Raced Bodies and the Public Sphere in Ichikawa Kon\u27s \u27\u27Tokyo Olympiad\u27\u27

Historical Consciousness, Historiography, and Modern Japanese Values, 2002年10月末-11月, カナダ, アルバータ州バン

Gambling with the nation : heroines of the Japanese yakuza film, 1955–1975

A revamped period-drama film genre surfaced after the Allied occupation of Japan (1945–1952), featuring androgynous comic heroines who cross-dressed to perform male and female yakuza roles. By the late 1960s, they had been replaced by increasingly sexualized figures, and later by the ‘pink’ violence of the ‘girl boss’ sub-genre. Yet masculine themes in the ‘nihilistic’ yakuza films of the late 1960s and 1970s have been the focus of most scholarship on the genre, with scant attention paid to the female yakuza film. This article offers an iconographic reading of the heroines of the yakuza genre, arguing that the re-imagining of a postwar ‘Japaneseness’ was conducted as much through the yakuza genre’s heroines as its heroes. Through analysis of key visual motifs, narrative tropes, and star personae, the image of the female yakuza can be read as a commentary on social conditions in postwar Japan. We can see the rapid social and political changes of postwar Japan reflected and mediated through the changing image of the female yakuza heroine during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s

Assimilation—On (Not) Turning White: Memory and the Narration of the Postwar History of Japanese Canadians in Southern Alberta

This essay explores understandings of “race” – specifically, what it means to be Japanese – of nisei (“second generation”) individuals who acknowledge their near complete assimilation structurally and normatively into the Canadian mainstream. In historically-contextualized analyses of memory fragments from oral-history interviews conducted between 2011-2017, it focusses on voices and experiences of southern Alberta, an area whose significance to local, national, continental, and trans-Pacific histories of people of Japanese descent is belied by a lack of dedicated scholarly attention. In this light, this essay reveals how the fact of being Japanese in the latter half of the twentieth century was strategically central to nisei lives as individuals and in their communities. In imagining a racial hierarchy whose apex they knew they could never share with the hakujin (whites), the racial heritage they nevertheless inherited and would bequeath could be so potent as to reverse the direction of the colonial gaze with empowering effects in individual engagements then and as remembered now. We see how the narration and validation of one’s life is the navigation of wider historical contexts, the shaping of the post-colonial legacy of Imperial cultures, as Britain and Japan withdrew from their erstwhile colonial projects in Canada

Structure and stylistics in the short works of Shiga Naoya.

The dissertation explores the ways that Shiga Naoya (1883-1971) used techniques of style and structure to support the presentation of specific themes in his short fiction. Although Shiga is acclaimed in Japan as a master of modern fiction, many Western critics, and some Japanese writers, have complained that his stories lack the formal features of narrative that often serve as cohesive elements in the modern novel: tight plot, dramatic incident, strong characterization, etc. Rarely do these studies attempt to reveal the stylistic and structural devices that do inform Shiga's fiction. Many critics view his work as primarily autobiographical, and concentrate on connections between Shiga's life and events in his stories. This dissertation, however, is concerned with the expectations that readers (especially those educated in a Western literary context) bring to their reading of Shiga, and the ways his work satisfies or fails to satisfy those expectations. Shiga's techniques of narration, characterization, and irony are compared with representative Western models. These comparisons show that Shiga did use narrative techniques similar to those used by some of the most influential writers in the West. Despite the similarities, however, there are many stylistic and structural aspects of Shiga's work that differ significantly from the Western models. His style uses literary and linguistic elements that are rarely discussed or analyzed, and consequently may escape the notice of readers expecting a "st and ard" novel. Shiga's structural choices, too, follow techniques from earlier Japanese literary forms, but may be overlooked by readers whose definitions of the novel do not include such possibilities. Many of Shiga's stories are constructed using systemic structural metaphor: they are based on narrative and textual connections that are spatial and relational, rather than the temporal/causal connections that the modern reader might expect. The overall effect of Shiga's style and structure is to dissolve (temporarily) the barriers of time and space that are often taken for granted (indeed celebrated) in modern literature. Many of Shiga's stories have themes of connection between things or people that are actually physically and temporally separate; his idiosyncratic literary techniques are ideal for the support of such themes.Ph.D.Asian literatureComparative literatureModern literatureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162351/1/9001693.pd

Life and Work of Futabatei Shimei after Ukigumo

Master of ArtsCenter for Japanese StudiesUniversity of Michiganhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144942/1/cjsmat_249.pdf45

Meiji at 150 Podcast, Episode 009, Dr. Sharalyn Orbaugh (University of British Columbia)

In this episode, Dr. Orbaugh sheds light on the story of Nogi Shizuko and her gruesome suicide alongside husband Nogi Maresuke on the day of the Meiji Emperor’s funeral in 1912. Noting the relative silence on Shizuko’s role in the story, we discuss the absence of Shizuko as a figure in anti-war or women’s movements in the prewar period, her reappearance in the postwar, and the position of women more broadly in Japanese wartime ideology.Arts, Faculty ofHistory, Department ofAsian Studies, Department ofUnreviewedFacult