Graduate And Professional

From Buddhist Temple to Shinto Shrine: A History of Dazaifu Anrakuji/Tenmangū

In 1868, one of the first acts of the new Meiji government was to declare that Shinto and Buddhist institutions must be separated. For most of Japanese history, the nation’s two major religious traditions had been tightly integrated and so this change has been characterized as a “cultural revolution.” My talk will focus on one component of traditional Japanese religion, the Tenjin cult, and how it was practiced at one of its principle centers located in Dazaifu, Kyushu.

Repurposing Wood for Sacred Images in Kamakura-Period Sculpture

Sculptors during the Kamakura period at times looked to unconventional sources for their images in other projects. One of the most noteworthy instances of this practice occurred in 1256 when the sculptor Kaijō carved statues of Aizen Myōō and Jizō from wood from the pillars of the Great Buddha Hall at Tōdaiji that had burned in 1180. When preparing to carve the statues Kaijō and his patron, the monk Jakuchō, consecrated the wood, and then Kaijō and his assistants maintained the Eight Pure Precepts while sculpting the images.

Online Rakugo Workshop

Rakugo is an art of traditional comic storytelling from Japan for over 400 years. It is performed by one person who remains seated on a stage, with a fan and a tenugui (washcloth), for the entire performance as he tells funny stories. The performer changes his voice or subtle movement to play different characters in each story. Rakugo has been popular and enjoyed by people of all ages.

A Journey to freedom

Recounts of his fight to survive in North Korea, his path to China and America. His current work on North Korea at the Bush Institute.
Joseph Kim is an Associate and Expert-in-Residence on the Human Freedom Initiative at the George W. Bush Institute. He was born and raised in North Korea. At the age of 12, his father died of starvation, and he was separated from his mother and sister.

Two Faces of Japan’s Wartime Empire: Khin Myo Chit and Asha Sahay

In 1945, two women with complicated imperial loyalties faced down the end of empire on the battlefields of Burma. Khin Myo Chit (1915-1999), a Burmese feminist writer and anti-colonial activist, was living in an army barrack in Rangoon, working as an army translator during the day and hosting meetings of anti-Japanese insurgents at night. Asha Sahay (b. 1927), the daughter of Indian independence activists who lived in Japan, was dodging Allied bombers as her regiment, the women’s division of the Indian National Army, retreated through the jungle.

Women Writers and the Discourse on the Postwar Japan

Discourse on the Postwar (sengoron) in Japan has predominantly consisted of debates among male commentators concerning responsibility for the war. Absent from these debates are questions of how women experienced the postwar era, and of how women have attempted to overcome their experiences of the war and trauma. This absence can be attributed in part to the lack of cultural perspectives—as opposed to those that are historical, political, and sociological—in Postwar Discourse.

Green With Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups

Today, Americans are some of the world’s biggest consumers of black teas; in Japan, green tea, especially sencha, is preferred. These national partialities, Robert Hellyer reveals, are deeply entwined. Tracing the trans-Pacific tea trade from the eighteenth century onward, Green with Milk and Sugar shows how interconnections between Japan and the United States have influenced the daily habits of people in both countries.

A Slumlord’s View of Tokyo at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

In 1903, Ōsaki Tatsugorō, builder and manager of some 1,100 slum houses in Tokyo, dictated his autobiography. This talk draws on the autobiography to examine the social context and the economic calculus underlying the construction of the city’s sprawling working-class periphery. Ōsaki’s story reveals a transitional moment in the city’s history, before a land-centered real estate market governed by contracts and planning regulations redefined the economics of housing.

A Kite Flies Against the Wind: Internationalism, identity, and ideology in the shaping of postwar China, and the legacy for today

The postwar period saw China debate many issues that still have immense importance for understanding the China of today. Those years contain the period of the Chinese civil war of 1946-50, but also much more than that. It was also the time when China moved into a new phase of internationalization, and became embroiled in some of the biggest global debates about the links between economic and social development. It was also a time when ideological concerns were to the forefront.

How Institutions Rebound: Untangling Difficult Reforms in China’s State-Owned Enterprises

Why are perennially entrenched institutions so hard to reform? This talk proposes a novel theory of institutional rebound for difficult reforms. It untangles reforms in China’s state-owned enterprises, which aimed to break the “iron institutions” in leadership, employment and wages and introduce competition. I argue that the reforms triggered the emergence of informal institutions, which eroded the new rules and allowed previous institutions to bounce back.

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