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...
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...
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,...
David R. Ambaras (History, North Carolina State University) Wednesday, June 7, 2017 / 4:00 PM SSMS 2135 David R. Ambaras is a scholar of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japanese history. His first book, Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Japan...
Rui Kohiyama (Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan) Wednesday, January 11, 2017 / 4:00 PM HSSB 4080 American women missionaries are well known for their educational and reformatory intervention in various mission fields in Asia. Although their initiatives in criticizing child marriage and widowhood in India and foot-binding in...
Timon Screech (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) Wednesday, November 2, 2016 / 4:00 PM SSMS 2135 The English East India Company was founded in 1600 as a spice-importing organization. In 1611, it sent a ship to Japan, which arrived in 1613. This talk will...
Daniel Aldrich (Political Science, Northeastern University) Tuesday, May 3, 2016 / 4:00 SSMS 2135 The March 11, 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and associated tsunami and nuclear meltdowns took nearly 20,000 lives, created half a million refugees, and affected energy policies as far away as Germany, Switzerland,...
Mark Winchester (Kanda International University,Tokyo) Tuesday, March 8, 2016 / 4:00 PM SSMS 2135 Hate speech and hate crime in the form of demonstrations and other actions carried out by so-called ‘action conservative’ groups have spread across Japan since the early 2000s. The actions of these neo-fascist ‘action...
Ramona Bajema, Ph.D. Tuesday, December 1, 2015 / 4:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Ramona Bajema has spent the past four years searching through the post-triple disaster remains in order to better understand what cannot be washed away by a 100-meter high wave that obliterated...
Eric C. Rath (History, University of Kansas) Tuesday November 10/ 2015 4:00 PM SSMS 2135 Lunch is both older and newer in Japan than we might imagine. The midday meal is said to have become a norm by the 1700s when most of the population finally...
Laura Nenzi (History, University of Knoxville) Tuesday, October 13, 2015 / 4:00 PM McCune Conferene Room, HSSB 6020 Nenzi is a social historian of early modern Japan interested in gender, space, memory, and identity. In my first book, Excursions in Identity (2008) she examined the manifold...
Ian Condry (Japanese Culture and Media Studies, MIT) Wednesday May 6, 2015 /4:00 PM SSMS 2135 Now that recorded music is always available for free, what are the possible futures for musicians and fans? This talk will explore recent developments in Japan, including the resurgence of...
Katarzyna Cwiertka (Modern Japan Studies,Leiden University) Wednesday, April 22, 2015 / 4:00 PM 2135 Social Sciences and Media Studies Building Japan has one of the most sophisticated waste management systems in the world and its household waste generation has been steadily declining since 2003. However, before...
Amy Stanley (History, Northwestern University) Wednesday, February 25 / 4:00 PM SSMS 2135 In 1839, a twice-divorced temple daughter from a small village in Echigo ran away to Edo. In a letter home, she wrote that she wanted to enter a daimyo’s service and learn “the conduct and...
Anne Allison (Anthropology, Duke University) Wednesday, November 19, 2014 / 4:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB At a moment when the Japanese population is declining, marriage and birth rates are down, one-third of people live alone while one-fourth are 65 or older, and reports of “lonely death”...
Daniel Botsman (History, Yale University) Tuesday May 13, 4:00 PM SSMS 2135 This talk will begin by considering the place of cows in Japanese society before the Meiji Restoration, particularly in relation to the agrarian economy of the Kansai and surrounding regions. It will then consider the revolutionary changes...
Kate McDonald, History kmcdonald@history.ucsb.edu Sabine Frühstück, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies fruhstuck@eastasian.ucsb.edu We have come together as an interdisciplinary group of graduate students and faculty members from the departments of History, East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies, Religious Studies, Music, and Film & Media Studies to examine, discuss and...