Category Archives: Japan
Thursday, April 27th 4-6 PM : Amy Borovoy “Japan Studies in the Postwar Era: Reflections on Modernity and Society in American Social Thought”
Amy Borovoy
Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, Princeton University
“Japan Studies in the Postwar Era: Reflections on Modernity and Society in American Social Thought”
Thursday, April 27
4-6 PM
CEAS 319 (Harris School, 1155 E 60th St.)
Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop and the Committee on Japanese Studies in welcoming Professor Amy Borovoy (Princeton University) as she presents a section of her new project. Professor Borovoy has provided the following abstract for her talk:
In the decades following World War II, Japan emerged as a “place to think with” for American social scientists. Until 1945, Japan studies had been centered in Europe. Although understanding “total war” was the initial provocation for American social science research, as in the 1946 classic, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, not long after, social scientists began to see in Japan compelling forms of socio-centrism, social community and cultural identity. By the 1970s, Japan studies had become fruitful terrain for reflecting on the excesses of American liberal individualism. In this project, I analyze this process through a series of canonical texts in anthropology and sociology, from Benedict, to occupation-era village studies, to Thomas P. Rohlen’s ethnography of a Japanese bank and Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One. Japan’s modernity offered powerful insights for those wrestling with American post-industrial society, but it was an experiment made possible by a particular historical moment, and one that raised as many questions as it answered.
As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served. This event is sponsored by the Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies.
If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Jessa Dahl at jdahl@uchicago.edu or Erin Newton at emnewton@uchicago.edu.
Protected: Thursday, April 27th 4-6 PM : Amy Borovoy “Japan Studies in the Postwar Era: Reflections on Modernity and Society in American Social Thought”
Thursday, April 20 **3-5 PM** : Alex Jania “A Blood Red Sun Rises”: Affective Nationalism in the 1923 Korean Panic and Massacre
Alex Jania
University of Chicago, History Department
“‘A Blood Red Sun Rises’: Affective Nationalism in the 1923 Korean Panic and Massacre”
Thursday, April 20th
**3-5 PM**
John Hope Franklin Room (SSR 224)
Discussants:
Gregory Valdespino, University of Chicago History Dept.
Please join us at a slightly earlier time as the East Asia: Transregional History Workshop welcomes our own Alex Jania, who will present his second-year seminar paper entitled “‘A Blood Red Sun Rises’: Affective Nationalism in the 1923 Korean Panic and Massacre.” This paper explores the affective nationalism of the Korean Panic and Massacre in order to understand the relationship between emotion, violent ethnic scapegoating, and the imagining of the nation. This study uses the recollections of children who lived through the disaster in Tokyo and Yokohama, in addition to a critical passage from the Tokyo novelist Ema Shū’s disaster memoir When the Sheep Rise in Anger to explore how latent Japanese prejudices against Koreans created an affective environment that led to massacre. Using these sources, the study explores the creation and circulation of hate, fear, insecurity in the Korean Panic and later, excitement, security, and ambiguity in the Korean Massacre. Ultimately, he argues that the desire for a feeling of security and its creation through violence was a powerful, but fraught, part of Japanese affective nationalism following the Great Kantō Earthquake.
Alex’s paper can be found in the post below.
As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served. If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Jessa Dahl at jdahl@uchicago.edu or Erin Newton at emnewton@uchicago.edu.
Protected: Thursday, April 20 **3-5 PM** : Alex Jania “A Blood Red Sun Rises”: Affective Nationalism in the 1923 Korean Panic and Massacre Paper
Thursday, April 6, 4-6 PM : Kyle Pan — Aiding War Criminals in the “New” Japan
Kyle Pan
University of Chicago
“Aiding War Criminals in the ‘New’ Japan: A Study of The War Convicted Benefit Society, 1952-1958.”
April 6th, 4-6 PM
John Hope Franklin Room (SSR 224)
Please join us as the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop welcomes our own Kyle Pan as he presents his second year seminar paper to the workshop. In “Aiding War Criminals in the ‘New’ Japan: A Study of The War Convicted Benefit Society, 1952-1958,” Kyle examines the nature and activities of The War Convicted Benefit Society from 1952 to 1958 in order to show that war crime trials and other policies intended to dismantle the “militarism” in Japanese society had unexpected yet significant consequences for the postwar Japanese state and society.
Kyle’s whole seminar paper is posted on the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop website. He has also provided a more focused range of pages that he would like feedback on: 5-6, 13-15, 23-29, 33-34, 41-44, 47-48, 50-51 and the conclusion.
As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served.
If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Jessa Dahl at jdahl@uchicago.edu or Erin Newton at emnewton@uchicago.edu.
Protected: Thursday, April 6, 4-6 PM : Kyle Pan — Aiding War Criminals in the “New” Japan Paper
Thursday, March 9 : Jessa Dahl
Please join us next week as the East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop welcomes our own
Jessa Dahl
PhD Student, University of Chicago
“After Dejima: Nagasaki’s ‘Heroic Women’ and Networks of International Exchange, 1827-1899”
Thursday, March 9th
4:00PM – 6:00PM
John Hope Franklin Room (SSR 224)
Jessa will be presenting an early draft of her dissertation proposal, which centers on personal and professional networks managed by women in nineteenth century Nagasaki. Jessa describes her project as follows:
As a treaty port community, Nagasaki experienced the dynamism of Japan’s entry into the nineteenth century international system first hand. Unlike the other treaty ports, however, Nagasaki was built upon already extant personal and professional networks of intercultural exchange that were over two hundred years old. It was also the only treaty port in which a small cohort of women participated prominently the most vital networks of exchange including international trade, the exchange of ideas and technology, diplomacy and even prostitution. My research will show that these two developments are not coincidental. I will argue that Nagasaki’s history as an established site of international exchange provided a base for the subsequent dynamic transformation that allowed these women to capitalize on the opportunities that were afforded to them. By showing how these women and their networks adapted to and transformed under the new treaty port system, I hope to explore what conditions made their success possible and illustrate how kaikoku (lit. “opening of the country”) and Japan’s subsequent modernization transformed local sites of international exchange.
As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served.
If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Jessa Dahl at jdahl@uchicago.edu or Erin Newton at emnewton@uchicago.edu.
Protected: Thursday March 9: Jessa Dahl “After Dejima: Nagasaki’s ‘Heroic Women’ and Networks of International Exchange, 1827-1899”
TOMORROW, Thursday Jan. 12th 4:00 PM Gender and Law: A Faculty Forum
Gender and Law: A Faculty Forum
Thursday, January 12th, 4:00 – 6:00 PM
John Hope Franklin Room (SSR 224)
Presenters:
“Legal Sources, Gender and Historians’ Quest for Non-elite Agency”
Johanna Ransmeier (University of Chicago, Assistant Professor of History and the College)
and
“In the Arena of the Courts: Rethinking Gender and Law in Meiji Japan”
Susan Burns (University of Chicago, Associate Professor of History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College)
Discussants:
Erin Newton (PhD Student, History, University of Chicago) and Jessa Dahl (PhD Student, History, University of Chicago)
As participants in EAT Histories’ second faculty forum, Professor Ransmeier and Professor Burns will each give a brief presentation on their recent work on the theme of gender and law. During the subsequent discussion we hope to explore the relationship between gender and law in the history of East Asia and beyond.
There is no pre-circulated paper for this event, and first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments will be served.
If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Jessa Dahl at jdahl@uchicago.edu or Erin Newton at emnewton@uchicago.edu.