Donald Keene Center

Lecturer information
Sherry Fowler is a specialist in Japanese Buddhist art history and Associate Professor of Japanese Art History at University of Kansas. Recently she has been researching images of Kannon. Among her publications are Murōji: Rearranging Art and History at a Japanese Buddhist Temple (University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), “Views of Japanese Temples and Shrines from Near and Far: Precinct Prints of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Artibus Asiae 68/2 (2008) and “Travels of the Daihōonji Six Kannon Sculptures” Ars Orientalis 36 (2006). She has a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles.

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“Girls in Society: ‘Asia,’ Colonial Modernity, and the Place of Vernacular Sociology in Consumer Culture” resituates the debates over the historical and political framework of colonial modernity. This presentation establishes a relationship between Sino-Japanese social-science logics and treaty-port consumer culture, as reflected in imperialist corporate commodity advertising campaigns. Central to vernacular or lay sociological philosophy and the visual ephemera of advertising campaigns in the era of the 1910s-1930s was the dynamic term “society.”

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Tani Barlow is Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Studies and Director, Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice University where she teaches in the History Department. Her work has addressed the histories of Marxism and Maoism in China, the question of gender in modernity, and the politics of culture in ‘Asia.’ Tani Barlow is the author of THE QUESTION OF WOMEN IN CHINESE FEMINISM (2004), numerous edited volumes and dozens of articles. She is also the founder and editor of the landmark journal, positions. Her current manuscript, IN THE EVENT OF WOMEN, examines the relation of social science logics to Chinese treaty port consumer culture.

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Every decade or so a novel appears that leaves its mark on an entire generation. For Japan in the 1990s, that novel was Rieko Matsuura's The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P. An astonishing, gripping read, this now legendary book was both a critical success and an instant sensation that flew off the shelves. Selling more than 300,000 copies in hardcover, it rocketed its cult author to stardom almost overnight.

The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P tells the story of Kazumi Mano, a naïve twenty-two-year-old who wakes up one afternoon to discover that her big toe has turned into a penis. Her life as an ordinary girl is over, and a rigorous “apprenticeship” has begun. Kazumi flees her homophobic fiancé after he tries to castrate her, and hooks up with a blind pianist with whom she falls in love. Together they join a troupe of sexually deformed and emotionally twisted men and women who tour the country performing what amounts to sexual freak shows. In the course of her bizarre journey, Kazumi is forced to reconsider what she had always passively accepted: her body, her sexuality, and her life.

By turns provocative, intelligent, humorous, heartbreaking, and grotesque, The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P is like no other novel you will read. Matsuura is a master of sensual slipstream, and this work is her chef d’oeuvre.

Lecturer Information:
Rieko Matsuura was born in Matsuyama, Japan, and graduated from Aoyama Gakuin University with a BA in French literature. She debuted as a writer in 1978, while still in college, with “The Day of the Funeral,” a short story that won that year's Bungakukai Prize for New Writers. Since then, she has published six works of fiction and three essay collections—among them Natural Woman (1987), a series of three related novellas exploring lesbian love; The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P (1993), a bestseller that won the Women's Literature Prize, Japan's most prestigious literary award for women writers; and A Dog's Body (2007), about the intimate but nonsexual relationship between a woman with “species identity disorder” who turns into a dog, and her friend-turned-owner.

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The conflict between Korean Christians and state-mandated compulsory veneration at Shintō shrines lives on as a foundational memory of religious crisis in colonial Korea. This talk reframes that story’s familiar themes of ethnonational and religious identity in a different context: the colonial career of Tenrikyō, a Japanese New Religious Movement founded in the final decades of the Edo period. Despite its suppression by the Japanese state—both in Japan and on the Korean peninsula—and despite its forced registration as a branch of Sect Shintō from 1908 onward, Tenrikyō managed to attract a sizeable number of Korean converts, who sustained the religion even after their Japanese co-religionists left the peninsula in 1945-1946. How did Tenrikyō appeal to its Korean proselytes? Drawing on period sources published by Tenrikyō institutions, this talk proposes that one answer can be found in Tenrikyō’s multiple, and sometimes contradictory, roles within the colonial environment: as broker of Japanese colonial rule; as martyr to Japanese state religious policy; and as prism or crucible for relations between the colonizers and the colonized.

Lecturer information:
Micah Auerback is Assistant Professor of Japanese Religions at the University of Michigan. His primary research interests lie in Japanese religions in the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, with a special focus on Buddhism. His dissertation research and manuscript currently under revision concern the roles played by Japanese Buddhist individuals, ideas, and institutions on the Korean peninsula during this period. Other topics of continuing interest include relations between religious institutions and the Japanese state from the Meiji Restoration onward; the formation of Buddhist Studies as an academic discipline in modern Japan; and the polymath scientist and sometime student of Buddhism, Minakata Kumagusu (1867-1941).

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Although Confucian scholars in the early Edo period made frequent claims regarding the pernicious effect of classical Japanese literature on the morals of women, by the eighteenth century classical literature came to occupy a prominent place in the flourishing segment of the contemporary book market known as josho, or books for women. Examining both the selection of content and the deployment of that content on the printed page, this talk considers what josho reveal about the place of classical literature both in the education of women and in the early modern book market.

Lecturer Information:
Jamie Newhard is an assistant professor of premodern Japanese language and literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her interests include premodern narrative, poetry, and poetics; medieval and early modern reception of classical literature; the history of literary scholarship and thought; book and publishing history; and gender issues in premodern literature. She has just finished her first book, titled Knowing the Amorous Man: A History of Scholarship on Tales of Ise.

Lecture Information:
Professor Fujitani's presentation will draw from his forthcoming book, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans in WWII. The book is a comparative and transnational study of ethnic and colonial soldiers during the Asia-Pacific War (or the Second World War in the Asia-Pacific region) that focuses specifically on Japanese Americans mobilized to serve in the Unites States army and Koreans who were recruited or drafted into the Japanese military. His research utilizes the two sites of soldiering as optics through which to examine the larger operations and structures of the changing U.S. and Japanese national empires as they struggled to manage racialized populations within the larger demands of conducting total war. As Prof. Fujitani's work uncovers, discussions about, policies, and representations of these two sets of soldiers tell us a great deal about the changing characteristics of wartime racism, nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, gender politics, the family, and some other related issues on both sides of the Pacific. These issues go well beyond the soldiers themselves, and their repercussions remain with us today.

Lecturer Information:
Takashi Fujitani is Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. His primary areas of research are modern and contemporary Japanese history, East Asian history, and transnational history (primarily U.S./Japan and Asia-Pacific). His publications include: Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (UC Press, 1996; Japanese version, 1994; Korean translation, 2003); Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (co-editor, Duke, 2001); and Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans in WWII (forthcoming, UC Press; Japanese version, Iwanami Shoten); as well as numerous book chapters and articles published in Korean, Japanese, and English. His recent research has been funded by the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, NEH, and SSRC.

The Winners of the 2009-2010 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature

Jeffrey M. Angles
For his translation of Tada Chimako's Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako, to be published by University of California Press in 2010.
Jeffrey Angles is an Associate Professor at Western Michigan University, where he teaches Japanese literature and translation studies. He earned his Ph.D. at Ohio State University in 2004, and his book Writing the Love of Boys: Desire Between Men in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature will be published by University of Minnesota in 2010. His other translations include Killing Kanoko: Selected Poetry of Ito Hiromi (Action Press, 2009) and numerous short stories in various anthologies. Recently, he earned a National Endowment for the Arts grant to support his current translation project, the memoirs of the Japanese poet Takahashi Mutsuo.

Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen
For her translation of Shinkei's Murmured ConversationsProfessor Ramirez-Christensen is the Director of Language Studies at the University of Michigan and specializes in classical Japanese literature, especially Heian and medieval poetry, narrative, and criticism. Her research interests include literary hermeneutics and Buddhist intellectual philosophy, as well as feminist readings of Heian women’s writing. Among her works are Heart's Flower: The Life and Poetry of Shinkei (1994) and "Self-Representation and the Patriarchy in the Heian Female Memoirs" in The Father-Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father (2001).

Prior to Mr. Morimura’s lecture, the Donald Keene Prize for the Promotion of Japanese Culture will be awarded to Impressions, the journal of the Japanese Art Society of America (JASA). Julia Meech, Editor of Impressions, and Joan D. Baekeland, President of JASA, will accept the award.

Lecture information:
Widely known as the artist who transforms himself into the Mona Lisa and movie actresses, Yasumasa Morimura has won international acclaim for his unique and avant-garde expression of ‘beauty’. Since 1985, his focus has been his ‘self-portrait series’, consisting of unique reconstructions of art masterpieces in which the subject’s face is substituted with that of Morimura himself. Through careful study and analysis of the themes, artists, and historical background of these works, Morimura searches out their raisons d’etre and transforms them according to his own interpretations. His ability to deconstruct, subvert, and simultaneously create an homage is what enables his work continually to defy categorization.

Lecturer information:
Yasumasa Morimura was born in Osaka and graduated from Kyoto City University of Arts in 1978. Since 1985, he has primarily shown his work in international solo exhibitions./p>

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The speaker’s forthcoming book explores the internal dynamics and global contexts that shaped foreign relations in early modern Japan. Examining diplomacy, coastal defense, and especially foreign trade, it demonstrates that while the shogunate created the broader framework, foreign relations were actually implemented through cooperative as well as competitive relationships with the Satsuma and Tsushima domains. Successive Tokugawa leaders also proactively revised foreign trade, particularly with China, taking steps that mirrored the commercial stances of other Asian and Western states.

Through its examination of the internal and the global, the speaker’s book offers new insights on the evolution of Japan’s foreign relations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It also suggests new approaches to understanding Japan’s transition from participation in early modern East Asian practices of foreign relations to the national adoption of international relations, especially the recasting of foreign trade and the centralization of foreign relations authority, in the years surrounding the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

Lecturer information:
A historian of early modern and modern Japan, Robert Hellyer served on the faculty of the University of Tokyo, taught at Allegheny College, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard before coming to Wake Forest in 2005. His book, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868, was published by the Harvard University Asia Center in late 2009. He is currently working on a new project, Green Tea and the Path to an Industrial, International Japan, for which he received Smithsonian and Japan Foundation fellowships to support research in Washington, D.C. and Japan. Robert Hellyer earned his B.A. from Claremont McKenna College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Lecture information:
Theater is a performance art that almost by definition requires the presentation of living human bodies enacting an event or series of actions before a live audience. In a fundamental sense, as an art form it is the word made flesh. But the relationship between language and the body was problematized by the process of modernity or modernization, especially in Japan, where the models all came from the West. It was one thing to translate or even emulate the Western novel, for example. But to present Japanese actors on stage as Europeans, or as people transformed by Westernization, involved a process that denaturalized both the text and those who acted it out. How, physically, does one express the experience of living in the modern world? And how does that expression change over the course of time?

This presentation will examine how theater over the past century in Japan has reflected fundamental changes in artistic practice and conceptions of personal and social identity through physical appearance and action. It will cover a wide range of work, from early 20th century to contemporary theater and discuss a number of genres, performers and topics such as: the relationship between text and performance, Japanese and Western bodies, tradition and modernity in theatrical training, butoh, and modern dance. The lecture will use a Powerpoint slideshow and video images to illustrate a selection of different works and genres.

Lecturer information:
Cody Poulton is Professor of Japanese literature and theater and Chair of the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria, Canada. His books include Spirits of Another Sort: The Plays of Izumi Kyôka (Michigan Monographs in Japanese Studies, 2001) and the forthcoming A Beggar's Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900-1930 (University of Hawaii Press, 2010). His translations span from kabuki to contemporary, including work by Kara Jûrô, Betsuyaku Minoru, and Hirata Oriza. He is currently working with his co-editors J. Thomas Rimer and Mitsuya Mori on The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama.

Lecture Information:
So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish zeroes in on Japan's involvement in World War II and the Greater East Asia War, which provoked a range of reactions from its citizens. Pride, rage, sympathy, revenge—a single year of triumph and three of catastrophic losses forced the Japanese to question their country's presumption and its ability to shape history and the world. Falling to the will of the Allied powers further complicated Japan's postwar recovery, imprinting feelings of shame, resentment, doubt, and self-recrimination onto the national psyche.

No writers have better captured these fluctuations than a group of well-known authors who risked recording their thoughts amid the bombings and fear of invasion. Nagai Kafû, Takami Jun, Itō Sei, Hirabayashi Taiko, Yamada Fūtarō, and the scholar Watanabe Kazuo wrote absorbing narratives, passionate polemics, and crystalline poems. Donald Keene, a leading scholar of Japanese literature, samples from their texts, some of which were written by individuals he knew well. His own relationship with the writers adds a compelling layer to his work. The diary of Itō Sei, for example, with its fervent patriotism and racial claims, forms a stark contrast to the soft-spoken, kind man Keene knew. Weaving archival materials together with personal reflections and the intimate accounts themselves, Keene produces an entirely original portrait of wartime attitudes and foreign domination in Japan. Whether detailed or fragmentary, these diary entries were written for future generations, making clear the danger of false victory and true defeat.

Lecturer Information:
Donald Keene is a University Professor Emeritus and Shincho Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, where he began teaching in 1955. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including one of Japan’s highest honors, the title “Person of Cultural Merit” (Bunka Kōrō-sha) in 2002, for his distinguished service in the promotion of Japanese literature and culture. Other awards include the Kikuchi Kan Prize of the Society for the Advancement of Japanese Culture (1962); the Order of the Rising Sun, Second Class (1993) and Third Class (1975); the Japan Foundation Prize (1983); the Yomiuri Shimbun Prize (1985); the Shincho Grand Literary Prize (1985); the Tokyo Metropolitan Prize (1987); the Radio and Television Culture Prize (1993); and the Asahi Prize (1998). He has received honorary degrees from St. Andrew's College (1990), Middlebury College (1995), Columbia University (1997), Tohoku University (1997), Waseda University (1998), Tokyo Gaikokugo Daigaku (1999), and Keiwa University (2000).

Lecture information
In Japan, as well as abroad, Tezuka Osamu is widely known as the cartoonist who created the immensely popular sci-fi manga series Astro Boy (1952–1968). Yet Tezuka produced many other manga and animated films over his prolific career, the themes of which often centered around issues of war and peace. This lecture examines the interrelation between Tezuka’s experience of Osaka’s aerial bombing by U.S. forces during the final year of the Asia Pacific War and a number of his ‘epic manga’ such as Next World (1951) and Adolf (1983–1985), in which he dealt with such difficult but important themes as the alienation and brutalization of human beings, racial prejudice and hatred, nationalism, and political corruption. The lecture also analyses various philosophical influences on Tezuka’s work. His early experience as a medical doctor and the work of Dostoyevski and Karel Capek, a Czech writer persecuted by the Nazis, are considered in detail. Finally, the lecture contrasts Tezuka’s creative legacy with more recent manga produced by nationalistic cartoonists such as Kobayashi Yoshinori, who tries not only to sanitize the crimes and atrocities that Japanese troops committed against other Asians during the war, but even to glorify Japanese military conduct. What this comparative analysis serves to illustrate is the tremendous power popular culture forms like manga and films have in shaping public images of “national history.”

Lecturer information
Professor Tanaka is Research Professor of History at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, Hiroshima City University. In 2008 he was Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, the University of London and the Sir Ninian Stephen Visiting Scholar at the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law of the University of Melbourne. Professor Tanaka is an acknowledged international expert on the history of Japanese war crimes during World War II. His two books Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation (2002) and Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (1996) both remain seminal works in English. The latter volume provided extensive background material for a BBC documentary series entitled ‘Horror in the East’ produced in 2000. Professor Tanaka’s most recent book in Japanese, Sorano Senso-Shi (A History of Aerial Warfare), was published in Japan in 2008 to critical acclaim. In 2009, he co-edited the book, Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History, together with Marilyn Young.

October 11th, 2010