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 | 7:00-8:30 PM ET | 6:00-7:30 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.

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.

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.