Japanese Studies Seminars 2011-12
For Chinese Studies seminars see the Centre for Chinese Studies
Popular representations of Tokyo’s history: anxiety of discontinuity and yearning for continuity
Dr. Shiro Yoshioka (Lecturer in Japanese Studies, Newcastle University)
Wednesday, 18 April, 2012
5-7 pm
A115 Samuel Alexander Building
“This is really a strange city. … As each building fell, a new one rose up. Look away for a second and everything is changed. Before you know it, the past is gone, No one in Tokyo seems to care about our vanishing history”.
In anime feature Patlabor: the Movie (1989), one of the characters lamented about the extraordinary speed of change in the landscape of Tokyo in the middle of so-called “Bubble economy”. Such magnitude and speed of change, however, was not limited to that particular period. Instead, it has been part and parcel of modern history of the Japanese capital. Highs and lows in the history of the city---earthquake, war, Olympic game, and economic craze---put the city in a ceaseless cycle of destruction and reconstruction. People, as seen in the quote above, do not pay much attention to the change. However, some of Japanese popular texts show anxiety such change can arouse through depiction of “Twilight Zone” in Tokyo where past is somehow trapped in the middle of the present without being replaced by things new. In this talk, I will show some examples of such depiction, contextualising these fantastic images into “real” history of Tokyo.
Fukushima Colours - Voices of recovery after the catastrophe in Japan
Elin Lindqvist
Thursday, 22 March, 2012
5.15-7pm
A113 Samuel Alexander Building
It will take years for the full extent of the nuclear crisis’ impact on Japan to become clear. Yet, a year after the tsunami it is already possible to see some of the consequences that March 11th has had on people’s mind-sets, Japanese agriculture, the fishing industry, family ties, and research about renewable energy sources. Through the stories and destinies of individuals who were affected by the crisis in different ways, in this talk we hear the emergence of a common voice striving towards a more sustainable and ecological future. It also becomes apparent that Japanese cultural values play an important role in the recovery process.
Elin Lindqvist was born in Tokyo in 1982 and currently lives in England. A freelance journalist, dramaturge and translator, she has a BA in Individualized Studies from Sophia University in Tokyo and New York University. She is a multilingual author, and has published three novels in Swedish (tokyo natt, 2002; Tre röda näckrosor, 2005 and Facklan, 2009). At the height of the nuclear crisis, when most foreign journalists were leaving Japan, Lindqvist went to the devastated areas as a reporter for Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, offering her readers a unique insight into the crisis. Her reportage book Fukushima Colours was published in Swedish and in English on March 11th 2012.
Golf Clubbing in Modern Japan
Dr. Angus Lockyer (SOAS, University of London)
Thursday, 17 November, 2011
5:15-7:00 p.m.
A113 Samuel Alexander Building
This talk will trace the history of golf in Japan, trying to explain the postwar explosion of course development, obsessive practice and occasional play, which culminated in the 1980s, as well as what has happened since. Golf in Japan turns out not to have been so much about playing the game, as joining the club--more or less Anglo in the first instance, then progressively corporate and speculative as the century wore down to its end. This produced a very particular kind of golf, in terms of landscape, practice and paraphernalia. But by the 1990s, the game was up. American vultures swooped in and the booking moved online. Currently, a bashful prince may promise a happy ending, while women pros earn the hard foreign prizes, but the truth is the days of the cozy but constricting male comfort zone seem to be at an end.
All welcome!
For more information contact mara.patessio@manchester.ac.uk
Previous seminars include:
- Professor Yamanaka Akiko (Former Vice-Minister of Foriegn Affairs of Japan): Japan's Geopolitical Situation in Asia
- Professor Timon Screech (Soas): The Royal Cult of the Shoguns: Building the Nikko Mausolea, 1617-35
- Dr Gaye Rowley (Waseda): Memoirs of a Real Geisha: Translating Masuda Sayo's Autobiography of a Geisha
- Professor Anne Allison (Duke): Precarious Sociality: Hardship of Life for Post-Corporate Japan