Donald Keene Center

Eiko & Koma dance about what matters to them. Their subjects are elemental; their message pitiless yet humanistic. Both their choreography and stagecraft are characterized by bold, highly theatrical strokes. The result is stark, infused with a relentless stillness that subverts and transcends our everyday notions of time and space. Eiko & Koma want the vulnerability of their own dancing bodies to invite the audience’s empathy.

Eiko & Koma have received two “Bessies” (1984 and 1990) and have been awarded Guggenheim (1985), MacArthur (1996), and United States Artists (2006) Fellowships. They were honored with the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award (2004) and the Dance Magazine Award (2006) for lifetime achievement in modern dance.

Admission is free

Lecture Information:
Japan was the first Asian country to succeed in industrialization. From the 1970s into the 1980s, the buzzword in Japan was "all-middle-class society." More recently, issues of poverty and inequality have become a popular topic of discussion among Japanese, especially conspicuous since the end of 2008. This lecture examines some of the factors that have contributed to the increasingly active discourse on inequality, focusing in particular on demographic and family changes in contemporary Japan.

Lecturer Information:
Sawako Shirahase is a professor at the Department of Sociology, the University of Tokyo, and a visiting fellow of Todai-Yale Initiative in 2010-11. Her research interests include ageing and socio-economic inequality, family change and the social security system, and the comparative study of welfare states. Her recent books are Ikikata no Fubyodo: Otagaisama no Shakai ni Mukete (Inequalities in Life Course: Seeking for the Mutually Supportive Society), published by Iwanami in 2010, and Nihon no Fubyodo wo Kangaeru: Shoshi Korei Shakai no Kokusai Hikaku (Thinking about Inequality in Japan: A Comparative Study of Ageing Societies), published by the University of Tokyo Press in 2009.

Tom Hare is William Sauter LaPorte '28 Professor in Regional Studies, in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His intellectual interests include Japanese drama and Buddhism, writing systems, Egyptology, portraiture, and the interaction of literature and the arts. He did his PhD in Far Eastern Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan and studied the musicology of noh at Tokyo University of Fine Arts (Tôkyô Geijutsu Daigaku). He taught in the Departments of Asian Languages and Comparative Literature at Stanford University before moving to Princeton. He is the author of Zeami: Performance Notes (Columbia University Press, 2008), Zeami's Style (Stanford University Press, 1986) and ReMembering Osiris (Stanford, 1999). He is currently working on a project on performance and practice in Buddhist Japan.

Michael Emmerich is Assistant Professor of Premodern Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently completing a manuscript about the early modern and modern canonization of The Tale of Genji as a classic of both Japanese and world literature. He is the translator of numerous novels and short-story collections by authors as diverse as Kawabata Yasunari and Takahashi Gen'ichirô, and is the editor of Read Real Japanese Fiction and the forthcoming New Penguin Parallel Texts: Short Stories in Japanese.

Lecture Information:
In 1903, the Japanese Ministry of Education decreed that all pupils in elementary schools would learn rudimentary western-style technical drawing for the manufacture of wooden objects as part of compulsory manual-education classes. Professor Teasley’s talk explores the broader context for this regulation. Through an analysis of the changing status of the technical drawing and technical specification, it considers ideas of technology, expertise, design, and the public in late Meiji Japan.

Lecturer Information:
Sarah Teasley teaches design history at the Royal College of Art in London. She received her doctorate in Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Tokyo, and has published widely in both English and Japanese on the history of Japanese design. Her books include 20th Century Design History (Tokyo: Petit Grand Publishing, 2005), which she co-authored with Watabe Chiharu.

Lecture Information:
As both abstract and concrete space, the black markets (yami ichi) played a central role in the development of postwar Tokyo, while helping to shape the literary and popular imagination of the city. This lecture examines the literary representation of the black markets, focusing on their role as mediating spaces between the collapse of empire and the reconstruction of the postwar nation-state.

Lecturer Information:
Seiji M. Lippit teaches Japanese literature and culture at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include modernism, mass culture, urban space, and minority literature, as well as representations of decolonization, occupation, and the transformation of national consciousness in postwar Japan. His publications include Topographies of Japanese Modernism (Columbia UP, 2002), an examination of modernist fiction in the 1920s and 30s, and the edited volume The Essential Akutagawa (Marsilio, 1999), an anthology of writings by the celebrated writer Akutagawa Ryûnosuke. Professor Lippit is currently working on a book project on literature of the immediate postwar period that focuses on representations of urban space in the wake of empire’s collapse.

This semester, Shincho Professor Emeritus Donald Keene teaches his last class at Columbia University. We invite you to join us in celebrating over fifty years of Professor Keene's contributions to Japanese Studies.

Through the generous support of the Japan Foundation, a symposium on "The Legacies of Donald Keene" will be held on April 15th. Speakers include Karen Brazell, Van Gessel, Carol Gluck, Amy Heinrich, Susan Matisoff, and Carolyn Morley, all of whose distinguished careers in the Japanese Studies field began in one of Professor Keene's classrooms. Drawing on personal experiences, the speakers will address Professor Keene's unique pedagogy and long-term contributions to the field of Japanese Studies.

This symposium is free and open to the general public. We recommend arriving early in order to secure a seat.

Lecture Information:
In this talk, Professor Gordon considers the selling, buying, and the using of the sewing machine in the early-to-mid twentieth century. On the demand side, the focus is on women users in the home, with attention as well to home-based commercial production by seamstresses or dressmakers. On the supply side the main actors are Singer Sewing Machine Company and then its Japanese competitors. An extraordinary variety of meanings and experiences attached to this object, which allows us to study the modern transformation of daily life with its continuing harshness, its new opportunities, and its new imposition of discipline on both the men who sold it and the women who used it.

Lecturer Information:
Andrew Gordon is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University. His teaching and research focus primarily on modern Japan. Professor Gordon has published numerous books and articles, including several important works on the history of Japanese labor, and the widely used textbook A Modern History of Japan (2002).

Movie Information:
ANPO refers to the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty, which permits the continued presence of numerous U.S. military bases in Japan. In 1960, public resentment against the military presence erupted in massive popular demonstrations that were crushed by Japan’s C.I.A.-backed Prime Minister Kishi. A wide range of Japanese artists depicted this resistance with a rich archive of art and films, including many large-scale paintings long hidden from public view. Contemporary artists continue to draw on their predecessors’ legacy, depicting problems generated by the bases. Shot in high definition, the film reveals the extraordinary passion behind this wave of paintings, photographs, anime, and documentary and narrative films.