysis revealed that speakers with higher interoceptive awareness tended to use certain UFPs more often than those with less awareness. Particularly, speakers with richer awareness of their bodies are less likely to use an UFP that indicates a lack of confidence in what they are trying to convey to their listeners. In addition, speakers with a high sense of empathy (especially affective empathy) are more likely to use UFPs that express strong emotions, or desires to convince others of their words. In the presentation, I will discuss the processes in which language is embodied in the speaker.

Aldo TOLLINI

Ca' Foscari University of Venice

Zen master Dōgen in Shōbōgenzō (chapters: “Shinjin gakudō” and “Shohō jissō”) quotes a famous sentence of Chan master Yuánwù Kèqín (in Jap.: Engo kokugon) 圜悟克勤（1063-1135）: 生死去来真実人体 which means “The real human body is living and dying, coming and going”.

This statement gives us a very special view of the human body: no longer as a limited, conditioned and restricted element, and the cause of illusion and suffering, but of a human body with neither spatial nor temporal limits: it is the body of true Dharma. The Zen Way teaches us to abandon the narrow view of our body (and of our self) and replace it with a view that identifies the body with the whole world and with all its events.

The dropping off of our body - which we identify with our self - is the indispensable prerequisite for acquiring a new perspective in which the human body is no longer limited to the self, but encompasses everything: the self then becomes diluted and the illusion of a body separated from the whole falls away.

My presentation deals with the shift from the view of the body from the traditional doctrine of Buddhism to the evolution in the Sino-Japanese schools, and in particular of the Zen master Dōgen, who teaches the drop off of the body and the abandonment of the narrow, physical vision of one's body in favour of a vision in which one's self is identified, through the universal body, with the whole.

Shiyi ZHA

PhD Student, University of Leeds

This paper aims to provide a fresh perspective on how Murō Saisei (1889-1962), one of modern Japan’s most revered writers, explores embodied experiences in his fictional writing. Since Saisei began writing fiction in 1919, his focus on exploring the senses in novels has garnered attention from critics. Chiba Kameo, the critic who coined the term Shinkankakuha for the group of writers who founded the journal Bungei Jidai in 1924 and focused on exploring “new perceptions”, recognized Saisei as the writer who indulged with the realm of senses even before the emergence of the New Sensationist group. However, critics tend to examine the sensations depicted in Saisei's creative writings solely as a construction within the narrative and criticize Saisei for excessively indulging in sensations related to the skin or the body, especially when it comes to the female characters, characterizing his work as erotically charged. In this paper I argue that Saisei's intentions behind his sensational writings extended beyond mere carnal indulgence. Through the close reading of Saisei’s two novellas Kōro wo Musumu (Steal an Incense Burner, 1920) and Gen’ei no Toshi (City of Illusions, 1921), I examine how the author display a development from photographic-cinematic, non-human vision to a more nuanced visuality that involves other sensory faculties that are corporeal and intersubjective. Saisei who was an immigrant to Tokyo, fully embraced the new aesthetic and cultural grounds that the city provided him. By translating his embodied perception of the city into writing, Saisei effectively conveyed the modernity he experienced and observed. Ultimately, this paper aims to re-evaluate Saisei’s comprehension of the senses by incorporating cinema’s language into literary production and perceiving them as a means of experiencing space and time, inherently intertwined with memories.