Event Category Archives: Featured Japanese

Imaginaries of Wartime: Illustrations and Photographs of Shōjo no Tomo and Shōjo Kurabu

JAPAN STUDIES LUNCHTIME SPEAKERS SERIES, 2024-2025 The gender category shōjo (lit. “girl”), which emerged in the early 20th century, underwent a radical transformation during wartime. With the introduction of shōkokumin ( junior citizens) as a representation of children in girls’ magazines, shōjo became both genderless and classless. While girls continued to be portrayed within the […]

DEFYING RESTRICTIONS: Women-Created, Women-Read Sexual Writing in Modern Japan

JAPAN STUDIES LUNCHTIME SPEAKERS SERIES, 2024-2025 In this presentation, Shirin Eshghi Furuzawa will provide an analysis of award-winning stories from the By Women, For Women R-18 Literary Prize, which features sexual writing created by women and for women readers. She will also discuss the broader impact of libraries, government and publishers on the creation and […]

Karayuki-san, Rashamen, and Places of Memory: Fieldnotes from Yokohama

JAPAN STUDIES LUNCHTIME SPEAKERS SERIES, 2024-2025 Ayaka Yoshimizu will share her work-in-progress research based on her multi-sited fieldwork, which examines the memories of Japanese women involved in interracial and transnational sex trade between 1853 and 1945 in the transpacific world. In this talk, she will specifically focus on her performance ethnographic work in Yokohama, where […]

Navigating Narratives: Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary as History and Fiction with Gustav Heldt

JAPAN STUDIES LUNCHTIME SPEAKERS SERIES, 2024-2025 The Japan Studies Lunchtime Speaker Series welcomes all for a lecture and discussion with Dr. Gustav Heldt on his new monograph, Navigating Narratives: Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary as History and Fiction.  Drawing on both contemporaneous historical sources and modern literary criticism, Navigating Narratives offers unique insights into Heian Japan through […]