SPRING 2008: RE-IMAGINING TOKYO

In a popular metaphor revealing of their bravado, the denizens of Edo, Tokyo’s early-modern precursor, referred to fires as “the flowers of the capital.” Despite a number of attempts by the authorities to mandate use of fireproof materials, the frequency of fire in the city increased over the course of 250 years of Tokugawa rule. In the first two decades under the rule of the modern state in the late nineteenth century, the capital’s famous flowers were largely eradicated. This occurred without any major advance in the technology of either fireproofing or fire-extinguishing. The transformation raises a host of questions about governance, property, and conceptions of dwelling. This presentation will explore the modern transition in Japan's capital city by reframing the early modern and modern urban social contexts as two distinct "regimes of fire."

Co-sponsored by the Department of History

Discussing her In a public discussion with Haruki Murakami, Kenji Nakagami described the conflict between them as one between "City and Anti-City." Looking at the burakumin (outcaste) context of Nakagami's work, particularly with its emphasis on blood, this talk explores notions of space and ethnicity in Japanese fiction of the 1980s. Zimmerman's book, "Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction," appeared in Harvard East Asia's series in 2007.

Co-sponsored by German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literatures

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Ôdachi Shigeo, Tokyo’s powerful Governor General and future Home Minister, faced a difficult situation in the summer of 1943. Having just returned from his post as Imperial Mayor of Occupied Singapore (Shônan), where he had watched the Japanese empire expand and then, with terrifying speed, begin to contract as the weight of American industrial capacity swung behind the war effort, Ôdachi knew that the triumphalist news stories of the day were woefully out of touch with reality. The Japanese empire was on the verge of horrific collapse, and the mass death and brutal hardships of the frontlines would soon be visited upon the capital’s populace. As the official charged with steeling Tokyo’s women and children for the arrival of Allied bombers and troops, Ôdachi was confronted with the question of how to mobilize a population numbed by years of propagandist exaggeration and exhausted from long-term material deprivation. His answer was one of the most surreal and best remembered events of the Pacific War: the mass mediated ritualized slaughter of Tokyo’s wildly famous zoo animals.
The slaughter was choreographed to shock depleted Tokyoites into a higher level of ideological compliance, suppress dissent, and instill a heightened sense of emergency through a conscious rupture of everyday conventions. Arguably rational only within the context of total war and impending total defeat, Ôdachi’s diaries and official memos illustrate not only the logic of sacrifice in a society in crisis but also the sacrifice of logic to the dictates of blinkered military strategy and illusory victory.

March 26th, 2008
Wednesday
4:00-5:00pm
Schwartz 3

Dr. Mariyo Yagi, a prominent Japanese environmental artist, designer and landscape engineer, will discuss her work and social philosophy in an open class session of Ellen Schattschneider's graduate seminar, "Trauma: Theory and Experience." Yagi, known for her creative work with "nawa" (Japanese sacred rope forms) will explore her artistic response to the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995 in Kobe, Japan. Working with many bereaved survivors of the earthquake, Yagi developed the "Kobe Roots-NAWA column", a vast sacred rope made out of ragged T-shits of the victims, as a requiem to those lost in the disaster. She will also discuss related environmental public art projects--reworking water, earth, metal and wind--through which she has sought to unite communities and peoples in the spirit of self-examination, reconciliation and peaceful coexistence.

Co-sponsored by the M.A. Program in Cultural Production

Akihabara, the so-called "otaku mecca" is both a concrete place in Tokyo and a state of mind, linked to play, paraphernalia and virtual reality. This talk examines Akihabara's place in the psyche of millennial Japan, particularly in relation to issues of masculinity, consumption and urban spaces, all of which are brought up in the hit television series and movie "Densha Otoko".

Co-sponsored by German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literatures

In an era of encroaching neoliberalism where the market economy and privatization are dominating ever more of—economic, social, and personal—life, how do youth imagine the human world around them and what kinds of attachments or detachments with others do they forge? Given that the modernist hope in the future and progressive prosperity has diminished if not totally ruptured in recent years—and this, strikingly so in Japan in its post-Bubble unease—youth are caught in a cipher of “futurelessness” where many say they can barely imagine a world or time beyond the present. How does such a time-freeze play out in the affective investments children form—or don’t form—with others and how, in turn, does the affective geometry of their lives get impacted by, and impact itself, the immaterial labor so critical to capitalism today? That is, what kind of sociality—ties to family, work, peers, self—is productive of capitalism today and how are kids contributing to or getting configured in this social economy? Representing very initial research, the paper is primarily a think piece, meant to address the sociality—or what the press often claims is the lack, loss, or violation of sociality—of youth today by asking what kind of sociality (or affective attachments, affective labor) accompanies the logic of the neoliberal market which, in turn, shapes or is shaped by kids. The focus is on Japanese teenagers in the first decade of the new millennium, and centers on ties made—or broken—with family, questioning the relevance of “family” and, alternatively, other affective relations, to a capitalism increasingly geared to the production less of things than of the immateriality of information, communication, and affect.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology

Fall 2007: OTHER JAPANS

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, and The International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life.

Co-sponsored by German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literatures