Kyoto Lectures
Edo Popular Literature and Female Readership
Mario Talamo
This lecture will be held on site and via Zoom
March 29th, 2024 18:00
The publishing world of the late Edo period was marked by the attempts to involve a female readership as literary consumers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, female readers were not considered as the “specific target” of a literary output. Thus, authors and publishers resorted to many expedients to find a product explicitly designed for their preferences, such as the ninjōbon (sentimental books). However, this paucity of literary contributions, whose main aim was to fulfil womanly interests, does not imply that authors did not try to involve them before the publication of these “sentimental books”. Furthermore, publications with men as their original consumers could in fact be tailored to a female readership. When a literary product changes its model reader, the transformations that the text undergoes are not concerned solely with the surface—cover and illustrations—or the plot. Changes are seldom embedded in deep narrative structures. This lecture aims to outline the evolution that texts, in particular tales of vengeance or katakiuchi mono, went through when they addressed a female readership, which involved morphological and structural changes.
Mario Talamo obtained his PhD from the University of Naples ‘l’Orientale’ and has a Postdoctoral Diploma in Sciences of Religion and the History of Thought from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He is currently a Visiting Research Scholar at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. His research is on the late-Edo popular literature of the nineteenth century. Among his publications are the Italian translation of Jippensha Ikku’s masterpiece, Tōkaidōchū hizakurige (Hizakurige: a piedi lungo il Tōkaidō, Aracne Editrice, 2019); an anthology of tales of vengeance from the end of the Edo period (Storie di vendetta di samurai, Asiasphere, 2021); and “Evolutions of Ethical Paradigms and Popular Fiction: The Case of Late Edo Tales of Vengeance,” Japan Review (2023): 29-50
This hybrid lecture will be held on site (email required in advance) and via Zoom (meeting ID: 842 5377 2915).
The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from March 27.
Kyoto Lectures
Izumi Kyōka’s Animistic Prose
When the Semantic Becomes Mantic
Cody Poulton
This lecture will be held on site and via Zoom
February 21st, 2024 18:00
Praised by younger writers like Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Kawabata Yasunari, and Mishima Yukio, Izumi Kyōka (1873-1939) is today one of the most challenging of modern Japanese novelists to read, much less trans-late into a foreign language. His prose style is one of enchantment: as Nakajima Atsushi put it, it has the effect of a narcotic like heroin, taking the reader into an altered state of consciousness. Using examples from his own translation of the story, in this lecture the speaker will focus on Sanjaku-kaku (“Three Feet Square,” 1898) and its sequel Kodama (“Echo”) to ex-plore how, through language, Kyōka makes the lost world of late-nineteenth century Fukagawa come alive.
Cody Poulton is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, Canada, and currently serves as Director of the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies. A specialist in Japanese performance, he is author of Spirits of Another Sort: The Plays of Izumi Kyōka (2001) and A Beggar’s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japan, 1900-1930 (2010). He is also chief editor and translator of Citizens of Tokyo: Six Plays by Oriza Hirata (2018), co-editor of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama (2014) and Okada Toshiki and Japanese Theatre (2021), and contributing editor to The Cambridge History of Japanese Theatre (2016).
This hybrid lecture will be held on site (email required in advance) and via Zoom (meeting ID: 840 2211 1804).
The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from February 19.
Convegni e workshops
BOOK LAUNCH – Hokkaido Dairy Farm: Cosmopolitics of Otherness and Security on the Frontiers of Japan
Discussion with the Author
(Language: English only)
Paul Hansen
February 19, 2024 18:00 JST
Prior registration, on-site or online, is required from here by February 16.
Concept
Hokkaido Dairy Farm offers a historical and ethnographic examination of the rapid industrialization of the dairy industry in Tokachi, Hokkaido. It begins with a history of dairy farming and consumption in Hokkaido from a macro perspective. It then narrows the focus to examine concrete changes in a Tokachi-area dairying community, with shifts in human relationships alongside changes in human and cow connections through new technologies. In the final chapters, the scope is further narrowed to a detailed history and ethnography of a single industrializing dairy farm and the morphing cast of individuals attached to it, centering on their idiosyncratic searches for economic, social, and ontological security in what is popularly considered a peripheral region and industry. The culmination of over fifteen years of ethnographic, policy, and historical research, Hokkaido Dairy Farm argues that the dairy industry in Japan has always been entwined with notions of Otherness and security seeking, notably in terms of frontiers (SUNY Press 2024).
Paul Hansen is professor in the Department of International Resource Sciences at Akita University in Japan. He is a socio-cultural anthropologist with a focus on Japan and Jamaica, social theory in relation to identity, affect, embodiment, posthumanism, cosmopolitan studies, ecology and animal-human-technology relationships. He is also interested in food and musicology. Having published extensively on these topics in anthropology journals, he is co-editor (with Blai Guarné) of the book Escaping Japan: Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-First Century (2018, Routledge) and co-editor (with Susanne Klien) of a Special Issue of Asian Anthropology titled Rural Japan as Heterotopia (2022).
Convegni e workshops
情動と仮想空間ー感覚を通じた距離と共在の再考
Affect and Virtual Space: Reconsidering Distance and Copresence Through Feeling
京都大学 吉田南1号館1共01
January 27, 2024 12:30 JST
Concept
In this symposium, we explore affect in interactions through virtual spaces. Focusing on mediated remote interactions not only highlights the processes through which virtual spaces shape and are shaped by affects and perception, but also stimulates rethinking of traditional concepts of distance and copresence. Therefore, the symposium not only explores various anthropological cases surrounding virtual spaces but also extends its scope to issues such as gestures and cognition in face-to-face interactions, correspondences with the environment, and to how the experience of “being with others” emerges in relation to distance through affect, feelings, and perception. By doing so, the symposium aims to examine the dynamics of affect, experiences, and perceptions in virtual spaces while simultaneously considering the theoretical dimensions of “distance” that have not been extensively discussed in cultural anthropology.
The symposium is divided into two parts: “Discussing” and “Experiencing.” In the former “Discussing” part, researchers engage in scholarly discussions on the theme in a traditional symposium format. The latter “Experiencing” part allows participants to explore the core theme of the symposium through their senses. Throughout both segments, the goal is to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the theme.
*Language: Japanese only
「論じる」締切:2024年1月26日(金)12:00 申し込みは締め切りました
「経験する」締切:2024年1月20日(土)12:00 申し込みは締め切りました
Kyoto Lectures
Japanese Traditional Kites
From Regional Studies to the World of Arts
Cecile Laly
This lecture will be held on site and via Zoom
January 22nd, 2024 18:00
The vanishing energy of Japanese traditional kites, crafted from paper and bamboo, echoes their departure from Japanese landscapes since the latter half of the twentieth century. This fading artistry has escaped the discerning gaze of foreign scholars specializing in Japanese studies and has been confined to the status of kyōdo gangu (Japanese folk toys) by Japanese researchers in regional studies. Yet, diligent research initiatives and the creation of the collective volume Cerfs-volants du Japon: à la croisée des arts (Japanese Kites: At the Crossroads of Arts) in 2021 calls attention to the untapped artistic richness of the study of Japanese kites. This lecture will highlight how the Edo period witnessed the rise of these delicate yet sturdy kites, not merely as celestial entities in the sky but as integral elements within the entertainment culture of the floating world. Indeed, their ethereal dance resonated with literature, poetry, theater, and the nuanced canvas of visual culture. The lecture will then illustrate how these delicate creations descended from the sky to find a new sanctuary upon the walls of galleries and museums as the twentieth century unfolded.
Cecile Laly has a PhD in Art History from Sorbonne University and is a Specially Appointed Lecturer at Kyoto Seika University. Specializing in Japanese arts and culture with a global perspective, her extensive research on Japanese kites is evident through her multiple scholarly publications, in particular her edited volume Cerfs-volants du Japon: à la croisée des arts (Nouvelles éditions Scala, 2021), a seminal contribution to the discourse on Japanese artistic heritage.
This hybrid lecture will be held on site (email required in advance) and via Zoom (meeting ID: 826 0859 2665).
The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from January 20.