OCTOBER 2008

October 2nd, 2008 (Thursday) 6:00 ~ 7:30 PM
"A Thousand Years of Genji: Envisioning the Tale of Genji, Canonization, Popularization, and Visual Culture"
Haruo Shirane, Professor of Japanese Literature, Columbia University
Location: 403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)

To celebrate the one-thousandth anniversary of The Tale of Genji, one of the great classics of Japanese literature, the Keene Center presents a special lecture by Haruo Shirane, Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature at Columbia University. Prof. Shirane is an eminent Genji scholar and is editor of the recent publication Envisioning the Tale of Genji: Media, Gender, and Cultural Production (Columbia University Press, 2008). A reception follows the talk.

This lecture is offered as part of a special Genji Millennium celebration.

October 16th, 2008 (Thursday) 6:00 ~ 7:30 PM
"The World in a Sign: Written Communication in Japan's Public Places"
Patricia J. Wetzel, Professor of Japanese, Portland State University
Location: 403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)

Across the urban landscape of Japan we see advertisements, directives, warnings, and maps that aim to establish a fictitious relationship between the “voice” of the sign and the reader. How are we to apprehend the characters in these narratives? Who are they to us? And who are we to them? Public texts tell us much about how language and place combine to reinforce, re-invent, play upon, and sometimes undermine longstanding cultural and linguistic practices.

This lecture is offered as the Third Shirato Lecture on Japanese Language.

October 23rd, 2008 (Thursday) 6:00 ~ 7:30 PM
"Individuality in An Age of Reproduction: Utagawa Toyokuni and the Actor's Image in Nineteenth-Century Japan"
Jonathan Zwicker, Professor of Japanese Literature, University of Michigan
Location: 403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)

Using a variety of printed materials, this lecture examines the status of the individual visage in Japan during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The opening decades of that century were a moment of emerging tension between an epistemology of reproducibility and assorted discourses of individuality. The present talk situates the mass reproduction of the actor's image in prints and novels within a framework bounded on one end by technologies of reproduction and on the other by an increasing anxiety over the status of the unique and the authentic.

October 30th, 2008 (Thursday) 6:30 ~ 7:30 PM
"The Four Great Temples"
Donald F. McCallum, Professor of Art History, UCLA
Location: 930 Schermerhorn, Columbia University (118th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)

Historically, the most important temples at the initial stages of Buddhism in Japan were a group referred to in early historical documents as "The Four Great Temples." These temples--Asukadera, Kudara Odera, Kawaradera, and Yakushiji--occupied key roles during the Asuka and Hakuho periods, and continued to be important in the Nara period after their transfer to the new capital. The sites of Asukadera, Kawaradera, and Yakushiji have long been known. The first two were excavated in the 1950s, while Yakushiji has been excavated more recently. However, the location of Kudara Odera long remained a mystery. Only in 1997, when investigations of a site called Kibi Pond began, was the mystery solved. This lecture considers the textual, archaeological, and art historical evidence needed to reconstruct the actual situations of the central temples of early Japanese Buddhism.

NOVEMBER 2008

November 20th, 2008 (Thursday)
"Paris on My Mind: Yosano Akiko and Europe"
Janine Beichman, Professor, Daito Bunka University and Visiting Scholar 2008-2009, Columbia University
Location: 403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)

From may to October of 1912, Yosano Akiko, the most renowned woman poet of twentieth-century Japan, traveled to Europe for the first and last time in her life. The journey out was made overland by the newly constructed Trans-Siberian Railway, the journey back by boat from Marseilles. Short as Akiko's stay in Europe was, the experience changed her as a writer in important ways. It also became the seed for some of her most original and moving poems and essays. Like other works of her maturity, these writings were largely overlooked until recently, but they in fact are among the hidden treasures of world travel literature.