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.

Western classical culture, and Greek culture in particular, has been a formidable source of reflection and imagination for twentieth-century Japanese artists and intellectuals. After tracing the milestones of this encounter, we will examine the nature of the link thus created between modern Japan and ancient Greece. At a time when the West is stumbling over the paradoxes of universalism, a reterritorialization of Greece seems more necessary than ever.

Michael Lucken is Professor of Japanese Contemporary History at Inalco (Paris), where he is teaching and studying intellectual history and visual culture. His main books are L’Art du Japon au vingtième siècle (Twentieth-Century Japanese Art; Hermann, 2001); Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts from Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao (Columbia University Press, 2016); The Japanese and the War: Expectation, Perception, and the Shaping of Memory (Columbia University Press, 2017); Nakai Masakazu. Naissance de la théorie critique au Japon (Nakai Masakazu: The Birth of Critical Theory in Japan; Presses du réel, 2015); and Le Japon grec. Culture et possession (Greek Japan: Culture and Possession; Gallimard, 2019).

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (email required in advance) and via Zoom (meeting ID: 863 0847 2410).

The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from April 15.

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.

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.

February 19, 2024  18:00 JST

Prior registration, on-site or online, is required from here by February 16.

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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).