Day Five - 062406 - Me Being a Good Grad Student

So today I decided to attend the Asian Studies Conference of Japan (http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/~ascj/) over at the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo. Starting from Yokohama at about 8:45 am it took about two hours to reach Musashi-Sakai-eki and eventually the ICU. I hadn't quite expected that this place would be so far away!

I started out by meeting some nice people who came from Sri Lanka, one of which is from Canada, and is presenting on Sunday. The campus was empty as could probably be expected on a weekend during the summer. In the picture above you can barely see two lovebirds lounging under a tree.

The first panel that I attended was a panel on Shibusawa Keizō (1896-1963), the former president of the Bank of Japan, post-war Finance Minister, and successor to Shibusawa Eiichi, considered the "founder of Japanese capitalism." According to this panel, many people consider Shibusawa Keizō to merely have been a bankroller of minzokugaku (Japanese folklore), though the panelists argued that Shibusawa Keizō was much more complex than this, and made important contributions to minzokugaku that seem to necessitate a reappraisal of his position. Additionally, such an appraisal is important because Shibusawa Keizō is little known outside of Japan compared to Yanagita Kunio, though his contributions within Japan are somewhat better known. One of the presenters, Kusumoto Wakako, suggested that Yanagita Kunio is more well known because 1) He was concerned with the idea of the internal Japanese mind and perception of self, 2) He suggested that the Japanese were a monolithic community based upon their rice-growing agricultural history, and 3) He supported the idea that only the Japanese can understand the Japanese. Shibusawa by contrast 1) Kept a very scientific attitude, collecting ethnography, and organizing them taxonomically, 2) Looked at maritime culture and material culture in contrast to Yanagita's agricultural bias, 3) Was more interested in comparative studies, and 4) He was more interested in collecting materials for scholars than in declaring his own position. According to another of the presenters, Aso Noriko, the collection of goods and materials that he collected are a rich treasure trove of goods that have not been properly analyzed and mined by scholars as they should, particularly I terms of their usage and what they tell us and potentially tell us about the Japanese.

During lunchtime I bumped into one of my fellow classmates at the IUC (not the ICU), Erin Kelley, from the University of Pennsylvania, and also Denis Gainty, who I had also met a few months previously while presenting at a panel at UCLA. After a lively and funny discussion, we went back to the panels and we also bumped into Jordan Smith, who had helped to organize the previously mentioned UCLA panel.

By the way, I should mention that they had Goya Chanpuru in the cafeteria at ICU. Here is a picture to the right. Umai and healthy too!

After lunch I had the opportunity to hear talks by a number of students from ICU who all dealt with "Japaneseness." The first presentation was by Yoshiaki Shiro, who discussed Miyasaki Hayao's animation works (such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away) as suggestive of Miyazazi's perspective on "Japaneseness" as a contested one that referenced to a universal view that borrowed from many different cultures, but still captures a sense of Japaneseness. Here is a picture of his presentation to the left. Nice graphics in his powerpoint I might add.

The second talk was by Kishi Yu, who spoke about Tange Kenzō, the famous architect who designed such buildings as the Hiroshima Peace Center, Osaka World Expo, Yokyo City Hall, and the Yoyogi Gymnasium. He suggested that his architectural works sought to overcome the dichotomy between the Yayoi style architecture (cultural formalism of upper classes) and Jōmon style architecture (dynamism of lower classes) which were seen as in dynamic conflict. I didn't get a chance to ask him, but I was curious of what he might have to say about the Hiroshima Peace Center in the context of Yoneyama Lisa's work which also discussed certain controversial aspects of the Hiroshima memorial.

The third talk was by Morita Miyuki, and was the most relevant to my work since it dealt with Okinawa in the immediate post-war period. In her talk, she looked at school textbook usage in the immediate post-war period, and pointed out the manner in which locally produced textbooks were used in the immediate post-war period, but that starting from 1948, school textbooks were imported from Japan. These textbooks were very Japan-centred in their perspective and references and thus reinforced the pre-war view of the Ryukyus as a part of Japan. Thus, while the U.S. administration continued to control the Ryukyus until 1972, the education sector in the Ryukyus was heavily influenced by the Japanese educational perspective. This was very interesting to me in that it helps to explain why the Okinawa Teacher's Association was such a large force in the early reversion movement, and suggests that the relationship between the education sectors in Japan and the Ryukyus was exceptionally high even from the early post-war years.

The fourth talk was by Kawazoe Yuji, who talked about Japanese policies in colonial Taiwan. In his talk he argues that Taiwanese intellectuals incorporated those aspects of Japanese colonial practices that were seen as universal, but argues that most colonial practices were disregarded as not being universal enough. Thus when Lin Xian-Tang submitted his famous appeal to the colonial authorities to implement local assemblies he did so by taking pride in his own culture and refused to incorporate the lower culture of Japan. With the civil unrest following the takeover of Taiwan by the nationalist party some politicians such as Lee Teng-hui have re-interpreted Japaneseness as a contrast to the corruption and influences of money that grew in the post-war Taiwan.

After the discussions I was able to talk to Morita Miyuki a bit and she mentioned that there is an Okinawa Kenkyukai over at Waseda that occasionally meets. I hope that I will be able to meet with them and participate to some degree. By the end of the talks I was a bit tired, so I ended up hanging out with Jordan Smith for a while, and we had a good talk. That's him to the left.

Finally I heard a talk by Mary Elizabeth Berry, from the University of California, Berkeley who talked about work and consumption in the seventeenth-century. She argued that while there was a considerable amount of pre-industrial activity during this period, the question remains why it was that people decided to engage in the kinds of high-risk investments that they did during this period of time. On the one hand, she argues that there were incentives in the form of an economic system that allowed peasants to keep the excess raised by their innovations. Yet this doesn't explain it alone. She argues that many families re-invested their surplus profits in the development of those arts and cultural practices basic to any respectable family of the time. In this respect, the development of monetary surpluses helped families to build their reputations and families.

By the end of the day I was so bloody tired, I got home and just collapsed. Damn tired and brain fried.