After the Tokugawa shogunate banned Christianity in Japan in 1614, several anti-Christian measures were implemented, but not in all domains, and not at the same time or speed. Substantial regional variations can be seen regarding when these actions began, as well as regarding their methods and development. In the process, the establishment (or re-establishment) of temples and shrines was an important move in areas where Christianization had involved iconoclasm. This was the case in the territories of the Omura and Arima daimyo, and especially in the self-governed city of Nagasaki.

This talk will focus on early measures concerned with religious institutions: specifically, the dismantlement of churches and the founding of temples and shrines. Previous scholarship on operations to eradicate the Christian presence in Nagasaki has thoroughly studied the many martyrs that lost their lives there, as well as the shifts in the anti-Christian legislation and the methods of persecution adopted. However, as will be argued, in the early Edo period (1614–1644), the support for new religious buildings and rituals by the shogunate and the local authorities also played a key role in the process of transforming Nagasaki from a “Christian city” into a “normal” Japanese Shinto-Buddhist town.

Carla Tronu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages, Kansai University of Foreign Studies. After she received her PhD in history at SOAS, University of London in 2012, she conducted postdoctoral research on missionary publications in Japan (kirishitan-ban) and the martyrs of Japan at Tenri University, Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, and Kyoto University. She is currently the Principal Investigator of a project on lay confraternities and missionary rivalry in the early modern Japanese mission. She has published articles and book chapters in English, Japanese, and Spanish, and is currently preparing a monograph on the Christianization and de-Christianization of early modern Nagasaki.

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.

Is a truly cosmopolitan sensibility possible where foreign travel is nearly impossible? In spite of the ease of maintaining virtual connectedness in today’s world, this question once again seems worth asking. This talk examines some examples of cultural omnivorousness across East Asia as manifested in the genre of bamboo branch lyrics (chikushiji/zhuzhici/jukjisa 竹枝詞), with a focus on Ōtō shiji zasshi 鴨東四時雑詞 (Miscellaneous Poems of the Four Seasons East of the Kamogawa, 1826), a sequence of 120 heptasyllabic quatrains set in Kyoto’s Gion District. Its author, Nakajima Sōin 中島棕隠 (1779-1855), drew extensively from the West Lake zhuzhici tradition—the lodestar of such poetry in China—in limning the customs and habits of its geiko and maiko as well as multiple other cultural and physical charms of the district. Examining Nakajima’s sequence in light of the genre’s full geographical and historical expanse (from Katori to Kashgar, from Saigon to Svobodny, and from Bai Juyi to the Meiji era), the talk assesses how it situates Gion as a node within the cultural cosmopolis of late-pre-modern East Asia.

Stephen Roddy is a professor of East Asian literatures and languages at the University of San Francisco. Recent and forthcoming publications include The Fragrant Companions (a translation with Ying Wang of the 1651 chuanqi drama 「憐香伴」), Writerly Engagement: The Reinvention of Chinese Literature in Europe and the Americas, 1910–2010 (co-edited with Zong-qi Cai), and articles on intellectual figures such as Gong Zizhen (1793-1841), Yu Yue (1821-1907), and Liang Shuming (1893-1988). In 2021-22, he has been a resident foreign researcher at the Nichibunken in Kyoto.

The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from march 16.

In July 1872, the María Luz, a bark flying the Peruvian flag, carried Chinese indentured servants from Macau to Peru. Due to a storm, the ship had to stop for repairs in Kanagawa Bay, and because of this, a number of legal issues arose that were destined to change the perception and use of the law in Japan forever. The María Luz incident is a significant episode in Japanese and world history. The case had a tremendous impact on the collective imaginary, both Japanese and international: it is one of the first occurrences in which an Asian country decided to resist the pressure of a “Western” nation, and responded using the most refined tools of domestic and international law. Moreover, the final outcome of the case (arbitration in front of the Czar of Russia) marks the debut of Japan on the stage of international arbitration. While historians have already examined the María Luz incident, jurists are yet to do so. This talk aims to address the most significant legal issues of the case and to foster further cooperation between historians and legal scholars of the early Meiji period.

Giorgio Fabio COLOMBO is Professor of Law at the Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University, where he is the Director of the Research Unit “Decolonizing Arbitration.” He is also Visiting Professor of Japanese Law at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. He is Resident Research fellow of the Italian School of East Asian Studies (ISEAS), and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Japanese Law/Zeitschrift für Japanisches Recht. His research focuses on ADR, arbitration, private comparative law, law and literature, and legal cultures. His book on the María Luz incident, International Law, Justice and Modernity in Japan: The María Luz Incident and the Dawn of the Meiji Restoration is forthcoming with Routledge (2022).

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

Unlike the arts of nō, kabuki and bunraku, Japan’s comic storytelling art rakugo rarely gets termed ‘literature’. This has to do with the fact that it’s an oral tradition without formal scripts, and because intellectuals have long viewed rakugo as uncouth, unsophisticated variety entertainment. Still, some label rakugo a ‘classical’ (koten) art. Truth be told, many still aren’t sure what to make of rakugo, so it gets overlooked. But rakugo is many things, literature included. The art is intimately linked to more conventional literature (on the page), both early modern and modern. Yet, some become alarmed or offended at the suggestion that rakugo is literature. This is strange considering that rakugo makes up an immense body of work and serves as an extraordinary vessel for much that has otherwise vanished with history—adages, customs, jokes, home remedies, poems, prejudices, profanity, recipes, songs, stories, wisdom, words, and more. This talk aims to challenge misguided perceptions of rakugo and how we define Japanese literature.

M.W. Shores is a scholar of Japanese literary arts and entertainment, with a focus on rakugo and its early-modern precursors, literary and otherwise. He began his career at Cambridge, where he was a fellow of Peterhouse. He has been Lecturer of Japanese at The University of Sydney since 2019. Shores has spent over a decade in Japan for research as well as apprenticeships with two prominent rakugo masters, and has directed Traditional Theater Training (TTT) at Kyoto Art Center since 2015. His recent monograph is The Comic Storytelling of Western Japan: Satire and Social Mobility in Kamigata Rakugo (Cambridge University Press, 2021). For more see mwshores.com.

The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from january 24.

Play occupied a significant place in the publishing industry of early modern Japan. Boardgames were designed to fuel competition among participants. Riddles, rebuses, and brainteasers enticed willing players to engage in mental play. Books of magic tricks worked as props that facilitated performative play. We tend to think of these materials as largely ephemeral, often associated with the child reader and deemed too trivial to be admitted in the realm of the literary. What happens when materials designed for play are reskinned to fit fictional prose? How do we make sense of texts that are replete with what we might readily dismiss as unnecessary, cognitive obstacles? This talk interrogates a wealth of early modern materials that appropriate the ludic and enable what can be tentatively called playful reading. The focus will be on texts that are designed as play spaces, with a view to explore how their potential is fully unleashed by readers who are eager to become comrades in play.

Laura Moretti is an Associate Professor in Premodern Japanese Studies at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Emmanuel College. Her research focusses on early modern Japanese prose, with a specific interest in popular literature. Her new project investigates playful reading in a wide range of early modern materi-als, including graphic narratives and ephemera. She has published a wide range of articles in English and Japanese and is also the author of Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children (Brill, 2016) and Pleasure in Profit – Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan (Columbia University Press, 2020).

The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from december 13.

It is well known that Tokugawa Ieyasu was deified and that his cult became centred at Mt Nikkō. However, the period from his death in Sunpu, in early summer 1616, to his interment at Nikkō in 1617, was fraught. In fact, he was twice-buried and twice deified, according to competing rites. This represented a struggle between the kami ritualists of the House of Yoshida, and the abbot of the Mangan-ji at Nikkō, Tenkai. Tenkai won, and went on to devise an unprecedented cult for Ieyasu as an avatar (gongen), that is, a kami emanating from a Buddha, the Buddha chosen in this case being Yakushi-nyorai. Why and how this occurred will be the first part of this talk.

The Mangan-ji was a great and ancient temple, and Tenkai had further aims for it, architectural, spiritual and temporal. These included full rebuilding for the 20th anniversary of Ieyasu’s entry into the pantheon. Having looked at the above, the talk will address the meaning of nikkō – ‘sunlight.’ Yakushi-nyorai has historically been worshiped with lanterns. The Mangan-ji – renamed the Rinnō-ji after Tenkai’s death – acquired a large number of curious instruments of illumination, which warrant analysis.

Timon Screech taught the History of Japanese Art for 30 years at SOAS, University of London, before moving to the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto, in 2021. An expert on the art and culture of the Edo Period, he has published some 15 books, probably best known being Sex and the Floating World, a study of erotica. In 2016, his field-defining overview of the Edo arts, Obtaining Images, was paper-backed. His most recent books, both published in 2020, are Tokyo before Tokyo, and The Shogun’s Silver Telescope. Screech’s work has been translated into Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Romanian. His is a Fellow of the British Academy.

This lecture will be available on Zoom. A limited audience (maximum twenty persons, with precedence to researchers and advanced students) will be allowed at our centre. For this, please contact us by e-mail. ()

Despite what Robert Marc Friedman has called the “scientific appropriation of weather”, traditional observations of local weather are still used in many areas of the world and belong to a long-established historical ‘sub-culture of the atmosphere’ which encompasses a variety of decision-making strategies, habitual applications of knowledge in everyday life,  and a rich variety of sensory knowledge. This talk explores some of traditional forecasting techniques used in Japanese island and coastal communities in order to provide a general overview of the interaction between community know-how, enskillment and risk mitigation practices in the context of small-scale economies. In particular, it will discuss how traditional forecasting strategies interface with and adapt to the most modern meteorological forecasting technologies. Through some ethnographic cases, it will then focus on how this particular form of hybrid knowledge represents an example of the complex dialogue between global science and local science.

Giovanni Bulian is a researcher at the Department of Asian and North African Studies of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His field of research includes environmental anthropology, ethno-climatology, landscape studies and the history of Japanese social science. He has published Periferie del sacro. Il Capodanno in una comunità di mare del Giappone (2012) and I linguaggi del rito: prospettive antropologiche sulla religiosità giapponese (2018). He has coedited with Sasa Raicevich In mare altrui: pesca e territorialità in ambito interdisciplinare (2013); and with Yasushi Nakano Small-scale Fisheries in Japan: Environmental and Socio-cultural Perspectives  (2018).

From 1812 to today, Napoleon remains the most famous Frenchman in Japan. During the early years of the 19th century, while trying to stay away from the international diplomatic scene, Japan could not escape the consequences of the Napoleonic wars. It almost exclusively relied on Dutch traders—stationed in Dejima as the only state-sanctioned conveyors of Western knowledge—to be enlightened on the nature of a man who had unflinchingly defied the Russian and British empires, both sworn enemies of Japan. In charting the different stages of Napoleon’s discovery in Japan—from the confessions of a sailor under duress, to the tears of his admirers—, this presentation will explore a series of texts and images that turned a ‘defeated’ French emperor into the icon of a new generation in urgent need of change and avid for glory. However, this passion did not stop in 1868 but gathered an even greater momentum during the Meiji era, when his nephew appeared as the worthy heir of Napoleon’s genius. The lives and afterlives of the French emperor in Japan remain a neglected subject among specialists of Napoleonic studies and among Japanese historians. The talk will then examine the significance of this ‘Napoleon moment’, and the far-reaching implications of the discovery of France through its most universal great man.

François Lachaud is a Professor of Japanese studies at the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) since 2000. His field of research includes art history (antiquarianism) and Japanese Buddhism. Inter alia, he has published Le Vieil Homme qui vendait du thé. Excentricité et retrait du monde dans le Japon du xviii^e siècle (Cerf, 2010), and coedited two volumes (EFEO, 2010 and 2017) with Dejanirah Couto on the diplomatic and cultural exchanges between Western empires and East Asia in the early modern period. Most recently, he has coedited with Martin Nogueira Ramos a volume on Japanese-French relations in the 19th century: D’un empire, l’autre. Premières rencontres entre la France et le Japon au xix^e siècle (EFEO, 2021).

This talk explores the dynamics of the socio-technical world in Japan from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s—associating the military, engineers, and doctors—generated by the formation of the nation-state, as well as national legislative reforms on medical education and its practices. During this period, the capabilities of the administrative and military apparatus underwent profound changes, and so did the sanitary and medical technologies of intervention. In a normative and prescriptive way, the issues debated by Japanese medical professionals engaged public decision making in terms of population health, but they also involved individual and collective sensibilities with regard to the “frontiers of the contemporary moral space.”

Medical experts in military institutions will be considered as the primary agency, with a focus on the importance of both wartime and peacetime experiences in the development of public health in Japan. Other questions that will be discussed in this context encompass the evolution of medical knowledge, the social expectations involved, and their relevance beyond national borders.

Ken Daimaru is Associate Professor at the University of Paris and affiliated with the East Asian Civilizations Research Centre (CRCAO). He is the author of “Between War Wounds and a War of Wounds: The Humanitarian Bullet Debate in Europe and Japan, 1890–1905” (Mouvement social, 2016), and “Preserving the Health of the Masses: Medical Expertise and the Advent of the Japanese Imperial Army, 1853–1894” (Histoire, médecine et santé, 2020), and is preparing a monograph on Japanese military health from a trans-war perspective. His current research focuses on public health issues and border management in twentieth-century Japan and its dependencies.

This talk explores the role of the production and circulation of sacred works in the geographical and social spread of esoteric lineages of Buddhism in medieval Japan. To do so, it focuses on the contents and use of two such examples in Shingon lineages. One is Great Notes (Maka shō 摩訶鈔), a rare collection from Ninnaji compiled by Kōzen 興然 (1121-1203) which includes the ritual scriptures transmitted to him by “Great Dharma Master” Jitsunin 実任 (1097-1169). The other is Shingon Raishin’s Notes (Shingon Raishin shō 真言頼心鈔), held in Hagiwaraji 萩原寺, Kagawa. Its author, Raishin (1281-1336), was an active temple-network monk within the developing traditions at Negoroji and Tōdaiji. Examining Kōzen’s and Raishin’s works, along with the networks that enabled their copying and entreasuring, makes it easier to understand the connection between the appearance of ritual scriptures and their role in medieval Kansai and other parts of Japan.

Brian Ruppert, Ph.D. (Princeton), is Professor at Kanagawa University. He is author of Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan (Harvard U.), co-author of A Cultural History of Japanese Buddhism (Wiley-Blackwell), and has authored articles such as “Buddhism in Japan” (Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed.), “Buddhism and Law in Japan” (in Buddhism and Law, Cambridge UP), “Religion in Medieval Japan” (in Routledge Handbook of Premodern Japanese History). He is completing an article on medieval Buddhism for the Cambridge History of Japan as well as writing a book on the history of scripture in Japanese Buddhism.