Category: Japanese Program

Takashima Talks in Japanese Cultural Studies: "Japanese Sex Workers, Rights, and the Gendered Economy"

Takashima Talks: Japanese Sex Workers, Rights, and the Gendered Economy

Posted on | by EALCS Admin

Contemporary Japan is home to one of the world’s largest and most diversified markets for sex.  Widely understood to be socially necessary, the sex industry operates and recruits openly, staffed by a diverse group of women who are attracted by its high pay and the promise of autonomy — but whose work remains stigmatized and dangerous.  This talk reframes the labor of adult Japanese women working in Tokyo’s legal sex industry as female care work.  Sex as care, I argue, reflects the simultaneous importance and marginality of female sex workers in Japan as well as the political-economic roles and possibilities that they imagine for themselves.

Gabriele Koch is a sociocultural anthropologist who studies care and its contestations in contemporary Japan.  She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College and author of Healing Labor:  Sex Work in the Gendered Economy (Stanford University Press, 2020).  Her work has also appeared in American Ethnologist and Critical Asian Studies, and is forthcoming in the Journal of Legal Anthropology.  Her current research focuses on the recent re-imagination of Japanese forests as agents of human well-being.

Wednesday, December 8, 2021

5:30 PM – 7:00 PM

McCune Conference Room & Live Streamed

"Rosewood: Endangered species conservation and the rise of global China"

Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China

Posted on | by EALCS Admin

Rosewood is the world’s most trafficked endangered species by value, accounting for larger outlays than ivory, rhino horn, and big cats put together. Nearly all rosewood logs are sent to China, fueling a $26 billion market for classically styled furniture. Vast expeditions across Asia and Africa search for the majestic timber, and legions of Chinese ships sail for Madagascar, where rosewood is purchased straight from the forest. The international response has been to interdict the trade, but this misunderstands both the intent and effect of China’s appetite for rosewood, causing social and ecological damage in the process. Drawing on fieldwork in China and Madagascar, Annah Zhu upends the pieties of Western-led conservation, offering a glimpse of what environmentalism and biodiversity protection might look like in a world no longer ruled by the West.

Annah Zhu is an Assistant Professor of environmental globalization at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. She received her PhD in society and environment from the University of California, Berkeley and her Masters in environmental management from Duke University. She is a veteran of the United Nations’ Environment Program in Geneva, and a former Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar. Her work has been published in Science, Geoforum, Political Geography, Environment International, and American Ethnologist.

Thursday, December 2nd, 2021
3:30 PM — 5:00 PM
University of California, Santa Barbara
Humanities & Social Change Center
Robertson Gymnasium 1000A
Cosponsors: Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life; Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies; Environmental Studies Program
"Sudden Exile, Sudden Wealth: Fukushima's Nuclear Aristocracy in Exile" Takashima Talks in Japanese Cultural Studies

Guest Talk with Tom Gill: Sudden Exile, Sudden Wealth: Fukushima’s Nuclear Aristocracy in Exile

Posted on | by EALCS Admin

Radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011 broke up local communities by forcing their inhabitants into exile in locations scattered though the prefecture.  In subsequent years, government compensation policy created further divisions within these ruptured communities, by providing wildly varying amounts of compensation according to the classification of danger in each district.  The most handsomely compensated were those in the “hard-to-return-zones” where many households received the equivalent of US $1 million dollars or more.  They have been cursed with the loss of their homeland and the lingering fear of radiation health risks, blessed with sudden wealth, then cursed again with “envy discrimination” by those less well compensated.

TOM GILL is a British social anthropologist and professor in the Faculty of International Studies at Meiji Gakuin University, Yokohama, Japan.  He is author of two books about Japanese casual laborers, Men of Uncertainty (2011) and Yokohama Street Life (2015).  Since April 2011 he has been following the fortunes of the inhabitants of Nagadoro, a hamlet which to this days remains closed for habitation due to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

WEDNESDAY, November 17, 5:30 – 7 PM at SS&MS 2135.  Live event.

Collage of various pictures during travel

Winni Ni Awarded Takashima Graduate Student Grant

Posted on | by Thomas Mazanec

Every year, the Koichi Takashima Graduate Student Grant is given to one of the most promising graduate students in Japanese Cultural Studies. This year, Winni Ni impressed the selection committee with her pursuit of an exceptionally innovative and theoretically sophisticated dissertation titled, “Forms of Relating –The Representation of Intersubjectivity in Contemporary Border-crossing Literature (ekkyō bungaku) in Japan.” Border-crossing literature by contemporary authors who are non-native Japanese speakers, she writes, is commonly known for its polyphonic texts. Scholars have argued that authors create polyphonic texts to mirror and express the multi-lingual identities that resist being pinned down to any given category. This dissertation proposes to radically rethink border-crossing literature by focusing on the representation of relationships between the self and others within a community. Ni examines the narrative’s representations of ways of relating in various border-crossing contexts, exploring how the characters’ self-perceptions are co-constructed with other subjects in the present and in the past. She asks how border-crossing literature represents that process of co-construction using specific rhetorical forms and linguistic expressions, and how it creates a body of knowledge of intersubjective encounters across social, cultural, and linguistic boundaries.

Winni Ni headshot
Winni Ni. Photo Credit to SJP Photography

Through close readings of the border-crossing fictions by Yang Yi (b. 1964), On Yūjū (b. 1980), and Sagisawa Megumu (1968–2004), Ni aims to elucidate the literary rendering of self-emergence through constant and dynamic exchanges with others. She argues that border-crossing literature provides an alternative cultural notion of happiness—one that is grounded in mutual recognition, psychological belonging, and trust. Border-crossing literature achieves this by representing moments of mutual recognition as transformative, enlivening, and deeply pleasurable: they are what the narratives and the characters return to again and again, through highly stylized plots and affectively engaging expressions. Combining literary analysis with psychological and social theories of self-formation, Ni intends to open up new perspectives on Japanese border-crossing literature and to encourage others to use these polyphonic narratives to imagine how individuals could live with their explicit differences—better and together.

A close-up photo of Marie Kondo with eyes closed, head slightly bowed, and palms clasped together

Kaitlyn Ugoretz’s Op-Ed on Marie Kondo Featured in Washington Post

Posted on | by Thomas Mazanec
A close-up photo of Marie Kondo with eyes closed, head slightly bowed, and palms clasped together
Our very own Kaitlyn Ugoretz‘s op-ed on Marie Kondo has been featured in the Washington Post. Her piece is an insightful analysis into tidiness guru Marie Kondo’s spiritual eclecticism, and what it can tell us about Japanese religion more generally.
Congratulations, Kaitlyn!

Japanese Language Placement Test for Fall’21

Posted on | by Yoko Yamauchi

 

The application period for the placement test Fall’21 has closed. Please check back in November 2021 for the dates of the next Japanese Placement Test in Winter 2022.

If you have any questions, please contact Yoko Yamauchi (yokoy@eastasian.ucsb.edu)

〈How to prepare for the Placement Test〉
Review the materials (textbooks) of the course(s) you have taken before. We recommend to review verb and adjective conjugations as well as vocabulary and kanji. Please refer to the course description (Japanese Language Course Description) for more information about the each level of our Japanese courses. If you have a certain course you wish to start, look at the description of the course prior to the placement test. A course description indicates what you are expected to be able to do to take the course you wish to take.