Past Events › Visiting Speaker

Takashima Talks: The Democracy That Society Allows -- Protest Sounds in Japan and the US Perceived attacks on the foundations of democracy in recent years have sparked large demonstrations, often numbering in the hundreds of thousands, in both Japan and the US. This paper will explore the ways in which democracy is sounded differently in street protests of two densely populated cities-Tokyo and New York-as shaped by urban geography, urban acoustics, participatory practices, and perhaps most importantly, policing. Analyzing protests…

Friday, May 6, HSSB Room 4080, 4 - 5:30 PM Join the Transregional East Asia RFG for a talk by Edward Kamens, Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies, Yale University, and Paul I. Terasaki Chair in U.S.-Japan Relations, UCLA. Sponsored by the IHC’s Transregional East Asia Research Focus Group, East Asia Center, and Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies

In a discussion for graduate students, Professor Pickowicz asks the questions, "What can be learned from oral histories that cannot be learned from other sources? What is unique about oral histories?" Pickowicz will show clips of several oral histories he filmed in China in the 1980s and 1990s and talk about both the pleasure and pain associated with the filming of oral histories. Monday, May 9, 12 - 3 PM, HSSB 4041

Women in Chinese Silent CinemaIn his lecture, Prof. Pickowicz will screen compelling clips from Chinese silent-era films of the 1920s and 1930s. He'll emphasize the diverse roles played by women and ask questions about why the women seen on screen, including such iconic figures as Ruan Lingyu, Li Lili, and Wang Renmei, were far more important than men to the success of Chinese silent cinema. Tuesday, May 10, 3:30 - 5:30 PM, SSMS 2135

Koichi Takashima Lecture 2022: Tawada Yōko -- Translation as Politics, Translation as Dream The consistent process of disorienting geography, maps, and directions in Tawada Yōko's fiction flies in the face of problematic distinctions between "areas" and the territorial boundaries they imply, assumptions still often dominant in studies of the "boundary-crossing literature" she is taken to represent. I contend, rather, that Tawada invites us to understand the reading of her texts as itself a "project of translation," one Roland Barthes once…

THE HUNT FOR THE "ENEMY WITHIN" DURING THE BATTLE OF OKINAWA: RETHINKING WARTIME ATROCITIES DURING THE ASIA-PACIFIC WAR This talk will detail the execution of Okinawans as "spies" by the Japanese military during the Battle of Okinawa, which was the last land battle of the Asia-Pacific War, and the one that resulted in the largest number of civilian deaths in the Pacific theater. I will foreground the fear of "spies" throughout the war in general as well as discuss different…