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 […]

Ecce Homo: The Male Body in Pain in Japanese World War Two Visual Propaganda

JAPAN STUDIES LUNCHTIME SPEAKERS SERIES, 2024-2025 Graphic depictions of the painful injuries and deaths of soldiers are common 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 […]

Tanomi shōmon: Political voice and “Democratization” within Tokugawa village society

JAPAN STUDIES LUNCHTIME SPEAKERS SERIES, 2024-2025 In this talk, Minami Orihara will share her ongoing research on quasi-legal agreements called tanomi shōmon. The presentation will involve primary source analysis and historiographical background on how this class of documents not previously studied in English emerged and evolved in the face of growing intra-village conflict and trans-village […]

Space Fantasy: Nagaoka Shusei’s Contributions to Afrofuturist Visual Culture

JAPAN STUDIES LUNCHTIME SPEAKERS SERIES, 2024-2025 The foundations of Afrofuturism lie in the efforts and aspirations of African, African American, and other African diasporic actors. And yet in the realm of African American popular music there was a special window in time when a diasporic Japanese illustrator based in Los Angeles, California—Nagaoka Shusei (1936-2015)—worked to […]

Preserving Enemy (Japanese) language Histories

JAPAN STUDIES LUNCHTIME SPEAKERS SERIES, 2024-2025 In Canada, with the onset of WWII, Japanese was deemed the enemy language, resulting in the erasure of cultural heritage, archival sources, and histories based on the Japanese-language. My aim is to recover the undocumented loss and perseverance of war-time Japanese-language literary spaces, through tracing the journey of a […]

Drawing the Holocaust: The “Documentary” Manga of Satonaka Machiko

This talk examines the presence of the Holocaust in shōjo manga from the 1960s to the 1980s. Why is the Holocaust an enduring thematic concern within postwar Japanese manga and what are implications of these representations for Japan’s own processes of remembrance and education about the war? I begin with an analysis of the influence and reception […]