This lecture is based on the recent publication of Le Japonisme, un art français (Les presses du réel, 2023). Following Michael Baxandall’s warning in his landmark monograph Patterns of Intention (1985), the book challenges the notion of inuence, “a curse of art criticism.” As the critic Gaëtan Picon wrote, “from the time of Manet onwards, Western painting has often listened to Far Eastern art, but it has hardly heard it except through its own voice.” Operating as a brilliant indicator, Japanese art reinforced convictions that predated the opening of Japan. The confrontation of Western works with their presumed Japanese models has obscured the research and debates that make the discovery of Japan the culmination of a quest, inseparable from the perception of Greek art, the acclimatization of Pre-Raphaelitism in France and, more generally, Medievalism. Limiting the study of Japonisme to France makes it possible to reconstitute the network of internal resonances so important to the ethnologist and Japanologist Ernst Grosse who insisted in The Beginning of Art (1894), that each culture is above all an echo chamber. Giving a leading role to the artists allegedly inuenced by Japan, this study, which excludes “japonaiseries,” focuses on Japonisme as a revolution of the gaze.

Sophie Basch is Professor of French Literature at Sorbonne University and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the author of numerous books, critical editions, and articles at the intersection of literary history and art history, focusing on Orientalism, archeology, n-de-siècle culture and Marcel Proust, whose relationship to the decorative arts she studied in Rastaquarium (Brepols, 2014).

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (email required in advance) and via Zoom (meeting ID: 818 6178 0877).

The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from may 29.

Authorship and creativity are elusive concepts, and so are the metaphors and analogies that premodern poets used to claim ownership of their work. This presentation dives into waka theory and practice from the late twelfth to the early sixteenth century to trace the emergence and development of a “copyright” discourse in medieval Japan.

From the close reading of poetic texts, a new profile comes to light which compels us to redefine the author (sakusha) as a self-effacing presence, yet one solidly emplaced in the socio-epistemological grid of its times. This conundrum unfurls as potentially critical when it comes to “poetic theft,” a crime that medieval commentators would leverage to discredit their rivals and, by contrast, empower their professional status. By examining the rhetorical strategies they used to protect themselves and their intellectual property, we will be able to grasp the stakes of literary practice and catch a glimpse of the poets’ lived experience.

Pier Carlo Tommasi received his Ph.D. from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, in 2019. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His research interests include classical Japanese poetry, selfhood and agency in premodern Japan, samurai culture, medievalism, and Sinosphere studies. His most recent article, entitled “Neither Plagiarism nor Patchwork: The Culture of Citation and the Making of Authorship in Medieval Japanese Poetry,” appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of Monumenta Nipponica.

Zoom meeting ID: 875 5721 9118

The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from may 7.

The origin stories of French Japonisme, the nineteenth-century fascination for Japanese art, tend to frame the movement in terms of the activities described in the memoirs of an elite group of men active in the French arts administration. And yet, a return to archival sources uncovers a much broader landscape of interest and exchange related to Japanese works in the years following the 1858 “Traité d’amitié et de commerce.” Travelers such as Emile and Louise Desoye imported and sold Japanese goods, while families such as Louis and Anna Gonse collected and displayed art in their homes. Artists Felix and Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt, among many others, took inspiration from the Japanese prints and ceramics they admired.

Drawing on the findings of Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France (1853-1914) (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), this presentation will provide an overview of some of the many women involved in promoting Japanese art and culture in the nineteenth century while asking questions about how and why their stories have been “cropped” from the frame through which Japonisme tends to be represented. How might twenty-first century scholars enlarge the canvas?

Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French Studies at Montclair State University. She is the author of books, articles, and essay anthologies related to the reception of medieval art and architecture in nineteenth-century France and America, literary house museums, and to the work of women art dealers and collectors of Japanese art. She serves as an editor for the Journal of Japonisme and has been contributing to the “Connoisseurs, Collectors, and Dealers of Asian Art in France from 1700-1939” Program (Institut national de l’histoire de l’art).

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (email required in advance) and via Zoom (meeting ID: 890 4028 6066).

Europe clearly has “a thing” for megaliths. So much that, when Western European archaeologists went abroad during the 19th century, they seemed to make it a priority to detect and report the existence of any dolmen or menhir they thought they had found. When it comes to Japan, a figure like William Gowland comes immediately to mind. However, non-European archaeologists have not necessarily made a specific category or point of interest in raw, more-or-less big, stone structures. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they do not, depending on the history of their respective archaeological tradition. This is the first reason why Megaliths of the World, as a project and now as a book, needed to exist: to build a sort of temporary summary and to acknowledge the existence of “megaliths”, in places and times well- or lesser-known, and their anthropological and academic backgrounds. If megalithic structures appear to be universal, what makes them megaliths in the wide variety of societies that produce them? Japan, here, is an important field of study and reflection, for Japan’s megaliths come in a vast array of shapes and functions, in societies ranging from the hunter-gatherers of the Jōmon period to the protohistoric tombs and funeral mounds of the Yayoi and Kofun period’s agrarian organizations.

Laurent Nespoulous is Associate Professor of Japanese Archaeology at INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales), Paris, and researcher at IFRAE and at Trajectoires. De la sédentarité à l’État Laboratory (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University). He is the author of numerous contributions on Japanese archaeology, history, and pre/protohistoric Japan. He is the co-editor (with Luc Laporte, Jean-Marc Large, Chris Scarre & Tara Steimer) of Megaliths of the World (Archaeopress, 2022).

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (email required in advance) and via Zoom (meeting ID: 811 0972 7772).

Given Mishima Yukio’s (1925-1970) fascination with radical right-wing ideas that contributed to his dramatic suicide at the Ichigaya headquarters of the Japan Self-Defence Forces, it is not surprising that his literature is often read through the lens of his political views.  This lecture also pursues such links, by examining the political significance of the flying saucers that appear in his science-fiction novel, Beautiful Star (Utsukushii hoshi, 1962).  However, the lecture aims to broaden our insight into the nature of Mishima’s literary engagement with political consciousness.  The novel was serialized between January and November 1962, following the superpower confrontation of the 1961 Berlin Crisis, and it was completed just as the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was coming to a head.  The contemporaneous emergence of multiple UFO sightings has been linked to anxiety about impending nuclear war, so in that sense Mishima’s novel was obviously political.  However, the work also articulates a broader cultural political perspective, touching on Japanese post-war anxiety about a loss of cultural autonomy and racial ‘purity.’  Moreover, the exquisitely beautiful flying saucers evoke a deeply eroticised aestheticism, which points to an alternative political imagination with the potential to break through the stultifying oppression of consumerist Japan.

Stephen Dodd is Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at SOAS, University of London.  He has written on a wide range of modern Japanese authors.  He is author of Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern Japanese Literature (Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), and The Youth of Things: Life and Death in the Age of Kajii Motojirō (Hawai’i University Press, 2014.). He has also translated two Mishima Yukio novels in the Penguin Classic series: Life for Sale (Inochi urimasu, 1968) in 2019, and Beautiful Star (Utsukushii hoshi, 1962), in 2022.  He continues to research and translate Mishima’s writings.

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (email required in advance) and via Zoom (meeting ID: 869 6763 0628).

The argument that “Buddhism” as the “Eastern World Religion” is a Western colonial construct is widely accepted. What has received less attention is that also the Japanese encounter with non-Mahāyāna forms of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia during the 19th century occurred in a space structured by Empire, namely by established European domination and budding Japanese ambition. The question of how to order the Buddhist world, in short, was an inherently political one.

Taking as primary example the reception of the Sri Lankan Buddhist tradition in Japan, the speaker will show how the unprecedented entwinement of Western scholarly and Eastern scholastic perspectives on South and Southeast Asian Buddhism occasioned a re-interpretation of traditional East Asian Buddhist doxographies into tools for articulating a justification for Japanese imperial expansion. Eventually, these doxographies would come to be applied even to fellow Mahāyānists in China and Korea, and Japanese Buddhists would claim for their tradition to be the sole repository of the authentic Buddhist teachings as a whole. Through the efforts of the likes of Takakusu Junjirō, these doxographies and their attendant imperialist values eventually reached Western Buddhologists and continued to cause havoc in the discipline well into the 20th century.

Stephan Kigensan Licha received his PhD from SOAS in 2012 and is a faculty member in the Department of Japanese Studies at the University of Heidelberg. He specialises in the intellectual history of East Asian Buddhism, with an emphasis on the tantric, Tiantai/Tendai, and Chan/Zen traditions during the pre-modern, and the global history of Buddhist modernism during the modern period. He has published numerous articles on these topics, and his monograph, Esoteric Zen: Zen and the Tantric Teachings in Premodern Japan is forthcoming with Brill.

The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from december 12.

This presentation intends to address the political theory of Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), the speaker’s first topic of research some twenty-five years ago. By doing so, two fundamental questions come to the fore. First, what does his political theory express that is worth remembering? The question still deserves to be asked since there exist at least two possible but widely different readings of the theory: traditional and religious vs. secular and modern (or even postmodern, for some), both grounded on apparently explicit and unambiguously strong statements. For this reason, Sorai’s political theory presents us with the classic problem of the interpretation of the treatment of contradictions and incoherence. The favored reading that will emerge should prompt the question of “why?”: Why do these factors make such a bold theory conceivable? The argument will draw on Max Weber’s insights into “elective affinities,” as well as on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, hoping to provide a concrete example for an often obscure concept. The answer to this “why” question is to be found in the role of conventions, pretenses, and self-deceit of the bushi society of the time.

Olivier Ansart obtained his doctorate in Chinese studies (University of Paris, 1981), joined the French foreign service, and then returned to academia fifteen years later, this time in the field of Japanese studies. He was director of the Maison franco-japonaise (Nichifutsu Kaikan) in Tokyo (1992–1995) and a professor at Waseda University before joining the University of Sydney in 2003, from which he retired in July 2022. He is the author of L’empire du rite. La pensée politique d’Ogyū Sorai (1998), La justification des théories politiques (2005), Une modernité indigène (2014), L’étrange voyage de Confucius au Japon (2015), and Paraître et Prétendre (2020).

The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from november 14.

This paper offers preliminary findings from research on an understudied topic: premodern economic thought.  Japan’s medieval age was a time of tremendous change as people began using imported Chinese coins, selling goods in regional markets, and developing new instruments of credit.  Such activities surely affected the ways that people viewed the world, yet curiously, few left behind lengthy written reflections on economic matters like those found in other premodern societies as well as in Tokugawa Japan. Perhaps that is why most published histories of Japanese economic thought begin in the Tokugawa or later periods.

What broader significance did medieval Japanese assign to wealth and poverty (and how did their understandings of wealth and poverty evolve over time)? Why did their view of usury differ from those found in other contemporary societies?  How did women’s involvement in the expanding economy affect gender norms?  And, perhaps most importantly, what types of evidence can be marshalled to answer these questions and reveal new developments in medieval economic thought? The paper draws on primary sources from diaries and government documents to folktales, religious stories, and illustrated scrolls in an effort to answer such questions.

Ethan Segal is associate professor of Japanese history and chairperson of the Japan Council at Michigan State University. A scholar of medieval Japan, his publications include the book Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan, published by the Harvard University Asia Center. Other topics of his research and publications include proto-nationalism, historical memory, women and gender, and depictions of Japan on film and television.  He is currently on leave from MSU, conducting research with the support of a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University.

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (email required in advance) and via Zoom. The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from two days before the event.

The kanhua chan (Jp. kannazen 看話禅), a practice established by Dahui Zonggao 大慧宗杲 (1089–1163) during the Song period, soon became dominant in Chan (Jp. Zen) Buddhism. According to this method, practitioners must focus on a gong-an (Jp. kōan) until a spiritual explosion occurs, thus opening a passage toward awakening. This kanhua chan was imported into Japan and during the Middle Ages became the basis of the practice in both the Rinzai and Sōtō schools, as in China, Korea, and Vietnam. Around the middle of the fourteenth century, an important evolution occurred: while in other areas where Chan spread a practitioner had to pass only one gong-an to reach awakening, in Japan, several were considered necessary.

By examining the Daitō branch of Rinzai Buddhism, this talk will present the sources through which the history of this significant change can be reconstructed. It will also attempt to answer the question of how—and in part, why—Japanese Zen developed the specificities that radically distinguish it from other lands of Chan practice today.

Didier Davin is an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Japanese Literature. His first research examined the thought of the Zen monk Ikkyū Sōjun. Recently, he has been investigating the doctrinal evolution of the Rinzai Zen school from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century with a specific focus on the so-called Daitō branch, which became the Rinzai school’s main branch in the Edo period and is the only one remaining today. Davin has published a study on the reception in Japan of the important Chan text Wumenguan (Jp. Mumonkan) (Mumonkan no shusse sugoroku: Kika shita zen no seiten; Heibonsha, 2020).

This lecture will be held on site (limited space: send us an email in advance) and via Zoom. The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from two days before the event.

After establishing Manchukuo in March 1932, Japan made strenuous efforts to persuade France to conclude an alliance by revitalizing the French-Japanese entente of 1907.  In particular, Japan wished to overcome its diplomatic isolation before the Lytton Report was discussed in the League of Nations during autumn 1932.  To this effect, Japanese diplomats and military attaches suggested favorable investment conditions for the French companies in Manchukuo. However, France declined these offers to prioritize collective security, despite substantial sympathy toward Japan in the French Foreign Ministry over concerns to protect French imperial interests in China and Southeast Asia.

Drawing on records from both sides, this talk will show the aims, details, and process of Japanese diplomatic initiatives along with the French response. After briefly reviewing the initial division within the French Foreign Ministry over its response to the Mukden Incident, it will examine Japanese diplomatic maneuvers toward France from the spring of 1932, as well as the reasons why they were declined by the French cabinet led respectively by André Tardieu and Édouard Herriot. The talk will also explore why the French government internally defined Japan’s military actions and assertive diplomacy as posing a “problem of aggression.”

Seung-young Kim is a Professor of International History and Politics at Kansai Gaidai University. Before joining Kansai Gaidai in 2018, from 2003 he taught at the University of Sheffield and the University of Aberdeen. He has published widely on U.S.-East Asian relations in the twentieth century.  Since 2019, he has been working on a JSPS research project entitled “Japanese-French Diplomatic Relations from 1900 to 1933.” He was a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo from 2008–2010 and worked as the UN correspondent for The Chosun Ilbo until 1995. His publications include “The Diplomacy of the Japanese-French Entente and Fukien Question, 1905–1907,” in International History Review (2019).

This lecture will be held on site (limited space: send us an email in advance) and via Zoom. The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from two days before the event.