Michael Emmerich (Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA) is the author of The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature (Columbia University Press, 2013), as well as more than a dozen book-length translations of works by Japanese writers including Kawabata Yasunari, Yoshimoto Banana, Takahashi Gen’ichirō, Akasaka Mari, Yamada Taichi, Matsuura Rieko, Kawakami Hiromi, Furukawa Hideo, and Inoue Yasushi. Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the East Asia Center, the Dept. of East Asian Languages and ...

The Echigo province migrant was a familiar type in nineteenth-century Edo. Every year in the tenth month, snow country peasants would come down the mountains on the Nakasendō Highway and enter the city through Itabashi Station. They wandered down the main street in Hongō, where they were met by labor scouts who had learned to recognize their bewildered expressions and country accents. Many ended up in the city’s notorious boarding houses for laborers, where they ...

A focus on student actors has often led historians of Japan to dismiss the idea of epochal change in “the long 1968.” This talk adopts the perspective of the older generation of Japanese social scientists to show these years as a watershed in the basis of authoritative knowledge. The existing historiography often presents these scholars as reactionary. I show how they, in concert with their colleagues abroad, actually anticipated and indeed accelerated epistemological revolution. Born ...