Japan

Hirayama Ikuo, “Ancestral Buddhism,” 1959. Saku Municipal Museum Modern Art Collection.

Paride Stortini (PhD Student, Divinity)
“Imagining a Cosmopolitan “Furusato”: India and Buddhism in the Silk Road Imaginaire of Hirayama Ikuo”
Monday, March 5th, 12:00pm-1:15pm in Swift Hall’s Marty Center Library
Discussant: Sandy Lin (PhD Student in Art History)
Co-sponsored with the Religion and the Human Sciences Workshop

Please join us Monday (3/5) from 12:00pm-1:15pm as we host Paride Stortini (PhD Student in Divinity). He will present a draft of his qualifying exams paper in progress, which he summarizes as follows:

This paper is on a topic that is not directly linked to my dissertation research and will not be included in my dissertation, which will be focused on India in Meiji Japan. Nevertheless, many of the theoretical references, as well as the general issue of Buddhism and pan-Asianism, will certainly end up in my dissertation. In addition, I plan to present the last section of the paper at a conference in Delhi at the end of March on “India in the Silk Road,” and plan to keep this material for future research projects and single article publication. In this paper I am working on a chronological period (post-WWII Japan) with which I am less familiar than the Meiji period, and I use a lot of art, with which I am definitely not familiar, that is why any suggestion from colleagues with more expertise will be greatly appreciated.

Clockwise from left: Fumiko Kawabata, Eiga no Tomo (July 1938), flyer for Zenkoku Nomin Sogo Taikai (April 1935), in-studio session for JOAK program ‘santo no bunka wo kataru (1933), promotional image for NHK Tokyo station JOAK.

Alex Murphy (PhD Student, EALC)
“The Era of the Voice: Performance, Technology, and Politics in Japan, 1918-1942”
Wednesday, February 14th, 4:30-6:30pm in CEAS 319
Discussant: Nicholas Lambrecht (PhD Candidate, EALC)

Please join us Wednesday (2/14) from 4:30-6:30pm as we host Alex Murphy (PhD Student in EALC). He will present a draft of his dissertation proposal, which he summarizes as follows:

The 1920s and 30s in Japan witnessed a striking degree of attention converge on the voice in poetry, theater, and popular music. Alert to recent advances in radio, commercial recording, and sound film, artists, intellectuals, and activists sought to reckon with the human voice both as an increasingly powerful medium of public self-expression as well as a material and aesthetic object of mediation itself. For poets and musicians in turn, sound technology seemed at once to enliven new modes of vocal expression while ironically threatening the very sense of immediacy and authorial presence that drew many to the voice in the first place. At the same time, the transit of voices and bodies on records and radio waves across the Pacific and throughout Japan’s heterogeneous empire invited unruly expressions of subjectivity across audible markers of race, gender, and culture. By addressing this historical moment as an ‘era of the voice,’ then, my dissertation project explores how these discursive and technological currents manifested in embodied vocal practice, and how an attunement to these sounds might help to rethink the culture and politics of interwar Japan.

The paper is available directly below, or at this link. If you have not received the password, or have questions about accessibility, please feel free to contact Helina Mazza-Hilway (mazzah@uchicago.edu) or Susan Su (susansu@uchicago.edu).

Cover for Tsutsui Yasutaka’s 1967 short story “The Vietnam Travel Agency”

Brian White (PhD Candidate, EALC)
“Asian Aliens: Race and Ethnicity in 1960s Japanese Speculative Fiction”
Friday, January 19th, 3-5pm in CEAS 319
Discussant: Cody Jones (PhD Student, Comparative Literature & Divinity)
Co-sponsored with the Mass Culture Workshop

Please join us Friday (1/19) from 3-5pm, as we host Brian White. He will present a draft of his dissertation chapter, which he summarizes as follows:

In this partial dissertation chapter, I take up a 1968 short story by metafiction writer Tsutsui Yasutaka, entitled “Rose-Tinted Rhapsody.”  Through a close reading of this text, I discuss the significance of race and ethnicity in considerations of Cold War-era SF (speculative- or science-fiction).  This argument is an intervention in the hegemonic scholarly tradition in Japanese popular cultural studies of reading postwar texts within a bilateral system in which the United States is Japan’s only interlocutor and nuclear trauma and hyper-capitalism its only thematic concerns.  Instead, I argue for a reading of these texts that is more sensitive to the complex contemporary geopolitical situation, in which a variety of affinities were negotiated, opened up, and closed off.

The paper is available directly below, or at this link. If you have not received the password, or have questions about accessibility, please feel free to contact Helina Mazza-Hilway (mazzah@uchicago.edu) or Susan Su (susansu@uchicago.edu).

Friday, October 27th, 3:00 – 5:00 p.m. in CEAS 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)

Discussant: Helina Mazza-Hilway (PhD candidate, EALC)

Please join us Friday, October 27th as we host Reiko Abe Auestad (Professor of Japan Studies at the University of Oslo.) She will present a draft of her article in progress, which she summarizes as follows:

The philosopher Avishai Margalit privileges an ethics “that tells us how we should regulate our thick relations” with family, friends, and others who are close to us, over a “morality” that concerns our “thin relations,” with those with whom we share only a common humanity. While Margalit points toward the difficulty of reconciling these two, this paper argues that Tsushima’s novels show how the distinction can be disrupted. I read Warai ōkami (Laughing Wolf), which addresses issues of history and memory, against Tsushima’s explicitly autobiographical work “Mahiru e” (Toward midday)  to see how reading them together can connect the social and the personal by turning “thin relations” into “thick” ones through the act of remembering.

In a 2001 interview with members of Shishōsetsu kenkyūkai, Tsushima argued that it is impossible to write a work of fiction that is not somehow rooted in the authorial “I,” and that all fiction is therefore a form of “shishōsetsu,” or I-fiction. Overemphasis on the value of fictive imagination and so-called “socially important themes” can, she warns, not only kill the “I” in a work, but can also kill off its relation to humanity (and thus its status as literature) altogether.

Many of Tsushima’s novels are haunted by deaths of people close to her in real life, including her father, Dazai Osamu, her mentally handicapped brother, and her own son. At the same time, the novels enable the “rebirth” of these figures by way of affective association and creative remembering. Indeed, the great power of Tsushima’s novels lies in their ability to evoke the presence of these ghosts. The network of affective associations that they trigger in us through our knowledge of her life creates the very visceral qualities that render “thick” our ethical experience of reading about these people whom we have never met.

The paper is available directly below, or at this link. If you have not received the password, or have questions about accessibility, please feel free to contact Helina Mazza-Hilway (mazzah@uchicago.edu) or Susan Su (susansu@uchicago.edu).

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