Please join us for a talk by Dr. Millie Creighton (Department of Anthropology, UBC), who will discuss Japan-Palestine connections, and the Japanese residential community’s involvement with Palestinians.
This paper presents Japan-Palestine connections via research done on Japanese residing long-term in Palestine who were sent to work there on a construction project by their Japanese employer. The project pivotally involved Palestinian heritage and identity, constructing a cover for a centuries and millennium old historic site so it could be opened for public viewing. The research discusses initial thoughts on Palestine or the Middle-East by Japanese and how these changed as they came to know and work with Palestinians on the project.
The talk discusses the concept of “pessoptimism” used within Palestine to aim towards a better future prior to the current crisis. While the emphasis is on the Japanese residential community, and their involvements with Palestinians, not the current crisis enveloping Palestine, it mentions a previous strike on Gaza that affected more distant Jericho (the site of the residential Japanese community) and some workers’ reactions to this.
This talk is free and open to the public.
Date & Time:
Friday, January 30 | 12:00pm – 1:30pm (PT)
Location:
Room 604, Asian Centre, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver BC
Speaker
Millie Creighton is an Anthropologist, specializing on Japan and East Asia in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where she was one of the founders of the Centre for Japanese Research at UBC, now transitioning into a Japan specialist network at UBC. She has conducted extensive research on Japan’s department stores, consumerism, tourism, popular culture, gender, minorities, law and constitutional debates. She received the Canon Prize for her work showing consumerism reflecting negotiations of nostalgia, modernity, and imagined future trajectories. She has also done extensive work on Japan’s connections with other world areas, which has brought her into a research stream dealing with other geographical world areas. Notable among these is a project on Africa-Japan connections, and one involving the Middle East. She has done research in Palestine in the Jericho area, initially due to a Japanese company community residing there because of their work on the construction of the covering of Hisham’s Palace, and then increasingly got more directly involved in the Jericho area and the Hisham Palace project as sites of world importance.
