Event Category Archives: Featured Japanese

Translating “pop fiction” from 1000 years ago: Ochikubo monogatari (Lady of the Low Chamber)

JAPAN STUDIES LUNCHTIME SPEAKERS SERIES, 2024-2025 This talk will discuss the features of the 10th century Ochikubo monogatari as a piece of popular fiction in the Heian period. These features include an emphasis on plot and a narrative style that relies heavily on dialogue and interior monologue. The tale is considered a parody of the […]

Kyojin, Taihō…and Repatriation?: On the Legacies of Repatriation in Postwar Japan

In 1960s Japan, it was said that there were three things that all Japanese children loved: the Yomiuri Giants (nicknamed Kyojin), the yokozuna Taihō Kōki, and tamagoyaki. The catchphrase “Kyojin, Taihō, tamagoyaki” reveals how the rapid postwar proliferation of mass media and commodity goods allowed for an emergence of a popular culture that came to […]

Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890-1930

Join us for an online talk by Dr. Anri Yasuda (University of Virginia), whose most recent monograph Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890-1930 was published by Columbia University Press in June 2024. The monograph examines how writers, living through a period of profound changes in Japanese culture and society, had […]

Stakeholder Perspectives on Language Support for Ethnic Minority Children in Japan: Centering Voices That Matter

Join us for a talk by Dr. Michi Ann Saki (Visiting Scholar from Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts), who will discuss viewpoints and experiences of educational stakeholders engaged in offering Japanese language assistance to ethnic minority children in public elementary schools in Japan. Saki will discuss a 2020 study she carried out on the […]

Contested Frames: Women, Photography, and the Politics of Seeing in Modern Japan

Join us for a talk by Dr. Kelly McCormick (University of British Columbia), who will discuss her book project on the history of Japanese women photographers and their untold stories. Kelly McCormick’s Contested Frames: Women, Photography, and the Politics of Seeing in Modern Japan tells the history of Japanese women photographers from their collaboration with […]

Emotion and Entertainment in the Mobilization of the Japanese Empire, 1937-1945

From the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, a storytelling medium called kamishibai was used extensively by the Japanese government in its efforts to mobilize all imperial subjects in support of the war: young and old, women and men, soldiers and civilians, residents of the Japanese islands and residents of the colonies and […]

Visions of Man’yōshū: Reimagining Japan’s Oldest Poetry Collection in the Medieval and Modern Eras

Join us for an online talk by Dr. Małgorzata K. Citko-DuPlantis (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), who will be discussing her book project on the Man’yōshū. This talk considers Man’yōshū—Japan’s earliest anthology of vernacular poetry—as a continuously evolving and unstable discourse. The collection’s medieval life unfolded through a wide range of its manuscripts, commentaries, handbooks, poetic […]

Community-engaged exhibit making and restorative justice in museums

Broken Promises is the first travelling museum exhibition to critically investigate the dispossession of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s. It illuminates the loss of home and the struggle for justice of one racially marginalized community. Developed in close collaboration with community partners, the exhibition foregrounds first-person narratives, emphasizing the heterogeneity of lived experiences and the systemic […]