‘Reading the air’ (kūki wo yomu) is a highly valued communicative skill in Japan. It has been argued to shape expectations, motivations, and actions within social settings and to facilitate smooth relationships. Not being able to do it is understood as disruptive and damaging to social settings and the management of social relations. In this talk I discuss these concepts and explore the diverse ways in which people with food allergies in Japan are imaginatively reading the air and trying to avoid creating trouble (meiwaku) for others and themselves when they disclose their allergies. I trace how practices of reading the air, and the concept of meiwaku, can also be productively understood as a practice of the imagination, which is indeterminate, intersubjective and emergent, whilst also building from prior experience to direct the actions they take.

Emma Cook is a Professor of Modern Japanese Studies at Hokkaido University. Her research currently focuses on feeling, affect and emotion in food allergy experiences in Japan. She is particularly interested in exploring how the individual and social intersect, interact, and are embodied, and how cultural conceptions of food, food sharing, health, illness, and the body affect experiences of food allergies.

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (registration from here) and via Zoom (meeting ID: 833 2325 8931).

The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from October 19.

From 1963 onward, six urns containing of Holocaust victims remains have been interred in Japan. These urns’ journey was both transnational, converging with the Polish state museums memory diplomacy, as well as a very local one, as the meaning of and politics around the remains were intimately connected with Japan’s own experience. Indeed, this phenomenon is not unique to Japan. Polish museums have sent such urns all around Poland and globally, building a secular network of pilgrimage sites with its own relics and altars. Taking advantage of the fragile corporeality of ashes, this practice transformed them into portable commemorative objects. The (literal) objectification of the Jewish dead globally and in Japan meant different things for different actors in this story. Tracing the journey of the urns and their various uses, reveal the complex politics of transnational commemoration of World War II in its very local meanings in Japan and beyond.

Ran Zwigenberg is associate professor at Pennsylvania State University and Kyushu University. His research focuses on modern Japanese and European history, with a specialization in memory and cultural history. He has taught and lectured in the United States, Europe, Israel, and Japan, and published on issues of war memory, atomic energy, psychiatry, and survivor politics.  His latest manuscript Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (University of Chicago Press, 2023) deals with the psychological aftermath of the nuclear attacks on Japan. For more information on this and other projects, please see https://sites.psu.edu/zwigenberg/

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (email required in advance) and via Zoom (meeting ID: 894 1109 9080).

The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from July 22.

The Asia-Pacific War (1931-45) saw fifteen years of conflict in the Asia-Pacific region, involving 10 world powers and numerous colonies following the Japanese Empire’s invasion of mainland Asia and numerous island nations across the Pacific Ocean. In 2023, 25 million overseas tourists came to Japan, bouncing back from the 3-year low caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, 80% of whom came from Asian nations which fought against the Japanese Empire. This research project asks the following questions: how do international visitors to Japan interpret Asia-Pacific War heritage sites compared with domestic visitors? What translations have been provisioned for international visitors, and how do they vary in content from the source language texts? Finally, what are the motivations for the managers of Asia-Pacific War heritage sites to translate, and how does this affect the discourse? Through analysis of Google Maps reviews and surveys of attendees to interpretive “War Heritage Tours”, this research explores from a bottom-up perspective the relationship between translation and interpretation at these conflict heritage sites. My findings identify the diversity of how domestic and international visitors value and make meaning of Asia-Pacific War heritage sites. These findings have the potential to inform wider translation practice at heritage sites of international conflict, fostering intercultural dialogue through a translational justice approach.

Oliver Moxham is a PhD student in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and a Daiwa Scholar in Japanese Studies (2022). He has been researching the history of the Japanese empire since his undergraduate in Japanese Studies and History. Through his master’s in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, he focussed his research on international engagement with conflict heritage site Mimizuka, a 16th century burial mound in Kyoto. He is currently undertaking ethnographic fieldwork for his PhD in Tokyo and Kyoto, focussing on how translation at Asia-Pacific War heritage sites affects heritage discourse and interpretation.

Prior registration, on-site or online, is required from here by July 2.

Horimono, or Japanese tattooing, has been documented in photography since the first commercial series in 1859, with technical problems that were quickly overcome by coloring the monochrome prints. The arrival of Western travellers led to the emergence of tourist photography ateliers (Yokohama shashin), which flourished in the new treaty ports. All the renowned photographers, such as Shimooka Renjō, Beato, Stillfried, Usui, Kinbei, and Kajima Seibei, included portraits of tattooed men in their portfolios. Alongside the geisha, the tattooed man became a new expression of Japanese masculinity in the eyes of Westerners.

Claude Estèbe is a French photographer and Japanologist. Formerly resident at the Villa Kujoyama (2001), he obtained his PhD in early Japanese photography from INALCO (2006). His publications include Les Derniers Samouraïs (2001) and Yokohama shashin (2014). He is currently editing a book on tattoos during the Meiji period. He has curated several exhibitions for the Guimet Museum, Kyotographie, and the MCJP (Le Japon en couleurs, 2022).

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (email required in advance) and via Zoom (meeting ID: 842 6720 2188).

The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from June 23.

The spread of Afro-Brazilian religions—especially Umbanda and, to a lesser extent, Candomblé—has followed the flux of the migrations of Brazilians (mostly of Japanese descent) looking for work and better living conditions in Japan. This presentation will show some preliminary results on how religious experiences are entangled with migration, the search for healing, life plans, the possibility of people and objects to circulate between Japan and Brazil, and the complex relationship with Japanese society, nature, and spirits.

Daniela Calvo is a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, and is currently working on a project on Umbanda in contemporary Japan. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences (State University of Rio de Janeiro) and a PhD in Mathematics (University of Pisa).

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (email required in advance) and via Zoom (meeting ID: 852 6441 2277).

The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from May 20.