SEPTEMBER 2007

September 27th, 2007 (Thursday)
Kanō Motonobu’s Shuten Dōji Scrolls and Aspects of the Monstrous in Medieval Japan
Quitman E. Phillips (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 – 7:30 PM

Shuten Dôji was one of the best known monsters in late medieval and early modern Japan, the story of his downfall appearing frequently in texts, paintings, and prints. While the earliest extant version of the tale appeared in the fourteenth century, it became a staple of Japanese visual culture with its adoption by the Kanô School starting in the sixteenth century. Was there more to its popularity than the simple fact that it was a rousing good tale? Modern commentators have suggested that the tale draws upon anxieties about threats ranging from plagues to foreigners. This talk will present a synopsis of the Shuten Dôji story illustrated with slides from Kanô Motonobu's 1522 handscroll version and discuss modes of interpreting the story drawing on particular Shuten Dôji scholarship and recent trends in "monster theory."

OCTOBER 2007

October 4th, 2007 (Thursday)
Doubles: Japan and America's Intercultural Children (1995)
A Screening and Discussion
Regge Life (Documentary film maker, Global Film Network, Inc.)
Held Auditorium, 304 Barnard Hall (3rd Fl.), Barnard College (117th St., between Broadway and Claremont Ave.)
6:00 – 7:30 PM

Fraternization between United States soldiers and Japanese women during the American occupation of Japan resulted in a number of children being born in and out of wedlock. In the 50 years since then, intermarriage has continued, producing a new generation of intercultural children who are growing up in both America and Japan. This documentary explores the still taboo subject of "Doubles," children born of American and Japanese parents, living in Japan and in America. Their struggle for acceptance in the rigid, homogeneous society of Japan and in the racially polarized society of the United States, gives a unique perspective to how Japanese and Americans view themselves and their relationship to the outsider or the "other."

October 11th, 2007 (Thursday)
Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan
William Wayne Farris (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 – 7:30 PM

What was the population of Japan during the ancient age (700-1150)? This lecture attempts to answer this important question and provide support for demographic trend so adduced by examining mortality factors such as disease, famine and war and background variables such as agricultural and industrial technology, commerce and cities, and the family and material life. As a result of this research, at long last historians will have defensible population figures for Japan from the Jomon age to 1700.
 

NOVEMBER 2007

November 8th, 2007 (Thursday)
The Fate of the Japanese Language in the Age of English
Minae Mizumura (Novelist)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 – 7:30 PM

Abstract by Minae Mizumura: We who write, read, and study modern Japanese literature take for granted the existence of modern Japanese literature. We also take for granted that it should exist in the present form, written in the Japanese language, with kanji mixed into kanamoji. It is true that, soon after Japan came into contact with the West, the western-style novel began to flourish in the Japanese language as if it were the most natural course of events. Yet, when we examine the past, we see that specific historical conditions were necessary for modern Japanese literature as we know it to emerge and to thrive. Moreover, when we examine the present, we see that those very conditions are quietly disappearing as we move deeper into the age of English. Indeed, what I face today as a Japanese writer is the uncertain fate of the Japanese language itself. For it may well be that the Japanese language, which attained the status of kokugo, the national language, in the days following the Meiji Restoration, is now turning into a lesser language – a mere local language, incapable of shouldering the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic burdens that a language ought to shoulder if it is to remain the true medium of literature.

November 15th, 2007 (Thursday)
Global Sushi: Soft Power and Hard Realities
Theodore C. Bestor (Harvard University)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 – 7:30 PM

Global sushi flows in multiple directions. In the past generation, sushi has spread outward from Japan throughout the globe, riding the wave of Japan's soft power and "gross national cool." Sushi has migrated across a culinary spectrum from exotic, inaccessible, and inedible, to occupy table space both as haute cuisine and take-out fast food, becoming an icon of post-modern global chic in the process. Simultaneously, the fishing industries around the world have been re-oriented. The Japanese fishing industry has expanded its activities in every ocean of the globe, local industries have been oriented toward Japanese markets, and more species have become targets for export to Japan and newly emerged secondary markets in metropolitan centers around the globe.

This lecture explores the sushi boom and the appropriations of sushi as popular culture, the interralationship between this projection of soft power and the hard realities of the global fishing industry, the conflicts over fishing rights and quotas, the environmental issues of overfishing, the impact of aquaculture, and the struggles to create global fisheries management regimes.

November 29th, 2007 (Thursday)
Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories: Narrative, Ritual, and Royal Authority from The Chronicles of Japan to The Tale of the Heike - A Book Talk
David T. Bialock (University of Southern California)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 – 7:30 PM

After The Tale of Genji, the greatest work of classical Japanese literature is arguably the fourteenth-century historical narrative, The Tale of the Heike. To date, however, most English-language scholarship on The Tale of the Heike has tended to focus on one well-known variant of the work, resulting in an incomplete view of the tale's narrative world. This lecture will highlight some of the major themes in David Bialock's recent book, Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories, which open up fresh perspectives on medieval Heike narrative by connecting it to a range of problems centered on narrative, ritual, space, and Japan's changing views of China from the Nara to the early medieval periods.