2024-2025 Series

Tuesday, August 20, 2024 | 7:00-8:30 PM ET | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

Democratizing Luxury: Name Brands, Advertising, and Consumption in Modern Japan (University of Hawai'i Press, 2024)

Author: Annika Culver, Professor of East Asian History, Florida State University

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

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Annika Culver (Florida State University). Professor Culver will be speaking about her new book, Democratizing Luxury: Name Brands, Advertising, and Consumption in Modern Japan (University of Hawai'i Press, 2024) Democratizing Luxury explores the interplay between advertising and consumption in modern Japan by investigating how Japanese companies at key historical moments assigned value, or “luxury,” to mass-produced products as an important business model. Japanese name-brand luxury evolved alongside a consumer society emerging in the late nineteenth century, with iconic companies whose names became associated with quality and style. At the same time, Western ideas of modernity merged with earlier artisanal ideals to create Japanese connotations of luxury for readily accessible products. Businesses manufactured items at all price points to increase consumer attainability, while starkly curtailing production for limited editions to augment desirability. This book offers case studies that examine affordable luxury consumer items often advertised to women, including drinks, beauty products, fashion, and timepieces. As the first comprehensive history of iconic Japanese name brands and their unique connotations of luxury and accessibility in modern Japan and elsewhere, Democratizing Luxury explores company histories and reveals strategies that led customers to consume these alluring commodities. Jan Bardsley (UNC Chapel Hill) will serve as interlocutor.

Friday, September 6, 2024 | 8:00-9:30 PM EDT
Saturday, September 7 | 9:00-10:30 JST | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

From Japanese Empire to American Hegemony: Koreans and Okinawans in the Resettlement of Northeast Asia (University of Hawai'i Press, 2023)

Author: Matthew Augustine, Associate Professor of History, Kyushu University

Discussant: Deokhyo Choi, Assistant Professor of History, University of Maryland

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Matthew Augustine (Kyushu University). Professor Augustine will be speaking about his new book, From Japanese Empire to American Hegemony: Koreans and Okinawans in the Resettlement of Northeast Asia (University of Hawai'i Press, 2023). From Japanese Empire to American Hegemony is the first comprehensive study of the dynamic and often contentious relationship between migrations and border controls in US-occupied Japan, Korea, and the Ryukyus, examining the American interlude in Northeast Asia as a closely integrated, regional history. The extent of cooperation and coordination among American occupiers, as well as their competing jurisdictions and interests, determined the mixed outcome of using repatriation and deportation as expedient tools for dismantling the Japanese empire. The heightening Cold War and deepening collaboration between the occupiers and local authorities coproduced stringent migration laws, generating new problems of how to distinguish South Koreans from North Koreans and “Ryukyuans” from Japanese. In occupied Japan, fears of communist infiltration and subversion merged with deep-seated discrimination, transforming erstwhile colonial subjects into “aliens” and “illegal aliens.” This transregional history explains the process by which Northeast Asia and its respective populations were remade between the fall of the Japanese empire and the rise of American hegemony. Deokhyo Choi (University of Maryland) will serve as interlocutor.

Tuesday, October 15, 2024 | 6:00-7:30 PM ET | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria (Cornell University Press, 2024)

Author: Joseph Seeley, Assistant Professor of History, University of Virginia

Discussant: Andre Schmid, Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Joseph Seeley (University of Virginia). Professor Seeley will be speaking about his new book, Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria (Cornell University Press, 2024). Border of Water and Ice explores the significance of the Yalu River as a strategic border between Korea and Manchuria (Northeast China) during a period of Japanese imperial expansion into the region. The Yalu's seasonal patterns of freezing, thawing, and flooding shaped colonial efforts to control who and what could cross the border. Professor Seeley shows how the unpredictable movements of water, ice, timber-cutters, anti-Japanese guerrillas, smugglers, and other borderland actors spilled outside the bounds set by Japanese colonizers, even as imperial border-making reinforced Japan's wider political and economic power. Emphasizing the tenuous, environmentally contingent nature of imperial border governance, Border of Water and Ice argues for the importance of understanding history across the different seasons. Andre Schmid (University of Toronto) will serve as interlocutor.

Monday, November 4, 2024 | 7:00-8:30 PM ET | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire: Fragmenting History (Routledge, 2023)

Author: Nobuko Yamasaki, Associate Professor of Japanese, Lehigh University

Discussant: Michiko Suzuki, Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature, UC Davis

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with  Nobuko Yamasaki (Lehigh University). Professor Yamasaki will be speaking about her new book Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire: Fragmenting History (Routledge, 2023)  Analyzing materials from literature and film, this book considers the fates of women who did not or could not buy into the Japanese imperial ideology of "good wives, wise mothers" in support of male empire-building. Although many feminist critics have articulated women’s active roles as dutiful collaborators for the Japanese empire, male-dominated narratives of empire-building have been largely supported and rectified. In contrast, the roles of marginalized women, such as sex workers, women entertainers, hostesses, and hibakusha have rarely been analyzed. This book addresses this intellectual lacuna by closely examining memories, (semi-)autobiographical stories, and newspaper articles, grounded or inspired by lived experiences not only in Japan, but also in Shanghai, Manchukuo, colonial Korea, and the Pacific. Chapters further explore the voices of diasporic Korean women (Zainichi Korean woman born in Japan, as well as Korean American woman born in Korea) whose lives were impacted, intervening in ethnocentric narratives that were at the heart of the Japanese empire. Michiko Suzuki (UC Davis) will serve as interlocutor.

Thursday, November 21, 2024 | 6:00-7:30 PM ET | 5:00-6:30 PM CT | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi: Historical Fiction and Popular Culture in Japan (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2022)

Susan Westhafer Furukawa, Associate Professor of Japanese, Beloit College

Discussant: Rebecca Copeland, Professor of Japanese Language and Literature, Washington University in St. Louis

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Susan Westhafer Furukawa (Beloit College). Professor Furukawa will be speaking about her recent book The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi: Historical Fiction and Popular Culture in Japan (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2022). By analyzing representations of the famous sixteenth-century samurai leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi in historical fiction, The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi explores how and why Hideyoshi has had a continued and ever-changing presence in popular culture in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan. The multiple fictionalized histories of Hideyoshi published as serial novels and novellas before, during, and after World War II demonstrate how imaginative re-presentations of Japan’s past have been used by various actors throughout the modern era. Using close reading of several novels and short stories as well as the analysis of various other texts and paratextual materials, Professor Furukawa discovers a Hideyoshi who is always changing to meet the needs of the current era, and in the process expands our understanding of the powerful role that historical narratives play in Japan. Rebecca Copeland (Wash U) will serve as interlocutor.

Thursday, December 12, 2024 | 7:00-8:30 PM ET | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Author: Kerry Smith, Associate Professor of History, Brown University

Discussant: Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Class of 1955 Memorial Professor of History, Williams College

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Kerry Smith (Brown University). Professor Smith will be speaking about his new book Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). Predicting Disasters is the first English-language book to explore how scientists convinced policy makers and the public in postwar Japan that catastrophic earthquakes were coming, and the first to show why earthquake prediction has played such a central role in Japan’s efforts to prepare for a dangerous future ever since. Professor Smith shows how, in the twentieth century, scientists struggled to make large-scale earthquake disasters legible to the public and to policy makers as significant threats to Japan’s future and as phenomena that could be anticipated and prepared for. Smith also explains why understanding those struggles matters. Disasters, Smith contends, belong alongside more familiar topics of analysis in modern Japanese history—such as economic growth and its impacts, political crises and popular protest, and even the legacies of the war—for the work they do in helping us better understand how the past has influenced beliefs about Japan’s possible futures, and how beliefs about the future shape the present. Eiko Maruko Siniawer (Williams) will serve as interlocutor.

Tuesday, January 21, 2025 | 6:00-7:30 PM ET | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls under Japanese Rule (University of Washington Press, 2024)

Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Authors: Fang Yu Hu, Assistant Professor of History, California State Polytechnic University Pomona & Tadashi Ishikawa, Assistant Professor of History, University of Central Florida

Discussant: Seiji Shirane, Associate Professor of History, City College of New York

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Fang Yu Hu (Cal Poly Pomona) and Tadashi Ishikawa (Central Florida), who will be speaking about their new books Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls under Japanese Rule (University of Washington Press, 2024) and Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan (Cambridge University Press, 2024), respectively.

In Good Wife, Wise Mother, Fang Yu Hu uses female education and citizenship as a lens through which to examine Taiwan’s uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Chinese and Japanese ideas and practices. A latecomer to the age of imperialism, Japan used modernization efforts in Taiwan to cast itself as a benevolent force among its colonial subjects and imperial competitors. In contrast to most European colonies, where only elites received an education, in Taiwan Japan built elementary schools intended for the entire population, including girls. In 1897 it developed a program known as “Good Wife, Wise Mother” that sought to transform Han Taiwanese girls into modern Japanese female citizens. Drawing on Japanese and Chinese newspapers, textbooks, oral interviews, and fiction, Fang Yu Hu illustrates how this seemingly progressive project advanced a particular Japanese vision of modernity, womanhood, and citizenship, to which the colonized Han Taiwanese people responded with varying degrees of collaboration, resistance, adaptation, and adoption. Hu also assesses the program’s impact on Taiwan’s class structure, male-female interactions, and political identity both during and after the end of Japanese occupation in 1945.

In Geographies of Gender, Tadashi Ishikawa traces perceptions and practices of gender in the Japanese Empire on the occasion of Japan's colonization of Taiwan from 1895. In the 1910s, metropolitan and colonial authorities attempted social reform in ways which particularly impacted family traditions and, therefore, gender relations, paving the way for the politics of comparison within and beyond the empire. Ishikawa delves into a variety of diplomatic issues, colonial and anticolonial discourses, and judicial cases, finding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships to be sites of tension between norms and ideals among both elite and ordinary men and women. He explores how the Japanese Empire became a gendered space from the 1910s through the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, arguing that gender norms were both unsettled and reinforced in ways which highlight the instability of metropole-colony relations.

Monday, February 3, 2025 | 7:00-8:30 PM ET | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

Humanitarian Internationalism Under Empire: The Global Evolution of the Japanese Red Cross Movement, 1877–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2024)

Author: Michiko Suzuki, Project Researcher, Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo

Discussant: Jessamyn Abel, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, Pennsylvania State University

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with  Michiko Suzuki (University of Tokyo). Dr. Suzuki will be speaking about her new book Humanitarian Internationalism Under Empire: The Global Evolution of the Japanese Red Cross Movement, 1877–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2024). Humanitarian Internationalism Under Empire examines the history of the Japanese Red Cross Society (JRCS) to offer a new account of the humanitarian movement in modern Japan. Dr. Suzuki argues that contrary to its typical portrayal, the JRCS was not wholly subordinate to the government and the Imperial Family, nor was it derivative of Western values and institutional models. Instead, the JRCS operated within a transnational discourse, both contributing to and borrowing from peacetime and wartime international humanitarianism. By tracing the inclusion of non-Western national societies in the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and the evolution of the JRCS from a national into a transnational organization with branches in Japan’s overseas empire as well as in the Asia Pacific and the Americas, Humanitarian Internationalism Under Empire provides a fresh vantage point on major historical questions relating to Japanese modernization and internationalism before the Second World War. Jessamyn Abel (Penn State) will serve as interlocutor.

 

 

Thursday, February 27, 2025 | 8:00-9:30 PM EST | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

 

Kings in All but Name: The Lost History of Ouchi Rule in Japan, 1350-1569 (Oxford University Press, 2024)

Author: Thomas Conlan, Professor of Medieval Japanese History, Princeton University

Discussant: Adam Clulow, Professor of History, University of Texas

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Thomas Conlan (Princeton), who will be speaking about his new book Kings in All but Name: The Lost History of Ouchi Rule in Japan, 1350-1569 (Oxford, 2024). Kings in All but Name contends that in sixteenth-century Japan, members of the Ouchi family were kings in all but name for much of the country. Immensely wealthy, they controlled sea lanes stretching to Korea and China, as well as the Japanese city of Yamaguchi, which functioned as an important regional port with a growing population and a host of temples and shrines. The family was unique in claiming ethnic descent from Korean kings, and - remarkably for this time - such claims were recognized in both Korea and Japan. This status, coupled with dominance over strategic ports and mines, allowed them to facilitate trade throughout East and Southeast Asia. They also played a key cultural role in disseminating Confucian texts, Buddhist sutras, ink paintings, and pottery, and in creating a distinctive, hybrid culture that fused Japanese, Korean, and Chinese beliefs, objects, and customs.

Kings in All but Name illustrates how Japan was an ethnically diverse state from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, closely bound by trading ties to Korea and China. It reveals new archaeological and textual evidence proving that East Asia had integrated trading networks long before the arrival of European explorers and includes an analysis of ores and slag that shows how mining techniques improved and propelled East Asian trade. The story of the Ouchi rulers argues for the existence of a segmented polity, with one center located in Kyoto, and the other in the Ouchi city of Yamaguchi. It also contradicts the belief that Japan collapsed into centuries of turmoil and rather proves that Japan was a stable and prosperous trading state where rituals, policies, politics, and economics were interwoven and diverse. Adam Clulow (Texas) will serve as interlocutor.

 

Friday, March 28, 2025 | 7:00-8:30 PM ET | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

 

Koume's World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman Before and After the Meiji Restoration (Columbia University Press, 2023)

Author: Simon Partner, Professor of History, Duke University

Discussant: Laura Nenzi, Professor of History, Emory University

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Simon Partner (Duke University), who will be speaking about his new book Koume's World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman Before and After the Meiji Restoration (Columbia University Press, 2023). Kawai Koume (1804–1889) was an accomplished poet and painter in a lower-ranking samurai family in the provincial castle town of Wakayama. She was an eyewitness to many of the key events leading up to the Meiji Restoration and the radical changes that followed, including the famine of 1837, the great earthquake of 1854, the cholera epidemic of 1859, and the departure of samurai to fight in the civil wars of the 1860s. For more than fifty years, she kept a diary recording her family’s daily life—meals and expenses, visitors and the weather, small-town gossip, and news of momentous events. Through Koume’s eyes and words, Koume’s World opens a window on the social, economic, and cultural life of Japan’s transformative nineteenth century across the Tokugawa-Meiji divide. Laura Nenzi (Emory) will serve as interlocutor.

 

 

Monday, April 7, 2025 | 7:00-8:30 PM ET
Tuesday, April 8, 2025 | 8:00-9:30 AM JST | 9:00-10:30 AEST

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Entwined Atrocities: New Insights into the U.S.–Japan Alliance (Peter Lang, 2023)

Author: Yuki Tanaka, Research Professor Emeritus, Hiroshima City University

Discussant: Kirsten Ziomek, Associate Professor of History, Adelphi University

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Yuki Tanaka, who will be speaking about his new book Entwined Atrocities: New Insights into the U.S.–Japan Alliance (Peter Lang, 2023). Entwined Atrocities reconsiders the fire and atomic bombings of Japan during World War II in the context of the U.S. justification of the crime of indiscriminate bombings and its relationship to Japan’s political exploitation of the atomic bombing to cover up Emperor Hirohito’s war responsibility. In addition, it examines the fundamental contradiction in Japan’s peace constitution between the concealment of Hirohito’s war crimes and the responsibility of the United States. Readers will learn how Japanese and U.S. official war memories were crafted to justify their respective wartime performances, exposing the flaws and failing of present-day democracy in Japan and the U.S. This book also explores how Japanese people could potentially create a truly powerful cultural memory of war, utilizing various forms of artwork including Japan’s traditional performing art, Noh. Kirsten Ziomek (Adelphi) will serve as interlocutor.

Monday, May 5, 2025 | 8:00-9:30 PM EST | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

Selling the Future: Community, Hope, and Crisis in the Early History of Japanese Life Insurance (Cornell University Press, 2024)

Author: Ryan Moran, Assistant Professor of History, University of Utah

Moderator: Timothy Yang, Associate Professor of History & Director of the Center for Asian Studies, University of Georgia

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Ryan Moran (Utah), who will be speaking about his new book Selling the Future: Community, Hope, and Crisis in the Early History of Japanese Life Insurance (Cornell, 2024). Selling the Future explains how the life insurance industry in Japan exploited its association with mutuality and community to commodify and govern lives. Covering the years from the start of the industry in 1881 through the end of World War II, Moran describes insurance companies and government officials working together to create a picture of the future as precarious and dangerous. Since it was impossible for individual consumers to deal with every contingency on their own, insurance industry administrators argued that their usage of statistical data enabled them to chart the predictable future for the aggregate. Through insurance, companies and the state thus offered consumers a means to a perfectible future in an era filled with repeated crises. Life insurance functioned as an important modernist technology within Japan and its colonies to instantiate expectations for responsibility, to reconfigure meanings of mutuality, and to normalize new social formations (such as the nuclear family) as essential to life. Life insurance thus offers an important vehicle for examining the confluence of modes of mobilizing and organizing bodies, the expropriation of financial resources, and the action of disciplining workers into a capitalist system.

This event is co-sponsored by the University of Georgia Center for Asian Studies.

Monday, May 26, 2025 | 8:00-9:30 PM ET
Tuesday, May 27, 2025 | 9:00-10:30 AM JST | 10:00-11:30 AM AEST | 12:00–1:30pm NZST

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The Translocal Island of Okinawa: Anti-Base Activism and Grassroots Regionalism (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Presenter: Shinnosuke Takahashi, Senior Lecturer in the Asian Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington

Discussant: Grant Jun Otsuki, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthroplogy, University of Tokyo

Moderator: Simon Avenell, Professor of History, Australian National University

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Shinnosuke Takahashi, who will be speaking about his new book The Translocal Island of Okinawa: Anti-Base Activism and Grassroots Regionalism (Bloomsbury, 2024). The Translocal Island of Okinawa reveals the underrepresented memories, visions, and actions that are involved in the making of Okinawan resistance against its subordinated status under the US-Japan security system beyond the narrowly defined political, cultural and geographical borders of locality. As Okinawa's base politics is a problem deeply rooted in the context of East Asia, so is the history of the people's protest movement. The issue examined in this book is the arbitrary distinction of scale between 'local', which tends to be employed for a particular territory demarcated by a cohesive culture, and 'regional', a larger area that consists of myriad localities. Locality, Shinnosuke Takahashi argues, is neither self-evident, fixed, nor homogenous but is established through historical processes that involve interaction, conflict, and negotiation of individuals and communities across territorial and cultural boundaries. The concept of Okinawa as a translocal island offers a new way to understand locality in the context of Okinawan activism as a product of multiple cultural and human flows, as opposed to the conventional way of framing the local community as fixed, internally cohesive, and rigidly bordered. It makes an exciting contribution to the field of modern Japanese and East Asian studies by stimulating discussions on the richness and scale of local civic activism that is increasingly becoming a key political feature of the East Asian region. Grant Jun Otsuki (Tokyo) will serve as interlocutor.