Upcoming and Past Events

Tuesday, May 12, 2024 6:00-7:30 PM ET
Wednesday, May 13, 2024 7:00-8:30 AM JST

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MJHA Roundtable #4: Ninja vs. Samurai - Warrior Icons in History, Popular Culture, and the Martial Arts

Featured Panelists:

Polina Barducci (University of Cambridge)
Oleg Benesch (University of York)
Robert Tuck (Arizona State University)

Moderator:

Ran Zwigenberg (Pennsylvania State University)

Over the last seventy years, martial arts publications have been hugely influential in shaping views of Japanese culture and history among English-speaking readers. The US journalist Andrew Adams’ 1970 book Ninja: The Invisible Assassins, for instance, went through a staggering thirty-six editions to 2008 and has been cited by hundreds of subsequent popular authors, even as the majority of professional academics have remained unaware of its existence (and its total unreliability). This event engages with academic reluctance to tackle transnational myths of Japanese warriors, including those related to ninja, samurai, and the martial arts. It will showcase both the importance of academic engagement with popular media and the range of concrete ways in which rigorous scholarship delivers insights into these areas. Robert Tuck will argue that “ninja” history is not really “history” in the conventional sense, and that literary-focused methodologies are more useful for understanding how “ninja” discourse works. Polina Barducci will discuss the earlier historical records of those who later became known as the ninja and the challenges of distinguishing them from other warriors. Oleg Benesch will explore the reinvention of the samurai as an icon in modern Japan and around the world. Taken together, the three panelists make a powerful case that the time has come to take popular martial discourses seriously as a field of academic study.

Tuesday October 29, 2024 | 7:00PM-8:30 PM ET | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

MJHA Roundtable #3: Colonial Taiwan in Japanese Studies

Featured Panelists:

Paul Barclay, Professor of History, Lafayette College
Kirsten Ziomek, Associate Professor of History, Adelphi University
John Kanbayashi, Assistant Professor of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
Seiji Shirane, Associate Professor of Japanese History, City College of New York

Over the past two decades, there has been a renaissance in English-language scholarship on colonial Taiwan. This panel will discuss what makes Taiwan a particularly valuable site for Japanese studies, address the opportunities and challenges involved in working with transnational sources and historiographies, and highlight promising new directions in the field.

Thursday, May 2, 2024 | 7:00PM-8:30 PM ET | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

MJHA Roundtable #2: Remaking Shōgun - Historians Assess

Featured Panelists:

Mary Elizabeth Berry, Class of 1944 Professor of History Emerita, University of California, Berkeley
Eleanor Hubbard, Independent Scholar
Morgan Pitelka, Bernard L. Herman Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Henry Smith, Professor of History Emeritus, Columbia University

In the wake of the latest television remake of James Clavell's celebrated novel Shōgun, a panel of distinguished historians of early modern Japan and England will consider what the shows and novel get right and wrong about history, examine how interpretations of the story and the source material have evolved over time, and look back on nearly 50 years of teaching with (and against) Clavell's tale of an English sailor in late Sengoku Japan.

A full-text version of this roundtable can be found HERE (pdf).

A video of the roundtable can be found HERE.

Tuesday, October 17, 2023 | 7:00PM-8:30 PM ET | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

MJHA Roundtable #1: The State of Our Field

Featured Panelists:

Sabine Frühstück, Koichi Takashima Professor in Japanese Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Carol Gluck, George Sansom Professor Emerita of History, Columbia University
Andrew Gordon, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University
Laura Hein, Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of History, Northwestern University

Panelists will discuss what they view as promising new directions in the study of modern Japan and Japanese history, classic works of scholarship that have stood the test of time, and areas that still remain under-studied as well as questions that still remain to be addressed.

A full-text version of this roundtable can be found HERE (pdf).

A video of the roundtable can be found HERE.