We are pleased to announce that Carl Gabrielson has successfully defended his dissertation, “Ambassadors, Apples, and Adversaries: American Military Narratives of the U.S. Japan Alliance,” an ethnographic exploration of the ways that U.S. military personnel in Japan make sense of Japanese culture and their place in it, and the intended and unintended consequences of encountering a foreign culture within a militarized context. Please join us in congratulating Carl on earning his PhD!
PhD Candidate Kaitlyn Ugoretz has published a chapter on her research into global Shinto communities in a new volume, Digital Humanities and Religions in Asia, edited by L.W.C. van Lit and James Harry Morris (De Gruyter 2023). The volume explores the limitations and potential opportunities of applying a digital humanities approach to pre-modern Asian religions. Ugoretz’s chapter, “Consuming Shinto, Feeding the Algorithm,” analyzes the impact of social media software on digital habitus and global religious aesthetic formations through a case study of posting practices relating to domestic altars in digital Shinto communities on Facebook.
Congrats, Kaitlyn!
On January 25-26, 2024, Prof. Sabine Frühstück will deliver the keynote address at the conference: “In Service of Security: The Gendered Politics and Everyday Experiences of Military Labor Across Asia,” at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.
The Japanese translation of Sabine Frühstück’s book, Playing War (University of California Press, 2017) is now out from Jinbun Shōbo, Kyoto, 2023. 『「戦争ごっこ」の近現代史—児童文化と軍事思想』
Strange Tales from Edo paints a sweeping picture of Japan’s engagement with Chinese fiction in the early modern period (1600–1868). Large-scale analyses of the full historical and bibliographical record—the first of their kind—document in detail the wholesale importation of Chinese fiction, the market for imported books and domestic reprint editions, and the critical role of manuscript practices—the ascendance of print culture notwithstanding—in the circulation of Chinese texts among Japanese readers and writers.
Bringing this big picture to life, Fleming also traces the journey of a text rarely mentioned in studies of early modern Japanese literature: Pu Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from Liaozhai Studio). An immediate favorite of readers on the continent, Liaozhai was long thought to have been virtually unknown in Japan until the modern period. Copies were imported in vanishingly small numbers, and the collection was never reprinted domestically. Yet beneath this surface of apparent neglect lies a rich hidden history of engagement and rewriting—hand-copying, annotation, criticism, translation, and adaptation—that opens up new perspectives on both the Chinese strange tale and its Japanese counterparts.
