Upcoming events

    • May 02, 2024
    • 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
    • Zoom

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

    MJHA Roundtable: 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.


    • May 06, 2024
    • Zoom

    Monday, May 6, 2024 | 12:00-1:30 PM EDT | 5:00-6:30 PM BST | 6:00-7:30 PM CET | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

    12 Questions for Jonas Rüegg: Japan and Oceanic History (with Paul Kreitman)

    Featuring: Jonas Rüegg, Senior Teaching and Research Assistant, University of Zurich, and winner of the 2024 Modern Japan History Association Dissertation Prize

    Interviewer: Paul Kreitman, Associate Professor of Japanese History, Columbia University


    The Kanrin Maru, the first shogunal steamboat, which had sailed to San Francisco in 1860 with Fukuzawa Yukichi other members of the Japanese embassy on board (National Diet Library)

    In light of a broader "oceanic turn" in historiography, Jonas Rüegg (Zurich) and Paul Kreitman (Columbia) will examine Japan's place within this broader historiography with reference to Professor Rüegg's prize winning dissertation The Kuroshio Frontier: Business, State and Environment in the Making of Japan’s Pacific (Harvard University, 2022), and Professor Kreitman's new book Japan's Ocean Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Significant time will also be allotted for audience Q&A.


    • May 09, 2024
    • 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
    • Zoom

    Thursday, May 9, 2024 | 6:00-7:30 PM ET | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

    Asia and Postwar Japan: Deimperialization, Civic Activism, and National Identity (Harvard University East Asia Center Press, 2022)

    Author: Simon Avenell, Professor in the School of Culture, History, and Language, Australian National University

    Discussant: Robert Hoppens, Associate Professor of History, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

    The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Simon Avenell (Australian National University). Professor Avenell will be speaking about his new book, Asia and Postwar Japan: Deimperialization, Civic Activism, and National Identity (Harvard University East Asia Center Press, 2022). Asia and Postwar Japan examines Japanese deimperialization from 1945 until the early twenty-first century. It focuses on the thought and activism of progressive activists and intellectuals as they struggled to overcome rigid preconceptions about “Asia,” as they grappled with the implications of postimperial responsibility, and as they forged new regional solidarities and Asian imaginaries. Professor Avenell reveals the critical importance of Asia in postwar Japanese thought, activism, and politics—Asia as a symbolic geography, Asia as a space for grassroots engagement, and ultimately, Asia as an aporia of identity and the source of a new politics of hopeRobert Hoppens (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) will serve as discussant.


    • May 31, 2024
    • Zoom

    Friday, May 31 2024 | 9:00-10:30 PM JST | 8:00-9:30 AM EDT | 1:00-2:30 PM BST

    REGISTER FOR ZOOM HERE

    New Books from Japan #6:

    Women in Asia under the Japanese Empire


    Presenter: 蔭木 達也 (Tatsuya Kageki, Keio University)

    Discussant: Marnie Anderson (Smith College)

    Contributors to this book provide an Asian women’s history from the perspective of gender analysis, assessing Japanese imperial policy and propaganda in its colonies and occupied territories and particularly its impact on women. Tackling topics including media, travel, migration, literature, and the perceptions of the empire by the colonized, the authors present an eclectic history, unified by the perspective of gender studies and the spatial and political lens of the Japanese Empire. They look at the lives of women in, Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, Mainland China, Micronesia, and Okinawa, among others. These women were wives, mothers, writers, migrants, intellectuals and activists, and thus had a very broad range of views and experiences of Imperial Japan. Where women have tended in the past to be studied as objects of the imperial system, the contributors to this book study them as the subject of history, while also providing an outside-in perspective on the Japanese Empire by other Asians.

    本書は、植民地と占領地における日本帝国の政策とプロパガンダ、特に女性への影響を評価し、ジェンダー分析の視点からアジアの女性史を提示する。メディア、旅行、移住、文学、被植民者による帝国に対する認識などのトピックを扱いながら、著者はジェンダー研究の視点と日本帝国の空間的・政治的レンズによって統一された折衷的な歴史を提示する。寄稿者たちは、台湾、朝鮮、満州、中国本土、ミクロネシア、沖縄などの女性の生き方を見ている。これらの女性たちは、妻であり、母であり、作家であり、移住者であり、知識人であり、活動家であったため、大日本帝国に対する非常に幅広い見方と経験を持っていた。これまで女性は帝国システムの対象として研究される傾向にあったが、本書の寄稿者たちは彼女たちを歴史の主体として研究し、同時に他のアジア人による大日本帝国へのアウトサイド・インな視点も提供している。

Past events

April 23, 2024 New Books on Japan: "Demarcating Japan: Imperialism, Islanders, and Mobility, 1855–1884"
April 11, 2024 New Books on Japan: "Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train"
March 16, 2024 MJHA Meeting-In-Conjunction at AAS Seattle
March 07, 2024 New Books on Japan: "Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki"
February 15, 2024 New Books on Japan: "Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan"
February 06, 2024 12 Questions with David Howell: The New Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. II
January 17, 2024 New Books on Japan: "Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima's Gray Zone"
December 13, 2023 New Books on Japan: "Japan's Ocean Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty"
December 12, 2023 New Books from Japan #5: "Chosenseki: A History of the Legal Marker of Koreans in Postwar Japan"
December 08, 2023 Professional Development Series: "Ask the Editors: Publishing Your Book in Japanese Studies"
November 16, 2023 New Books on Japan: "Provincializing Empire: Omi Merchants in the Japanese Transpacific Diaspora"
October 31, 2023 New Books from Japan #4: "Hara Takashi: Pioneer of Japanese Party Politics"
October 24, 2023 Professional Development Series: "Writing and Publishing a Second Book"
October 17, 2023 MJHA Roundtable: The State of Our Field
October 11, 2023 New Books on Japan: "In Close Association: Local Activist Networks in the Making of Japanese Modernity, 1868–1920"
September 27, 2023 Professional Development Series: "Job Hunting Outside North America, Part I: Asia"
September 13, 2023 New Books on Japan: "Oishii: The History of Sushi"
September 13, 2023 New Books from Japan #3: "Desire for Stability: A Cultural History of the Salaryman in Modern Japan"
September 08, 2023 Distinguished Annual Lecture: Tessa Morris-Suzuki on "Writing War: History in Occupied Japan and its Echoes for Today"
August 16, 2023 Professional Development Series: "Tackling the Academic Job Market"
July 19, 2023 Summer 2023 MJHA Members Meetup in Tokyo
July 04, 2023 New Books from Japan #2: "The Governing Assembly of the Capital City"
June 01, 2023 New Books from Japan #1: "Medicine and Christianity: American Protestant Missionaries and their Medical Work in Japan"
May 17, 2023 Research Exchange Seminar #1: "Ambivalent Aspirations: Okinawan Collaboration with the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere"
May 15, 2023 New Books on Japan: "Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan"
May 04, 2023 12 Questions with Laura Hein: The New Cambridge History of Japan Vol. III
April 12, 2023 New Books on Japan: "Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan"
March 18, 2023 MJHA Launch Event at AAS Boston
March 08, 2023 New Books on Japan: "Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan"
February 08, 2023 New Books on Japan: "Inglorious, Illegal Bastards: Japan's Self-Defense Force during the Cold War"
December 14, 2022 New Books on Japan: "Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945"

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