22 November, 2025   17:00-19:00(JST) 9:00-11:00(CET)

Concept

In Japan, gender has always been more than a fixed category. Especially in modern and contemporary contexts, it emerges as a dynamic site of negotiation, transformation, and commodification. The ways in which femininities and masculinities are shaped through labor, media, institutions, and everyday interactions reveal an ongoing process of identity construction that moves beyond rigid binaries.

This symposium brings together scholars whose work explores how gendered selves are (re)crafted across diverse spheres, from sacred ritual to organized crime, from digital platforms to global activism, and from fictional representations to lived experience. Together, these perspectives illustrate how gender in Japan continues to be performed, contested, and commodified across time and space. By engaging scholars from gender studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and Japanese studies, this event aims to foster critical discussion on the diverse ways femininities and masculinities are being reshaped in response to social, technological, and political change, revealing the multiplicity of paths through which individuals and communities create, inhabit, and transform gendered identities.

Program

17:00

Opening Address

Gianluigi Benedetti (Ambassador of Italy in Japan)

Giorgio Amitrano (University of Naples L’Orientale, ISEAS Scientific Committee)

Greetings

Silvana De Maio (Director of the Italian Cultural Institute, Tokyo)

Andrea De Antoni (Kyoto University, ISEAS Research Coordinator)

Chair

Marta Fanasca (University of Bologna)

17:15

Carmen Sapunaru Tamas (University of Hyogo)

“Not Discrimination but Separation”: Women and Matsuri in Contemporary Japan

17:30

Martina Baradel (Nagoya University)

“I was Always Treated like a Man”:  Women in Japanese Organised Crime

17:45

Maiko Kodaka (Sophia University)

From Performed Desire to Precarious Encounters

18:00

James Welker (Kanagawa University)

Leaving Home to Find Lesbian Selves: Overseas Travel and the (Re)Crafting of Lesbian Identities in 1970s Japan

18:15

Letizia Guarini (Hosei University)

Does Japan Have No Future? Compulsory Allosexuality and Asexual Experiences in Sobakasu (2022)

18:30

Discussion

18:55-19:00

Concluding remarks

This hybrid Workshop will be held on site and via Zoom 

Registration is required in advance by November 21st. Please register here.

Venue: ISEAS, 29 Kitashirakawa Bettō-chō, Sakyō-ku, Kyoto 606-8276

This talk expands on more than three decades of research that began in 1993 with the publication of the American Institute of Architects-Award-winning book Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan. With the goal of better understanding Wrightʻs philosophical priorities and process of design, his interpretations of traditional Japanese forms are re-examined in the context of current notions otherness, appropriation, abstraction, synthesis, translation and myth.

Kevin Nute is a British American architectural theorist based at the University of Hawaiʻi. He is an internationally recognized authority on the transcultural implications of Japanese architecture. He recently published Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan Revisited: Traditional Japanese Culture as a Means to Modern American Architecture (World Scientific Publishing, 2025).

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (registration required in advance from here) and via Zoom.

Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83190708879

Meeting ID: 831 9070 8879

Concept

This lecture presents a multi-sited ethnography, with a focus on its China component. The overall project, HealthXCross (funded by the European Research Council, 2021–2026), analyzes and compares how scientists in different parts of the world study microbes as entities that connect humans to their environments. It takes into account variations in technologies, methods, approaches, and socio-political contexts.

Microbiome science is popularizing a symbiotic understanding of health and ecology: between 50% and 90% of the cells in the human body are microbial. The microbiome influences metabolism, weight, immunity, allergies, mood, and personality. It is shaped by factors like diet, birth, antibiotics, and social interactions—just as it, in turn, shapes us. Health emerges from this human-microbial ecosystem, challenging an anthropocentric view. The microbiome reveals how humans, microbes, and environments are deeply interconnected in the processes of life.

While microbiome science has revealed how microbes entangle human and environmental health, what remains unclear is how this process may give rise to new cultural concepts and practices of health. To explore this question, the project examines several case studies from regions such as Europe, the United States, Africa, and the Pacific. Since 2023, these cases have been complemented by a dedicated focus on China and Greater China, made possible by FARE funding (Italian Ministry of Research) through the project Microbiome Technoscience in Shanghai and Hong Kong in Pandemic Times: An Anthropological Study. This lecture will discuss preliminary findings from the HealthXCross/FARE project, with particular attention to the intersections of health governance and biopolitics.

Speaker

Roberta Raffaetà is associate professor of Socio-cultural Anthropology at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Deputy Director of NICHE (The New Institute: The Centre for Environmental Humanities), where she coordinates the research cluster ‘Technoscience, Health and Justice in an Interdependent Planet’. Since obtaining a PhD at the University of Lausanne, she has worked at various universities in Italy and abroad (US, Australia, Switzerland). Her research has been funded by the European Commission, The Italian Ministry of Research, Fulbright, Wenner Gren and others

This lecture will be held on site and via Zoom.

Registrations are required from here by October 20.

The history of wine consumption throughout the world remains largely unexplored and unwritten. Drawing on a range of sources, including the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and several contemporary travel accounts from the 17th and 18th centuries, this lecture focuses on two key aspects: firstly, the consumption of wine by European expatriates in maritime Asia, and secondly, the emergence of a local market, primarily in Japan, during the Edo period. Wine is a product that allows us to connect diverse cultures and societies that existed in early modern times.

Joji Nozawa is a professor at Waseda University. He holds a Ph.D. in early modern history from the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) and teaches history of East-West relations and French language at the Faculty of Education. His research interests include the European East India Companies, the globalization of material culture and French cultural diplomacy.

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (registration required in advance from here) and via Zoom.

Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82947530025

Meeting ID: 829 4753 0025

From day selection to weather forecasting, divination was widely used in Edo-period society, as evidenced by the variety of printed books and manuscripts produced on the subject. Many of these works include diagrams as well as images depicting the possible fates awaiting clients and readers. This lecture will sketch the history of such images, explore their distinctive features, and consider the role they may have played in shaping and disseminating social norms.

Matthias Hayek is Professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études–PSL. His research focuses on the reception, adaptation, and uses of Chinese correlative cosmology in Japan. He is the author of Les Mutations du Yin et du Yang : divination, société et représentations au Japon, du vie au xixe siècle (Collège de France, 2021).

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (registration required in advance from here) and via Zoom.

Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84157148024

Meeting ID: 841 5714 8024