Seminar Abstracts from 2006-07

Sept. 9, 2006—SUNY Buffalo

"Historicizing Onnagata: Grappling with 2-ism in 3 Stages in 4 Centuries"
Maki Isaka Morinaga, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

This paper will study the discourse of "onnagata" (male actors who perform the roles of women in the kabuki theater) in term of how their gender performance has been conceptualized. The understandings and expectations of their gender performance were drastically differentiated between the time when the term "futanarihira" (androgynous stunner) was used to compliment "onnagata" on their beauty and the time when another term, "chi-no-michi ga okoru" (suffering from gynecological disorders), was the epithet for skillful onnagata. Both concepts and their respective presuppositions are also significantly foreign to those of a more recent idiom: "onna yori mo onna-rashii" (even womanlier than women. This paper surveys the trajectory, using these key terms as our guideposts, and proposes a case study in which a concept of femininity and an economy of gender construction are configured in a localized context.

"Cut Flowers: Buddhism and Kokoro no Kyoiku in Contemporary Japan"
Stephen G. Covell, Western Michigan University

Over the past two decades, but especially since the 1995 AUM Shinrikyo many in Japan have called into question the values of contemporary Japanese. In the education system this has led to the perceived need for enhanced morals education—a situation brought about by the sense that the school system no longer shapes the moral character of the youth. The perceived moral decline, has led to increasing calls for "kokoro no kyoiku," something that can be roughly translated as education of the heart and mind. These calls, in turn, have been answered by leaders in Buddhist education with claims to a natural calling for "kokoro no kyoiku" and increasing interest among sectarian and government officials for "shukyo joso kyoiku," or education that cultivates religious sentiment. This paper examines these stances and the teachings of Buddhist educators in detail and explores specific examples of how Buddhist educators are participating in the broad national dialogue regarding morals and education by implementing "kokoro no kyoiku" and "shukyo joso kyoiku" in their schools.

Oct. 21, 2006—University of Wisconsin

"Making Democracy Safe: Race, Politics and Rhetorical Authority in the 1913 Japan-US Immigration Crisis"
Bob Kane (rkane@niagara.edu), Niagara University

The 1913 immigration crisis involving Japan and the United States is frequently depicted as another landmark in increasing tensions between two culturally incompatible national units that culminated in the Pacific War. The existence of harsh words on both sides of the Pacific, however, should not obscure the high degree of cooperation between governments and private citizens in defusing this crisis and bilateral friction in the 1910s in general. To be sure, California exclusionists exploited Orientalist binaries and the politics of fear to serve their own ends, and so did the political opposition in Japan in challenging the government's competence in protecting the Meiji legacy. But even in the face of fierce criticism of their policies from within, officials in the Wilson administration and Yamamoto cabinet were committed to mending fences, as were such influential individuals as Theodore Roosevelt and Kaneko Kentaro, who consulted one another on the matter, and Soyeda Juichi, who visited Washington to explain Japan's case directly to the president. This does not mean, though, that no fundamental differences hampered Japan-U.S. relations. There were certain barriers in the minds of key American officials that simply could not then be overcome, such as racial segregation for Woodrow Wilson. Although the president did not subscribe to the extreme views of Japan as a menace espoused by the California exclusionists, he invoked state rights to ensure that the federal government was not party to 'another race problem'in the United States. The 1913 immigration crisis drove home to Japanese leaders, meanwhile, the need to increase their efforts to "enlighten" Americans about the justness of Japan's official position, but these campaigns often better underscored Japanese differences than compatibilities with the U.S. These factors make the 1913 crisis a precursor to the racial equality clause dispute in 1919 when the same central players—Wilson, Makino Nobuaki and Chinda Sutemi—met in Paris after World War I to try to mend the world, and Japanese efforts at equality were rebuffed by Wilsonian "state rights"once more, this time on an international level.

"Why the Emperor Didn't Eat his Breakfast and Other Food Fantasies in Early Modern Japan"
Eric C. Rath, (erath@ku.edu), University of Kansas

Every morning, following a custom that began before the mid-sixteenth century and lasted to 1868, the emperor sat down to a breakfast he never ate. This breakfast was prepared especially for him by a court purveyor, Kawabata Dôki, which was the oldest confectioner in Kyoto. The breakfast, called oasa in the language of the court was enclosed in three special boxes and hand-carried through a dedicated gateway into the palace by the head of the Kawabata Dôki household himself. Kawabata Dôki's daily ministrations were so famous that they became a tourist attraction in the Edo period and the story about them was later included in World War II textbooks as an example of popular loyalty to the emperor. Despite this, the emperor never touched his food.

The emperor's uneaten breakfast might be considered an odd or perhaps charming episode in Japanese history, but it actually speaks to the importance of conspicuous non-consumption in elite foodways in early modern Japan (1600-1868). This presentation introduces this and other instances of non-eating in Japanese foodways to argue that non-consumption and inedible dishes were defining features of the earliest Japanese cuisine that developed during this time.

Cuisine is not an easily defined category to apprehend or to apply to Japan even as a translation of the Japanese word ryôri. This paper begins with a discussion of various definitions of cuisine and their applicability to the context of early modern Japan. The author settles on the definition of cuisine formulated by the sociologist Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, expressed in her study of early modern French cuisine in which she offers that cuisine is a cultural code guiding the production and consumption of food that turns the "act of nourishment into an object fit for intellectual consumption and aesthetic appreciation."

This paper contends that the culinary highpoints in early modern Japan were inedible foods that were not meant to be eaten. It introduces several examples of inedible dishes and of customs of non-consumption to understand how widespread these phenomena were in elite foodways and how these demarcated a cuisine. It then suggests a periodization of the development of this cuisine from rituals of non-eating patterned after older customs of religious offerings, to the drinking traditions of medieval samurai, to early modern literary depictions of banquets which could not be eaten or even prepared but were meant to be consumed by the mind's eye. These examples of non-eating confirm the pivotal role of the imagination in transforming food into fantasy, the recipe for creating a cuisine in early modern Japan. The paper concludes with a few thoughts on the legacy of these culinary fantasies on modern Japanese cuisine.

Nov. 11, 2006—Wittenberg University

"Tokugawa Defense Redux: Organizational Failure in the Phaeton Incident of 1808"
Noell Wilson (nrwilson@olemiss.edu), Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese History, University of Mississippi

In 1808 a British frigate, the "Phaeton," sailed into Nagasaki harbor disguised as a Dutch trading vessel. This duplicitous incursion into Tokugawa waters, and the delayed response of Fukuoka and Saga domain troops, sparked a defensive crisis resulting in the suicide of the Nagasaki Magistrate, resident deputy of the Tokugawa in the port city, and punishment of Saga domain. The death of Matsudaira Yasuhira marked the single case during the entire span of Tokugawa rule in which a Nagasaki Magistrate took his life for defense related matters. During the "Phaeton" incident, no shots were fired during the two days the ship was in port; rather local troops could not respond because so few soldiers were stationed at the coastal fortifications. Conventional critiques of Tokugawa military failure focus on technological backwardness, but analysis of this incident suggests that ambiguous military organization, and lack of a unified command, were equally critical impediments to effective defense in early nineteenth century Japan.

"The Bullets of a Defeated Nation: The Shibuya Incident of 1946"
Adam Cathcart(adamcathcart@yahoo.com), East Asian History, Hiram College

This paper chronicles the controversy surrounding the Shibuya Incident of 1946, a riot that killed six Taiwanese merchants and one Japanese policeman in a Tokyo black market. The incident and ensuing court cases stirred a strong response from the Chinese government and press, highlighted the ambiguous national identity of Taiwanese in Japan, and laid bare the inability of the Americans to justify their occupation regime to Japan's East Asian neighbors. Within Japan, the incident exposed the related problems of immigration, police reform, and latent racism. Through an examination of the incident, the court case that followed, and the battle for public opinion in China and Japan, the essay reveals new international aspects of the American occupation of Japan.

Feb. 10, 2007—University of Memphis (Yuki Matsuda)

"Allegories of an Expatriate: Films of Sai Yoichi"
Noboru Tomonari (ntomonar@carleton.edu), Carleton College

Sai Yoichi (1949- ) is the most prolific of the "zainichi" (long-term Korean residents in Japan) filmmakers. He has been making films continuously from his debut in 1983 up to the present. Sai started his career making genre action films. Since the early 1990s, however, he has established himself, with films such as "All under the Moon" (Tsuki wa dotchi ni deteiru) and "Blood and Bones" (Chi to hone), as a filmmaker who depicts zainichi and the zainichi community. This paper situates Sai as a film auteur and discusses some of the themes in his films, such as absent fathers, journeying and triangle relationships. These themes appear frequently in his films and can be understood as allegories of being an expatriate Korean in Japan. As such, Sai's films are part of a diasporic filmmaking that is carried out around the world today. His constructions of Koreans in Japan are very much connected to the context of Japan in the 1980s and 1990s, which was marked by shifts in zainichi activism. Sai's filmmaking emerged in this context, and his films are very much connected to the changing zainichi community in Japan.

"Ume Kenjiro, Colonial Jurisprudence, and the Construction of Customary Law in Korea"
Marie Kim (mskim@stcloudstate.edu), St. Cloud State

Ume Kenjiro (1860-1910) came to Korea in 1906 to become legal advisor to the Korean government under Japanese protectorate rule. Ume's legislative activities in Korea during the next four years, in particular his campaign to collect Korea's old laws and popular usages in preparation for compiling a Korean civil code, have generally been seen as an effort to promote assimilation of Korean law and customs to those of Japan. Yet this view has posed difficulty for historians in reconciling Ume's enlightened natural law beliefs, in favor of equal rights of colonized subjects, with his supposed opposition to local traditions and customs. Examination of Ume's Korean enterprise suggests that he aimed at creating a civil law that blended Korean legal tradition with the demands of modern civil law. Under the post-annexation colonial legal regime, in which Korean customary norms were allowed to govern most private relations among Koreans, Japanese judges largely followed Ume's doctrine of custom and theory of rational and functional jurisprudence based on natural law. The resulting judicial innovations of customary law represented legal assimilation that began before the imperial policy-motivated assimilation course was imposed on colonial Korea.

April 14, 2007—Oberlin College (Ann Sherif)

"The Role of Intelligence and Togo: Reexamining Japan's Decision for War in November 1941"
Tosh Minohara (drminohara@hotmail.com), Kobe University

In light of the recently uncovered documents on prewar Japanese SIGINT from the National Archives II in College Park (Maryland), the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, the Japanese Diplomatic Records Office (DRO) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo, and the British National Archives (formerly, PRO) in Kew Gardens, the purpose of this presentation will be two-fold: first, to briefly overview the completely obscure history of the Japanese Black Chamber, and second, to examine/evaluate the role that intelligence played in the formulation of Japanese policy decisions, particularly at the critical juncture of November 1941. Specifically, a rational explanation for the motive behind the hitherto unexplained "Togo hensetsu" will be provided which will support the contingency theory in the road to Pearl Harbor.

"Individuality in an Age of Reproduction: Prints, Novels, and the Actor's Image in Nineteenth-Century Japan"
Jonathan Zwicker (jzwicker@umich.edu), University of Michigan

In 1817, Utagawa Toyokuni produced a small book titled "Yakusha nigao hayakeiko," an introduction to the techniques of drawing actor likenesses. And "Hayakeiko" was just one of several somewhat experimental, and variously successful, ventures in which Toyokuni collaborated with the publisher Tsuruya Kizaemon in the second decade of the nineteenth century—the moment when he was at the height of his fame and commercial success. As an idea, the book seems counter-intuitive for it makes commercially available and reproducible—it puts into the marketplace—the very individuality and individualistic techniques on which Toyokuni's fame and livelihood rested. But Hayakeiko raises another interesting paradox: the tension between the premise, on the one hand, that each actor's face is distinct and thus the production of its likeness rests on the approximation of certain individual features—Matsumoto Koshiro's large nose, for instance, or Iwai Hanshiro's curling lower lip—and, on the other hand, that individuality was itself reproducible both by hand-given knowledge of proper technique, but also, and of course more profoundly, through the mass mechanical reproduction of the actor's image in prints, fiction, theater guides, and on various printed ephemera from fans to kites.

Using a variety of printed material from the first quarter of the nineteenth century, this paper will examine the status of the individual visage at a moment of an emerging tension in the early decades of that century between an epistemology of reproducibility and discourses on individuality. This paper aims to situate the mass reproduction of the actor's image in prints and novels within a framework bounded on one end by technologies of reproduction and on the other by an increasing anxiety over the status of the unique and the authentic.