Tengoku to Jigoku (High and Low) is a crime thriller in which a wealthy, conscientious, hard-working shoe manufacturer (Mifune Toshiro) is the victim of a hideous crime: his chauffeur's son is kidnapped in mistake for his own. The kidnapper (Yamazaki Tsutomu) acknowledges the mistake but wants the money nevertheless, thus forcing the entire family – including, of course, the chauffeur himself -- into a moral dilemma. The time is the early sixties, as Japan prepares for the Olympic Games, ready to showcase its economic miracle and technological successes. The setting, significantly, is Yokohama, near Tokyo, then still a troubled industrial city struggling to emerge from a ruinous recent past.

This lecture will examine the role of sound and music in the film's representation of the urban fabric of Yokohama and the resulting use of cinema as a means of historical preservation of sounds (or sonic environments). As my analysis draws to a close, I will pay special attention to the radio broadcast of Schubert's music that marks the appearance of the film's anti-hero (the kidnapper). Far from being merely a static pointer, a cerebral, gratuitous musical reference, the broadcast is inextricably tied to the presentation of the character. While paving the way for a different interpretation of the film, my analysis of this crucial passage will also indicate in what ways the study of music and sound as an element of setting may contribute to a new understanding of the role of symbols in the context of narratives.

Lecturer information: Giorgio Biancorosso grew up in Italy and was educated in the UK and the US. After obtaining a Ph.D. in Musicology at Princeton University, in 2001-2003 he was a Mellon Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is now an Assistant Professor in Music and a Member of the Film Culture Project at The University of Hong Kong, where he teaches courses in Music History, Aesthetics, and Film Theory and Criticism. Recent publications include: "Ludwig's Wagner and Visconti's Ludwig," in Wagner and Cinema, (Indiana University Press); "The Harpist in the Closet: Film Music as Epistemological Joke," in Music and the Moving Image 2 (3); and the essay "Sound" in The Routledge Companion to Film and Philosophy. Biancorosso is completing a book called Musical Aesthetics through Cinema, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2010. He is also active as a journalist and writes monthly columns on the arts in China and the Asia Pacific for the Hong Kong Magazine Muse. In the Spring of 2010, Biancorosso will be Visiting Professor in Music and Film Studies at National Taiwan University (NTU), Taipei.

Co-Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Department of Music.

 

This talk, "Translation and its Postcolonial Discontents," examines the postcolonial controversy over Japanese leftist historian Toma Seita's interpretations of Korean poetry, which Korean writer Kim Soun translated into Japanese during the colonial period. In his 1954 essays, Toma read into the poems an allegory of the Korean nation's suffering under Japanese rule. However, Kim denounced Toma's politicization of the lyrical poems because, in Kim's view, Toma misrepresented the poems and Korean culture by relying on Kim's own Japanese translations. By contextualizing the controversy in the torrent of early 1950s debates among Japanese leftist intellectuals about what constitutes progressive national literature, intent on challenging both rightwing nationalism and American dominance in Japan, the lecturer explores the controversy's potential for encouraging a just relationship between the former colonized and colonizers.

Lecturer information: Serk-Bae Suh is currently an Assistant Professor in the East Asian Languages and Literature Department at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include modern Korean and Japanese literature, modern Korean and Japanese intellectual history, and colonial and postcolonial studies. His current research examines the role of translation in shaping attitudes toward nationalism and colonialism in Korean and Japanese intellectual discourse from the 1910s through the 1960s.

Sponsored by the Center for Korean Research.

 

In the spring of the year 1006 a spectacular new star appeared in the skies over Kyoto. People said it was as bright as the sun. For the next 18 months it lit up the night sky and could be seen during the day as well. Ongoing rituals were held at the palace and at temples and shrines to placate this bright new visitor. The star is known today as SN 1006, a spectacular supernova whose remnants can still be seen as the double star κ Lupi in the constellation Lupus. It is believed to have been the largest supernova recorded in human history. This event—exogenous and unpredicted—was but one of a series of environmental and biological interventions that struck Kyoto circa 1000. What this means for our understanding of the complex of art practices that emerged during the same period—a complex profoundly bound up with what we now identify as “traditional” or “native” Japanese culture—is the theme of my talk. I proceed on the premise that the rapid transformation of Kyoto art and culture circa 1000 was a function of a threshold phenomenon in which a series of exogenous—and stochastic—environmental factors triggered a geometric progression, or phase shift, in which an array of small causes and coincidences produced maximum effects in the cultural domain whose summed result was paradigm shift.

Lecturer information: Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan received her Ph.D. in Japanese Art from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1988. She has taught at Yale University since 1990. In her work Yiengpruksawan focuses on Buddhist art and iconography with an emphasis on political and social perspectives in the analysis of imagery and ritual. She is currently completing a series of books that examine the Buddhist cultural productions of early Kyoto from a revisionist perspective grounded in primary records and material evidence. Since the early 1990s Yiengpruksawan has also maintained a research and teaching commitment to modern Asian art.

 

In a letter composed in 1264, the poet known as Nun Abutsu (1222-1283) advises her fourteen-year-old daughter on the vagaries of court life and what to do when all else fails: "If things do not proceed as you had hoped, distance yourself from this cycle of birth and death and dedicate yourself to the Buddhist realm. Calm your heart, take the tonsure, and enter the true path." Abutsu embodied these teachings herself by oscillating between secular and religious life. This presentation will take up her writings to consider the intertwined issues of sexuality, motherhood, and nunhood and how tonsure could be both strategic and empowering in the literature of Kamakura-era (1185-1333) women.

Lecturer information: Christina Laffin is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia whose research focuses on medieval travel diaries and the contexts for their production. She is presently completing a manuscript tentatively entitled "Rewriting Medieval Women: Politics, Personality, and Literary Production in the Life of Nun Abutsu." Past contributions include The Noh Ominameshi: A Flower Viewed from Many Directions (Co-editor, 2003), and Gender and Japanese History (Managing Editor, 2 vols.). She is a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow at the University of Tokyo Historiographical Institute through June 2011.

Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.

Supported by the Japan Foundation.

 

In translating Language X to Language Y we lose a lot, but translation has survived the centuries, primarily because not everybody can easily learn the Japanese language, and gain is larger than loss. The structures of Japanese and English are quite different on the surface, so we first lose sounds and orthography. Even so, crucially phonetic poetry like tanka, haiku, and modern poetry has been frequently translated into English. Surface morphological and syntactic structures are lost, too. There is no end to the long list of loss of forms due to translation. This lecture focuses on something cognitively lost in translation of written Japanese, and especially literary work, into English – loss of deep cognitive meaning expressed explicitly in the original Japanese language. There are many of layers to the phenomenon, but the present talk will focus narrowly on shift phenomena such as number shift, case marker shift, tense shift, formality shift, and voice shift, that which are almost permanently lost in translation even though they convey a significant cognitive shift on the part of the author.

Lecturer information: Seiichi Makino is a Professor of Japanese and Linguistics and serves as the Director of the Japanese Language Program at Princeton University, as well as the Director of the Japanese Language Program at Princeton University. He is also the Academic Director of the Summer M.A. Program in Japanese Language Pedagogy at Columbia University. Professor Makino is the author or co-author of numerous books, dictionaries, and articles, including Aspects of Linguistics: In Honor of Noriko Akatsuka (edited with S. Kuno and S. Strauss, 2007) and A Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar (with M. Tsutsui, 2008). His current research interests include the cognitive linguistics inquiry intoof metaphors, and shift phenomena of tense, formality, numbers, and grammatical persons (i.e., the 1st person "I", the 2nd person "you", and the 3rd person "he"). He is the former President of the Association of Teachers of Japanese.

This lecture is offered as the Fifth Shirato Lecture on Japanese Language.

Supported by the Japan Foundation.

 

 

The speaker's recent book The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan concerns the creation of new forms of poetry in the 9th and early 10th centuries – such as poetry matches, screen poetry, and imperial anthologies – which that helped define Japanese court culture for centuries afterwards. Its aim is to demonstrate how aspects of poetic praxis, and particularly that of "harmonization" in verse, can offer new understandings of Heian poetry's textual, ritual, cosmological, social, and political dimensions.

 
Lecturer information: Gustav Heldt is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Virginia, specializing in the poetry and cultural history of early and medieval Japan. He received his Ph.D. in Japanese Literature from Columbia University in 2000. His recent publications include "Writing Like a Man: Poetic Literacy, Textual Property, and Gender in the Tosa Diary," Journal of Asian Studies (2005), and "Between Followers and Friends: Male Homosocial Desire in Heian Court Poetry," forthcoming in the U.S.-Japan Women's Journal.

Supported by the Japan Foundation.

 

 

For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, Japan's economic superpowerdom and stable social order made it a case study in seemingly incomparable success. Best-selling international titles touting how to "learn from Japan" appeared to tell it all, as enviable GNP and international test scores displaced the social burdens and historical onus of this success. With the dramatic decline of economic fortunes and failure to revive throughout the 1990s came a new "how not to follow Japan" literature and a swift transformation of Japan’s international image and position. This talk examines the effects of this writing on and writing off Japan on the first recessionary generation. Having come of age amidst economic decline ("fukeiki"), discourses of national collapse, neoliberal reforms, and new demands for success, this generation embodies a new sensibility of recession and nation. Dr. Arai's ethnographic engagement locates this sensibility as an effect of transformations in structures of capital and historical representation within the shifting sociocultural and economic landscapes of recessionary Japan.

Lecturer information: Andrea Arai teaches in the Jackson School of International Studies Japan Studies Program at the University of Washington. She is completing an edited volume, entitled Global Futures in East Asia, with Ann Anagnost, and is the author of one of its chapters, "Notes to the Heart: Learning to 'Love Your Country' in Neoliberal Japan." Professor Arai is also finishing a book manuscript, provisionally titled Recessionary Sensibilities, on the new effects of time and value in the economic downturn from the 1990s and the reshaping of realities and representations of Japan and its youth amid restructurings of education and labor. Her recent publications include "The Neoliberal Subject of Lack and Potential: Developing the 'Frontier Within' and Creating a Reserve Army of Labor in Japan" (2005), and "The 'Wild Child' of 1990s Japan," in the book Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present (2006).

Co-Sponsored by the

Supported by the Japan Foundation.
 

 

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