2025-2026 Series

Monday, September 8, 2025 | 8:00-9:30 PM ET

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Exhibitionist Japan: The Spectacle of Modern Development (Cambridge University Press, 2025)

Presenter: Angus Lockyer, Lecturer, Rhode Island School of Design

Discussant: Jordan Sand, Professor of History, Georgetown University

Moderator: Joseph Seeley, Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Angus Lockyer, who will be speaking about his new book Exhibitionist Japan: The Spectacle of Modern Development (Cambridge, 2024). From the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan has been a particularly enthusiastic user of exhibitions. Large-scale international exhibitions, including Osaka 2025, form only the tip of an iceberg comprising over 1,300 industrial, regional, and local exhibitions held in Japan over the past 150 years. Exhibitionist Japan explores how and why these events have been used as catalysts of development and arenas for fostering modern industry, empire, and nation; traces their complicated genesis, realization, and reception; and demonstrates that although they rarely achieve their stated aims, this has not undermined their utility – Japanese expos have provided a model subsequently adopted around the world. The history of this enthusiasm provides a more nuanced understanding of development in modern Japan, and emphasizes the shared experiences of global modernity. Jordan Sand (Georgetown) will serve as interlocutor.

Thursday, October 2, 2025 | 8:00-9:30 PM ET

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The Geography of Injustice: East Asia's Battle between Memory and History (Cornell University Press, 2024)

Presenter: Barak Kushner, Professor of East Asian History, Cambridge University

Discussant: Daqing Yang, Associate Professor of History, George Washington University

Moderator: Emer O'Dwyer, Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies, Oberlin College

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Barak Kushner (Cambridge), who will be speaking about his new book The Geography of Injustice: East Asia's Battle between Memory and History (Cornell University Press, 2024). The Geography of Injustice argues that the war crimes tribunals in East Asia formed and cemented national divides that persist into the present day. In 1946 the Allies convened the Tokyo Trial to prosecute Japanese wartime atrocities. At its conclusion one of the judges voiced dissent, claiming that the justice found at Tokyo was only "the sham employment of a legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge." War crimes tribunals, Kushner shows, allow for the history of the defeated to be heard. In contemporary East Asia a fierce battle between memory and history has consolidated political camps across this debate. The Tokyo Trial courtroom, as well as the thousands of other war crimes tribunals opened in about fifty venues across Asia, were legal stages where prosecution and defense curated facts and evidence to craft their story about World War II. These narratives and counter narratives form the basis of postwar memory concerning Japan's imperial aims across the region. The archival record and the interpretation of court testimony together shape a competing set of histories for public consumption. Daqing Yang (George Washington) will serve as interlocutor.

Tuesday, November 4, 2025 | 8:00-9:30 PM ET

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In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2025)

Presenter: Alicia Volk, Professor of Japanese Art, University of Maryland

Discussant: Franziska Seraphim, Associate Professor of History, Boston College

Moderator: Emer O'Dwyer, Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies, Oberlin College

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Alicia Volk (Maryland), who will be speaking about her new book In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2025). In the Shadow of Empire brings to light a significant body of postwar Japanese art, exploring how it accommodated and resisted the workings of the American empire during the early Cold War. Volk’s groundbreaking account presents the points of view of Japanese artists and their audiences under American occupation and amid the ruins of war. Each chapter reveals how artists embraced new roles for art in the public sphere—at times by enacting radical critiques of established institutions, values, and practices—and situates a range of compelling art objects in their intersecting artistic and political worlds. Centering on the diverse and divisive terrain of Japanese art between 1945 and 1952, In the Shadow of Empire creates a fluid map of relationality that brings multiple Cold War spheres into dialogue, stretching beyond US-occupied Japan to art from China, Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and demonstrates the rich potential of this transnational site of artmaking for rethinking the history of Japanese and global postwar art. Franziska Seraphim (Boston College) will serve as interlocutor.

Wednesday, December 3, 2025 | 7:00-8:30 PM ET

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Mothers Against War: Gender, Motherhood, and Peace Activism in Cold War Japan (University of Hawai'i Press, 2025)

Presenter: Akiko Takenaka, Professor of History, University of Kentucky

Discussant: Chelsea Szendi Schieder, Professor, Faculty of Economics, Aoyama Gakuin University

Moderator: Sara Kang, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Princeton University

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Akiko Takenaka (Kentucky), who will be speaking about her new book Mothers Against War: Gender, Motherhood, and Peace Activism in Cold War Japan (University of Hawai'i Press, 2025). Mothers Against War examines the shifting relationships among motherhood, peace activism, and women’s rights in the decades following Japan’s defeat in 1945. With a focus on the concept of bosei, generally understood to be the “motherly” qualities that are supposedly inherent to women, the book illuminates how popular perceptions of the mother, the child, and the mother-child relationship gradually evolved to create the image that mothers, more than anyone else, protect children from war. This image did not result simply from a mothers’ desire to keep their children safe, nor was it the outcome of the Japanese experience of the Asia-Pacific War in which many mothers became widowed or lost their children. Through the examination of five instances of peace activism that took place between 1945 and 1980, Akiko Takenaka argues that the maternal focus of Japanese women’s peace activism emerged from a convergence of various interests, including the security alliance between Japan and the United States, Japan’s Cold War–era political strategies, and Japanese women’s fight for increased rights. Mothers Against War demonstrates how Japanese women’s attempts to activate the concept of bosei to gain more rights also worked to confine them into domesticity. This is the first scholarly monograph to make this connection between Japan’s matricentric peace activism and the fight for women’s rights. Chelsea Szendi Schieder (Aoyama Gakuin) will serve as interlocutor.

Wednesday, December 10, 2025 | 8:00-9:30 PM ET

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Rethinking Japan's Modernity: Stories and Translations (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2024)

Presenter: M. William Steele, Professor Emeritus, International Christian University

Discussant: Robert Hellyer, Professor of History, Wake Forest University

Moderator: Emer O'Dwyer, Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies, Oberlin College

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with M. William Steele, who will be speaking about her new book Rethinking Japan's Modernity: Stories and Translations (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2024). Rethinking Japan's Modernity takes a new look at the people, places, and events associated with Japan’s engagement with modernity, starting with American Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853. In many cases, this new look derives from visual sources, such as popular broadsheets, satirical cartoons, ukiyo-e and other woodblock prints, postcards, and photographs. The book illustrates the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, perceptions of people who experienced the unfolding of modern Japan. It focuses both on the experiences of people living the events “at that time” and on the reflections of others looking back. Also included are three new translations—two of them by Japan’s pioneer Westernizer, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and another by Mantei Ōga—parodying Fukuzawa’s monumental work advocating Western learning. These and other stories show how Japanese views of modernity evolved over time. Each chapter is prefaced with a short introduction to the topic covered and historiographical approach taken, allowing each to stand alone as well as support the overall goal of the work—to inform and challenge our understanding of the links between Japan’s past, present, and future. Robert Hellyer (Wake Forest) will serve as interlocutor.

Thursday, January 22, 2026 | 8:00-9:30 PM ET

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Renaming Plants and Nations in Japanese Colonial Korea (Routledge, 2025)

Presenter: Jung Lee, Associate Professor, Ewha Women's University

Discussant: Ian Miller, Reischauer Institute Professor of Environmental History, Harvard University

Moderator: Joseph Seeley, Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Jung Lee (Ewha), who will be speaking about her new book Renaming Plants and Nations in Japanese Colonial Korea (Routledge, 2025). This book studies a striking example of intensely negotiated colonial scientific practice: the case of botanical practice in Korea during the Japanese colonization from 1910 to 1945. The shared aim of botanists who encountered one another in colonial Korea to practice “modern Western botany” is successfully revealed through analysis of their fieldwork and subsequent publications. By exploring the variations in what that term should mean and the politically charged nature of the interactions between both imperial and colonial players, Renaming Plants and Nations reveals how botanists of the region created a form of scientific practice that was neither clearly Western nor particularly modern. It shows how the botany that evolved in this context was a product of colonially resourced, globally connected practice, immersed in intertwined traditions, rather than simply a copy of “modern Western botany.” Ian Miller (Harvard) will serve as interlocutor.

Thursday, February 5, 2026 | 7:00-8:30 PM ET

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The Future Is Foreign: Women and Immigrants in Corporate Japan (Cornell University Press, 2025)

Presenter: Hilary Holbrow, Assistant Professor of Japanese Politics and Society, Indiana University

Discussant: Ulrike Schaede, Professor of Japanese Business, University of California San Diego

Moderator: Sara Kang, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Princeton University

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Hilary Holbrow (Indiana), who will be speaking about her new book The Future Is Foreign: Women and Immigrants in Corporate Japan (Cornell University Press, 2025). Japan is at the forefront of global population decline. The Future Is Foreign nvestigates how elite Japanese firms are responding to this unprecedented challenge. Hilary Holbrow argues that labor shortages push Japanese firms to hire more immigrants and women, and to ease excessive demands on all workers. At the same time, not all employees benefit equally. Japanese women's enduring overrepresentation in low-status clerical roles reinforces gender biases that hold all women back. In contrast, the small but growing presence of white-collar Asian immigrant workers weakens the ethnic prejudices of their Japanese colleagues. Despite Japan's reputation for xenophobia, white-collar immigrant men disproportionally reap the dividends of Japan's shrinking population. The Future Is Foreign sheds new light on the processes that perpetuate inequality in Japanese firms, and in organizations worldwide. While managers and policymakers often assume that increasing women and minorities' representation in leadership will erode prejudice, Holbrow reveals that the people we see when we "look down" the organizational hierarchy are more important to the social construction of bias than are the people we see when we "look up." Ulrike Schaede (UCSD) will serve as interlocutor.

Monday, March 2, 2026 | 7:00-8:30 PM ET

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The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Presenter: Lynne K. Miyake, Professor Emerita of Japanese, Pomona College

Discussant: Jan Bardsley, Professor Emerita of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Moderator: Sara Kang, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Princeton University

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Lynne K. Miyake (Pomona), who will be speaking about her new book The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga (Bloomsbury, 2024). This groundbreaking study examines the unlikely merger of two Japanese cultural phenomena, an 11th-century aristocratic text and contemporary manga comics. It explores the ways in which the manga versions of The Tale of Genji use gender, sexuality, and desire to challenge perceptions of reading and readership, morality and ethics, and what is translatable from one culture to another. Lynne K. Miyake shows that, through their girls, ladies, boy love, boys, and young men, and informational comics remediations of the tale, the manga Genjis visually, narratively, and affectively rework male and female gazes; Miyake reveals how they gently inject humor, eroticize, gender flip, queer, and simultaneously re-inscribe and challenge heteronormative gender norms. The first full-length study of Genji manga, this book analyses these adaptations within manga studies and the historical and cultural moments that fashioned and sustained them. It also interrogates the circumscribed, in-group aristocratic society and the consumer and production practices of Heian society that come full circle in the manga versions. The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga utilizes western queer, feminist, sexuality and gender theory and Japanese cultural practices to illuminate the ways in which the Genji tale redeploys itself. Yet it also provides much needed context and explanation regarding the charges of appropriation of prepubescent (fe)male and gay bodies and the utilization of (sexual) violence mounted against Genji manga - and manga and anime in general - once they went global. Jan Bardsley (UNC) will serve as interlocutor.