Yale Postdoctoral Trainees

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.