 Welcome to our celebration of 40 years of the Japan Research Centre, or as we call it, the JRC. I'm Helen MacNaughton, I'm the current Chair, and I welcome in particular the Japanese Ambassador, His Excellency Ambassador Tsuroka, and I also welcome long-term supporters of the JRC, colleagues from across SOAS, our students, our visiting scholars from Japan, and last but not least my fellow JRC members and family and friends as well. I'm going to try and cover 40 years of history in 10 minutes, so hold on tight. As many of you will know, SOAS celebrated its centenary a couple of years ago, so the study of Japanese language and culture has actually been with us for over 100 years, and while 40 years might not sound as significant, I think the smaller big numbers are worth celebrating as well. The JRC was established back in May 1978 by Professor William Beasley, eminent scholar of Japanese history at SOAS, and it was apparently named by Professor Pat O'Neill. It was founded with three core remits, the first to assist in the promotion of academic research on Japan across SOAS, second to provide seminars on topics of scholarly and public interest, and third to organise a regular programme of visiting scholars from Japan, all of which we still do, and more, as I'll show you. In the 1970s, the study of Japan was expanding, and SOAS was at the forefront of that expansion. In an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement in March 1978 said the following, Japanese studies in the United Kingdom is probably about to enter a new phase of growth. The economic and political power of Japan demanded. It's complex history, society and culture deserve it, and the natural thrust of Japanese studies in the UK invites it. The decision to form the JRC was taken at academic board in January 1978, and in May, the SOAS director, Professor Cohen, wrote to the Japanese ambassador at the time, Tadao Kato, saying, quote, we have taken the decision to set up what we hope will be a lively and productive institution here, irrespective of the outcome of the discussions now going on about possible allocation of Japanese funds for these purposes. We take this step as an indication of our commitment to Japanese studies, and of our belief in the importance of the links between this school and Japan. I also found early correspondence with the Japan Foundation, inquiring about the possibility of funding. Some things never change after 40 years. But I think it shows the strength of our relationship to have Tsuroka, Ambassador Tsuroka here and Embassy staff here and Takatori Sun from the Japan Foundation London here tonight. So thank you for your enduring support over the last 40 years. In 1978, sorry, Beasley recorded that SOAS had for many years run courses relating to Japan in the fields of language, literature, geography, history and sociology, but that the school was expanding into the social sciences to include economics, law and politics. The JRC was established back then with 11 members of staff, and one of those 11 is here tonight, Professor Christopher Howell. Where are you, Chris? Chris was initially a specialist on the Chinese economy who extended his interest to include Japan as well. So welcome, or rather should I say thank you for never fully retiring and still being with us here. Richard Sims, also another founding member, wrote to me and said he regrets that he couldn't join us here tonight, saying, in the light of the present day when the JRC is so active, you might be surprised how limited we were in its role in its early years. For the first 10 years we focused mainly on seminar talks, encouraging outside speakers and foreign scholars, but these were far fewer than is now common. Having said that, the JRC did get involved in 1981 in the great Edo exhibition held in the Royal Academy and hosted exhibition talks on Japanese art. The next two chairs were John Sargent, another founding member. He led the first JRC multidisciplinary research project into the Hokkaido region of Japan in the mid to late 80s, and the next chair, Philip Harris, focused on the theme of education and national competitiveness, and he hosted the first one-day workshop on teaching Japanese language as a foreign language in 87. But the activities of the JRC started to really expand in the late 80s with the enthusiasm of the next chair, Kaoru Sugi Hada. In addition to the regular seminar series, he organized conferences on themes including Japan and the Middle East, the Japanese economy and financial systems, and environmental policy. And he also ran an additional seminar at the time with Janet Hunter from the LSE for nearly 11 years on the economic and social history of Japan. He also started the postal bulletin JRC News, which over time developed into our current e-bulletin, and he ensured that the center received dedicated administrative support and its own financial accounts. In correspondence with me this week, Kaoru wished us a happy celebration and said that during his time as chair, Japan's bubble economy meant that it was very much at the center of attention, and such themes were deemed to be important to include, alongside more traditional fields that had been running for some time. The next chair, John Breen, also sent us best wishes from Japan. He said that for him the most memorable activities were creating the JRC annual lecture series in 2003, and thereby establishing our relationship with the Meiji Jingu Research Institute, which continues to run. We had our annual lecture last year. It's now in its 11th year supporting a lecture series, PhD scholarships and small research grants. John said that running the JRC involved very fun initiatives and played an essential part in stimulating research and thinking on Japan, and even commented that until the JRC came along, Japanese academics devoted themselves almost entirely to teaching, so clearly we weren't associable back then. Over time our programs have expanded, of course, so now we have to include more fields, including Japanese art history, anthropology, film and media, religion and music, and later we're going to showcase some of these fields to you. The next five chairs who steered the centre for the last 20 to 25 years are all still members of the JRC, so once we grab good people we don't let them go. Steve Dodd is currently on sabbatical, and Tokyo sent this message saying, serving as the JRC gave me the opportunity to engage with a range of visiting scholars and speakers, offering new and stimulating ideas, and he even went so far as to say the JRC is a jewel in the crown of soas. The other four chairs are here, so I'm going to ask them to take a little bow. Drew Gerstle, Tim Screech, Angus Lockyer, yes, up there, and Chris Gertis at the front. So centre activities continued to flourish with them, too many to mention but I'm going to highlight a few. Drew formed the JRC Steering Committee and held two big conferences on 18th and 19th century cumsine. Tim helped negotiate the arrival of the Sainsbury's Institute, Sysjack, which appointed annual fellows in Japanese art and a large donation to the Soas Library. He also led the later Japan 400 project in 2013-14, which the JRC co-sponsored, and he helped negotiate a very generous donation from the late Kayoko Tsuda, which enabled the JRC to run a Tsuda lecture series and PhD scholarships for 10 years until 2016. Angus launched our JRC annual review now in its 10th year, held the first translation workshop in 2009 with Chris Gertis and organised the British Association for Japanese Studies conference here. He also took our former Soas director, the late Paul Wembley to Japan, for the Meiji Jingu 90th anniversary celebrations in 2010. Chris Gertis bought the editing of the Badges Japan Journal into the JRC Japan Forum, as well as his monograph series, Soas Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan. He also launched our annual WG Beasley Memorial lecture now in its 5th year and named, of course, after our founder William Beasley, which almost brings us full circle. William Beasley during his lifetime was made a fellow of the British Academy, as have Chris Howe, Drew and Tim being made fellows as well. These are merely the highlights over the decades. Many, many others in the room, other JRC members have contributed significantly. David Hughes is in the audience, who, there he is, this year, this year was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun from the Japanese government for a career promoting the understanding of Japanese music. Now, you might ask, are there no women in Japanese studies at Soas? While, well, it's true that we were scarce on the ground in the 11 founding members, I think there was one woman, but I'm pleased to say that we now have 30 academic staff members, plus 30 research associates and visiting scholars at any one time, and around half are women. You'll be pleased to know I did a quick test. So, as somebody who researches gender in the workplace, I'm proud to be the first female chair of the JRC in its 40-year history, but this is merely historical accident. As any one of the great female colleagues in this room could be standing here too, so I want them to stand up too. Barbara, Japanese linguistics, Barbara Pizzconi, Lucia, religion. We're going to hear more from her later. Brazaldus, film and media. Meri Arichi, art history. Yoshiko Jones, sensei. Kashiwagi sensei? Can I say, Kashiwagi sensei is retiring after 30 years, teaching language here at Soas. Is that correct? We don't want her to go. Fujiko, our Soas librarian, may be here as well. Fujiko sensei couldn't make it, and of course, the wonderful Jane Savory without whom we would not function on a daily basis. So, like the chairs before me, I hope I too am leaving my mark on the JRC. I led the EU-funded executive training programme for Japan with Chris Goedas. I organised the Dulwich Boys Centenary celebration that we had of Japanese studies here. I've overseen the annual Sasakawa Scholarships programme generously funded by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. Thank you, Brendan, where are you for your enduring support of Japanese studies? And I also led the bid for the JRC to be the new institutional home for the British Association of Japanese Studies. And with support from the Japan Foundation, Toshibo and Japan Sports Council, I established our new sports symposia series, which will run until Tokyo Olympics 2020. While I was reading through the records to prepare for tonight, I was struck by two things. The first was the fantastically rich and diverse range of activities that we've done over the years, and I really could only mention a few. And also the enthusiasm of all the JRC members recording those activities. At the same time, I was also struck by the constant concern for Japanese studies in terms of funding and sustainability. And yet here we still are 40 years later in the spirit of Fuwaku. Fuwaku is very difficult to translate and maybe the ambassador can help me in a moment, but I'm going to offer one very loose and lengthy translation. Standing steady without hesitation, following the right course past 40. So very long translation. I'm pleased to announce that in our 40th year of the JRC seminar series, we have for the first time received a donation to sponsor the seminars this year from Mr Ichikawa, who is president of Ichikawa June, a customer relations and advertising company in Japan. And this is thanks to the friendship between Ichikawa Sun and our JRC senior fellow Steven McEnally. So what I would like to do is use this first donation to launch an initiative called the 4040 Fuwaku Fund. And the goal is to sustain the JRC through the next 40 years with a target of 40 companies, or individuals or institutions. So 4040 is sponsoring at least one or contributing to one JRC activity a year. No donation too small, all are welcome. So I might not be around to see that, come to its fruition in 2058, but I'm confident that the women and the men who stare at the JRC going forward can carry on the momentum of Fuwaku. Thank you. I'd now like to call upon His Excellency Ambassador Tsurulka to say a few words. Good evening, everyone. I'm amazed that, well, first of all, I have to apologise that I am here for the first time. Even though I've been in London for two years and now three, four months, I just realized that this really is the centre. The name centre represents the institution only too well. I'm meeting all my friends that I've met since my arrival in London who have worked very hard to promote relations between Japan and UK. The relationship between our two countries is indeed very precious and I would say priceless. I don't know if you could put a price on relationship, but to me it is indispensable, especially today. In order for Japan and UK to collaborate and work together, we need to enhance mutual understanding. It is really rewarding for me as ambassador here in UK to have so many people, and we just heard the history of 40 years. Of course, this is also preceded by Sawas celebrating Centenary two years ago where my priestess, Ambassador Hayashi, attended. It is based on having a real understanding of each other and without which collaboration never works, because countries in a way survive forever. Good or bad, it's your judgement. The Japanese emperor has been forever, so does the British monarchy. I am ambassador to the court of St James. First, I think UK and Japan, Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Japan has indeed a very, very strong basis to promote friendship to the service of the world, because two countries alike cannot survive without stability and prosperity in the whole of the globe. And as two countries that can make a difference, Great Britain, of course, has been making a difference for many, many centuries, having ruled the world at one time, but still continue to be a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and a strong voice in all issues around the world, including global issues. The Conference on Endangered Species, which will focus on illicit trade of ivory, for example, is being hosted here in London as the force conference of the kind. It's a British initiative. A Japanese parliamentary minister, a lady, by the way, must have arrived and that's why I will have to leave and host dinner for her after this. I'm sorry to say that, but this is the kind of initiatives and work that UK has been promoting and Japan on our part have also tried to do our own contribution to the world. But no one country can sustain or improve or enhance global prosperity anymore. Unless we work together, we cannot ensure peace and stability as well as prosperity that will benefit all. And in order to have a very reliable partner who you can trust, you need to understand and you need to know each other. And this is the great contribution that SOAS and GRC has been making over the last four years. 1978 is two years after I joined the Foreign Ministry. So I'm a bit older than GRC in professional career, I should say. I am still surviving. It's a good initiative to call for another 40 years of the good work of GRC and I hope that there will be supporters and participants who will keep this tradition alive. We can all be very proud and I'm not individually contributing to this, but I'm very happy that my government has consistently promoted the work of SOAS and in particular GRC. I need to mention one name that I'm indebted to since my arrival in London who recently passed away, unfortunately, and that's Sir Hugh Cortazzi, who is a graduate of SOAS, who has pioneered promoting Japanese understanding in the UK and left a legacy that we can all benefit in the form of many writings and also old maps of Japan, Sainsbury Institute in Norwich has a collection. And I think it's his past that we are now asked to follow because there are many precedents, many people who have made today happen and it is up to us now to continue that work. I may not be the oldest person in the room but we need to depend on the younger generation to continue the good tradition that we have inherited and it is up to us now that we may be leaving a few years time to make certain that this tradition continues on and the academic excellence of the London University, SOAS and GRC continue to flourish. One last word. I really am very grateful that a foreign person, a non-Japanese person has taken the initiative of establishing GRC and has maintained the work all along. It is a gratitude that I must express as a Japanese. It would have been very difficult for a Japanese to do it and that is the basis of the collaboration that I think we can trust and continue to rely on each other. Thank you all very much and congratulations. Thank you Ambassador and I know that you've got a busy schedule and you have to leave and you can't join us for sake but maybe another time. Thank you for coming along, we very much appreciate it. So now we're going to take you on a little tour of the kinds of research that we do here at SOAS and I've got eight GRC members and I've asked them to speak for five minutes each which is really difficult for academics because they just like to drone on. So eight of us are going to talk for five minutes each, hopefully nice visual presentation so about 40 to 45 minutes showing you what we do, showcasing what we do at SOAS here. First up is Andrew Gerstle. Andrew Gerstle. Thank you Helen for organising all of this. You did a great job so far and thank you all for coming. I was afraid this great big hole might be sort of empty but it's nice to see we have so many friends and supporters. Speaking about telling your whole life and I'm one of the older ones in five minutes is not a pleasant prospect actually. My little theme of the five minutes is serendipity or chance. So many times things happen that lead us to we don't expect that things happen. In my case when I was 19 without any knowledge or interest in Japan a chance came to go to study at Sophia University in front of my eyes and I just said oh this sounds like a fun adventure and it led me around the world from America to Japan but also Australia for 12, 13 years and finally to London. Why did I continue to research when I was at Columbia University I had a really excellent Shakespeare teacher actually and I at the same time had Donald Keane's course where we were reading all of Chikamatsu's plays and so the idea of tragedy intrigued me and so I went on to try to initially do comparative things but then didn't follow that exactly but the first book was on Chikamatsu and his plays particularly the concept of tragedy. Japan has a living, well we have slides don't we actually? In looking at the plays when I started doing that one of the fascinating things about Japanese theatre is that really there isn't, at least in the West there isn't a comparative one that the theatrical tradition is completely alive in other words Shakespeare has performed today but the tradition is broken several times we don't have tradition of performer to performer performer from as we do with the know or the puppet theatre or kabuki so you have this live sense and I became fascinated with that for example this is a text of a play which is really difficult the ambassadors left but I was going to ask him if he could read it but one of the fascinating things is that these texts were published with notation for the voice and so since these were a practice test people read them out loud and they formed them even until much more recent times so it was fun to explore this kind of aspect as the way to bring the text to life in order to take this further then I guess one of the stories is that one thing leads to another and then getting interested in this musical aspect I was a musicologist so I got to William Maugham and a Japanese musicologist to work together to explore the music and publish a book Theatre is Music on that then because the puppet theatre which I dealt with Shikamatsu is based in Osaka I decided I should do Osaka Kabuki and this led to a whole other world because when I approached Tim Clark who's here about doing an exhibition at the British Museum because it turned out that when you start doing Kabuki it's different, this case there's the text but in Kabuki it's the performers Kabuki didn't publish text they text her the ephemeral moment of actual stage performance and so it disappears each time there's playwrights but they write a new play every single time so it's the actors who were in control and the actors never gave up control like they did in Europe the directors and the playwrights themselves they were the bosses and so it was the focus on the actor and one of the things that became fascinating was the role of an actor of Sunimono this is where I switched to becoming interested in the visual because actors are at the bottom of Japanese society in the Tokyo period they're beyond the pale there's this class system but they're virtually outcast they're non-people but through the arts this is one of the things that's fascinating I'll come back to just right at the end of my little talk is that through poetry through haiku or other kinds of gatherings they were able and they're using a pen name were able to circulate with all kinds of other people at different levels even though they were at the bottom so one of the things they circulated with samurai, with courtiers, with Buddhist priests the sense and also women were able to participate in these sort of worlds and one of the things that's fascinating is how extensive was the activity of people in performing groups which continues today I suppose in Bukatsudo at a high school or a university this sense of socializing through club sort of activities one of the fascinating things about Osaka Kabuki different than Edo Kabuki is that when they started representing the actors they did it not as Bijinga, not as beautiful pictures but as men in drag when they did it and so this was sort of fascinating they did realistic portraits compared to more the commercial aspect that was in Edo in the Tokyo tradition and I became fascinated with this you can see here that I don't know if the actor would have been very happy with that he's sort of chubby big nose, he's got wrinkles he looks, it is a man playing performing a woman role this was fascinating consciously done this sort of tradition of realism so I began looking why did this, why was this artist dealing with this realism and looking for his his teacher and this was another one of the serendipity moments I was at Nichibunkan centre in Kyoto and looking for Sette's works Tsukioka Sette who was one of his teachers and found this book which was published in 1989 in Switzerland a small publisher which was a facsimile of a Sette illustrated book in a completely Japanese style with a chitsu and the whole sort of thing would have been very expensive but it was a Shunga book it was a book, a parody of a woman of a conduct book a very serious sort of conduct book and I started reading it this was published in Germany well Switzerland in Zurich by a German author and to be known by a scholar from the early part of the century just tell me when my time is going nearly up it won't last much longer the fascination was that the book, even though it was erotic and lively, was serious it was also presenting a different type of ideal woman, a lively one a partner in a conjugal relationship and so I became, then I looked and there wasn't any research on this and the Onadaigaku this parody of the other one no one knew about it anymore so it was like, what's the matter why is it something that's disappeared and then I realized this taboo and this led to the big Shunga Exhibition but finally there's a censored picture Zurich Ecosette but finally I'm sort of now looking to return to this theme of the way that these aesthetic salons, the poetry salons art salons, performing salons were such an absolutely essential element of adult period society that continues to modern but particularly even in post-war but at least into the Taisho period as the fundamental way that people socialized and one of the important things is that when you entered one of these groups you took a pen name so you left your status behind there's a clear indication that these were egalitarian even sometimes the Japanese called them utopian spaces temporary spaces but these were the ones where they collaborated and supported the arts painting, book publishing all sorts of things and this is the stage I met now of returning to this idea this is the one where the kouto courtier was working with kabuki actors and this is a commemoration where the fellows died they all got to get this magnificent this piece such as a huge print piece that they published in commemoration so just that I guess it's just the fascination Japan and then the leading to another is my little theme I suppose thank you I'm representing here religion a field that has been studied for almost 20 years this is my 20 years actually and it's been studied in various ways but I'm going to continue a bit certainly the talk that just started because while religion is traditionally studied through texts with an interest in doctrine of one or the other school I've been interested in studying it in performative and visual terms and in looking at religion in terms of the intersections between different lineages or between traditions that are understood as discrete but in fact have many more point of contact so I'm afraid to say that despite I'm one of the few women in the field I'm working really on the world of men, mostly men practitioners so I thought I'll give you two examples of what I've been doing on this and one has to do with the strategies of ritualisation that transformed a text and in this case I have a very important text in the East Asian tradition, the Lotus Sutra that is usually interpreted doctrinally by 10 high schools by very important philosophical representatives that in Japan received great attention from the point of view of tantric Buddhism and especially in terms of ritual of tantric ritual where each of the elements of the scriptures wether the Buddhas or the stupas became elements in the ritual procedures performed in front of coming and Buddhas actually and produced new iconographies a mandala of the Lotus Sutra such as two examples of it and this is particularly interesting because it's not I'm basically a medievalist a historian of religion focusing on the medieval period but stretching on both sides of this very long period in Japanese history this is a very important example in Niko in the Tokugawa period what is interesting about this type of a mandalaisation of a scripture ritualisation of a scripture is that in turn icons produced in Japan served as as model to shape other icons and other interpretations of Buddhism and of its devotional practices and I've spent my time working on the way in which a monk that is not usually associated with tantric schools called Nichiren as a 13th century monk reimagined the images that you've seen just before in a calligraphic way an iconographic that became a very important object of worship and that in turn propelled of different types of visualisations of the sutra the second example I wanted to give you has to do with the symbiotic relation between Buddhism and what today we call Shinto and there I've been interested in the way in which Japanese interpreters devised a combinaturi understanding of the gods of Japan and even a main deity of what we today consider the Shinto Pantheon such as a Materaso that you see there in some historical periods was understood in a Buddhist shape as a Buddhist deity we see it here riding a horse as a Bodhisattva in a double form as the Buddha Dainichi with all the elements of accessories of a Buddhist deity and such interpretations of Shinto what we call Shinto Shinto things let's say affected also the the envisioning of the regalia of the symbols of imperial power now here I have an example that is actually the British Museum one of the most eminent examples of how the Buddhists saw the sacred regalia that became vajras and stupas five elements stupas and this is a this is not just a medieval type of understanding because many of the images we have are actually from the 17th, 18th century and done recently research in parts of Japan where archives are not very much looked in terms of religious elements and there are many of these representations across the country the very last thing has to do with the way in which the importance of conceptualizing practice in visual terms reached almost its extreme in the way in which practitioners imagined their bodies this is what I've called mandalic bodies many archives in recent years that I've been privileged to work at have unveiled a great number of diagrams and visualizations of the body the body seem to have remained extremely important in the Japanese thinking about religious practice so the body is reimagined as a mandala or these little letters that you see there are deities the deities of the mandalas and is put at the center of the process of the generation of the sacred and so it is transformed the dualism of the human body is transformed in the perfected moment that can deliver salvation this is one of my favorite images of the beginning of an embryological process that engendered sacralization in Japan and again these are medieval things but there are plenty of it in the in the major period as well and I'll stop here thank you we're using this it's more important to look at the screen but I don't mind you looking at me if you wish to do so just put on a stopwatch so I don't speak for too long so I'll add my congratulations to ourselves it's not often that you get to say that but it's of course not a single persons project the impasse has said that no country can operate on their own and as academics we all know no scholar operates on their own we all know what we know by speaking to each other so the GRC has always been a fantastic space in which we can do that and I understand that thanks to friendship across Japan and Britain we now have additional sponsorship for our Wednesday seminars and this may lead to slightly better wine being offered in the future I wanted to give you a little sort of personal anecdote to link into my research talk some students in the room hear me talk about my work and some colleagues hear me talk we all talk to each other but of course a lot of our experiences as Professor Gerstle intimated they come out of actually very personal experiences we bumped into something we did something we talked to somebody it wasn't exactly an academic event that generated an academic idea so in my case it was I walked the talk I door and as you all know the talk I door is the road that links to Otoado it's almost exactly 500 km if it had one more bend in it it would have been exactly 500 km it's 498.6 km which given that they didn't have a concept of a km is quite amazing so anyway I walked it takes 13 days of continuous walking all through the day without any stops but it's not a difficult walk and it's one that almost everyone that we work on as historians of Japan up until the present period did and I wanted on my own body to experience what it was to walk this road that almost everyone I'd ever read about had done and all sorts of things come into your mind as you walk as some elderly person told me along the way that your mind controls your hands but your feet control your mind and you do think a lot of things as you're walking for 13-14 days non-stop Anyway walking on a talk I door are many beautiful parts it's not all beautiful but some parts are very beautiful and this is one going through the mountains not very far from the foot of Mount Fuji and just to prove it, there I am but within Mount of course there's an experience many people did but one thing particularly stands out as an Edo historian and also a reader of Japanese literature is the tales of Issei so one of the greatest classics of Japanese literature that continue to be read throughout history pretty much and it's just had a new Penguin Classics translation appeared the tales of Issei it's fairly random stories from round about the year 950 but one important section of it tales of a person who takes the talk talk I door highway this person who's not named just called The Man walks out of Kyoto he's sick of Kyoto he doesn't want to be there anymore he walks off into the countryside and he experiences all these places along the way now that book was a editorial text owned by the court we should remember that much of what we today call Japanese literature was owned by families and you couldn't just read it you couldn't buy copies of it even if you couldn't understand it without a lot of exegetical material and that suddenly was changed in the earlier period so something that we might call Japanese literature comes into being at that time and as an historian I'm interested in the course of the illustrations work with that the so-called Saga editions the first time that Issei was published easily to read these are very large books it's way bigger than A4 page text is very spread out so almost anyone can read it and it's also illustrated we see two points here along the way the talk I door from going he went from Kyoto I walked from Tokyo the other way same effect but it's going past first of all a spot called The Eight Bridges followed by Mount Fuji and along the path this person in the story takes we can pinpoint things along the real road and subsequent travellers would as they walk think to themselves that man in the ancient story when he was at this spot this real actual spot that I'm walking past now cos the road has not changed he thought this and he wrote that verse and so somebody would then try to conjure up in their own mind the same sort of feeling and they might even write a verse that linked to that I was not able to do that unfortunately but people who travelled also then created these spots along the talk I door in their own gardens almost any so called Japanese garden today will have one wonky bridge in it always has why? because it's that eight plank bridge that begins the story of the man's exit from Kyoto and moving to the west when he sat there as the original text tells you he and his friends wrote a verse on the theme of the sadness of travel the regret about leaving people that you love behind and the verse that they wrote was so poignant that they wept into their rice which swelled up from the salt of their tears it's a beautiful idea of course it's an overstatement so people that had to walk along the road for business purposes for me a pleasure as I did or for pilgrimages would think about these things along the way people who could not walk along the highway not everyone could take the time off women would find it very difficult to find excuses to walk they would recreate in the space of a garden a similar spot where you could then think the same feelings and that is really what the taiko taokai door was doing for people throughout much of history but my final point is that if you walk along past this place called the eight plank bridge is beyond towards Fuji you pass Shizuoka which is where the Tokugawa family castle was talking to the Yasi retired to Shizuoka so actually what happens in the Edo period is this old story which you can now walk because the road is in nice condition becomes a story of Tokugawa power the eight plank bridge or the eight bridges you can translate in ways is where the Tokugawa family originated from and they themselves made their own journey to this area where they found the castle and then went over Fuji and then they ended up governing from Edo and in Edo you see there Mount Fuji rising behind and beyond Mount Fuji is the road that takes you to Kyoto thank you I struggle with feeling appropriate and socially appropriate so give me just a moment here so this is my 10th year at Sawass and I'm a historian of gender and class I brought out my first book in my first year here at Sawass and I just finished my second monograph over this summer and it will come out next year so instead of going into sort of the overview of the book which is titled here Mobilizing Japanese Youth I thought I would share one chapter one part of the story that I narrate the whole book is an examination of a conflict between generations the transwar generation those who had grown up and come of age as teenagers in the 1920s and 1930s who after World War II re-assumed control and power in Japan and their conflict with the children who were born in the late 40s and 50s and come of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s this conflict for control is something that continues on well into the 1980s I'm particularly interested in extremist politics and so in this book I look at how the far right and the far left are seeking to mobilize this young generation of Japanese in the late 1960s and 1970s one chapter looks specifically at the emergence of the Kagekiha the radical leftist factions of the late 60s and early 1970s here pictured in their battle dress as they are marching on Haneda airport in 1968 the battles that emerge in Tokyo in Osaka called the Osaka War and the Tokyo War of 1969 are really quite contentious they determine the overall course of radical politics in Japan and some historians get lost in the maze of ideologies and I'm not interested in the competition of ideologies I'm interested more in how various political factions are seeking to use their ideas to mobilize and persuade young people to engage in radical politics to the point of throwing bombs robbing banks and engaging in terrorist activities central to this chapter is the story of Shigey Nobu Fusako who is one of the founders of Sekigun or the Japanese Red Army what's interesting about Shigey Nobu is that she's often misunderstood as just another university radical what's fascinating about her is that she was a night school student at university she was working the day as an OL as an office lady at the Kikomon Corporation she came from what some student radicals refer to as a petty bourgeois family but actually her father was an alcoholic failed shopkeeper and her family grew up with significant financial disparity so that when she was looking at her life at the age of 16 or 17 she chose to go to vocational school to become an office worker and didn't dream of university until the idea was introduced to her at Kikomon by one of her fellow workers who said, hey, you can go to night school at Waseda right excuse me, at Meiji Meiji University over the course of the 1960s she becomes deeply involved in radical politics and by the late 1960s she's hanging out with a group of musicians among others and so as I'm writing this chapter developing this story I got to delve into the emergence of punk rock in Japan Zuno Keisatsu was a garage band or a garage rock band that by the early 1970s is responsible for releasing the first proto punk rock album not just in Japan but it dates about six months before the release of the first punk rock album anywhere right and so in pulling this together we get to look at their first release which has the first three tracks which the fans call the revolutionary trilogy and it's overlap with Sekigun or the Japanese Red Army the declaration of world revolutionary war which is often considered to be an anthem of the radical bomb throwers of the early 1970s in its release of March 1972 is the lead singer Panta or Nakamoto's interpretation of the 1969 manifesto of the Japanese Red Army as it's screamed out in this angry vibrant recitation accompanied by firecrackers to mimic gunfire then moving on into the poetry of the Red Army soldier and then the final track of the revolutionary trilogy pick up a gun pick up a gun it's released and banned within five weeks no surprise six weeks later the Japanese Red Army launches the first airport terrorist attack in history this is the attack at Laud airport in Tel Aviv the three airport attackers the three terrorists Okamoto Kozo, Yasuyuki and Okutaira Tsuyoshi were recruited and trained by Shige Nobu in camps of the Palestinian PFLP People's Liberation Army for Palestinian Liberation alongside other radicals including the Red Army faction from West Germany and the Red Brigades from Italy this is the emergence of 1970s terrorism and the aftermath of the attack Japan goes through this moment when the international face of terrorism is Japanese and how people respond to this is fascinating and looking at the conflict between the generations in the late 1970s and into the 1980s is part of what the book does anyway so that's look for the book, it'll be out next year and we'll move on to Helen now, thank you I'm not sure I really prepared this part actually so my journey is from textiles to rugby I'm calling it it's taken place for over 20 years now I started off for my PhD looking at women in the textile industry it would be nice to say that I came out of that being able to make beautiful textiles but unfortunately that was not true I looked at that industry because it was a big employer of women in Japan in the pre-war and post-war years and in particular I was looking at the post-war years to see how they remodeled the image of the industry that was accused of exploiting female workers in the pre-war and in particular I looked at that industry looking at how it set a blueprint I argued it set a blueprint for how women were employed in post-war Japan and many of those threads we can see running through post-war Japan for example employing older women just as part-time workers and not as full-time workers so that was my first study and from that I moved into looking at the same time period so moving away from this rising demand for female labour and industries like the textiles wanting women to come and work for them because of economic growth and economic demand looking at women as consumers as well so the growing affluence of women working and men working and growing wages and women as consumers particularly of home appliances and as we know Japan was building up its electronic and home appliances business manufacturing at this period in time the 60s and 70s and in particular I focused on one home appliance you can see there the automatic rice cooker which was pioneered by Toshiba the first one in the world where you could put rice and water in there turn it on go away do nothing come back and you had perfectly cooked rice so I was looking at the technology of that I was looking at how they used women for advertising but I was also looking to see how these time-saving appliances released women from the chore of housework and therefore of course enabled them to work part-time and things like that so there was a connection to my previous study over the years I've continued to look at this issue of gender and work more recently I've looked of course at a policy a binomics womanomics looking at gender equality in the workplace over 20 years you can dip in and out of it and see what's changed sometimes it seems like not much has changed sometimes it seems like there is progress being made so I've been writing about that recently as well and particularly arguing that womenomics will not work in Japan unless men are included in womenomics as well so really it should be gendernomics that women can't go into a Japanese employment system that is designed for men it just won't work so that has been my argument in that sphere then I did a project on sport and this actually was something I came across during my PhD I was looking at as I said the textile industry and there was volleyball was played in textile companies for a very long time and it was about giving the workers some physical exercise after working in factories all day it was about well-being and team work and health building so for a very long time textile companies invested in volleyball but they became so good at it and competitive at it in the 60s that this one team won the women's gold medal for volleyball at the Tokyo 1964 Olympics and that team was basically one textile companies team they were so good so I looked at that story I went back to my PhD and looked at that again and I also looked at the spread of volleyball after that and particularly the spread to what they call mama son volleyball so the spread of sports to housewives and mothers so not just young women playing sport but older women being encouraged to play sport as well so that was that project and that led me to look at the staging of the Tokyo 64 Olympics as well and what it meant to stage a mega sporting event and that has led me into my project that I'm working on now so sorry they were called the witches of the Orient they were nicknamed the witches of the Orient that team that won the 1964 gold medal and I've come across this team that have been nicknamed iron men of the north and they played rugby that's the team on the left that's their 7th consecutive win in the old Japan championships and that team was from Kameishi and many of you may know that Kameishi is in the Torhoka region was one of the cities very badly hit in the tsunami and Japan next year is staging the rugby world cup so this is another big sporting mega event a building up to Tokyo 2020 of course in the following year and basically it leads on from textiles in the same way that textile companies were looking for a sport to provide wellbeing and teamwork and eventually a competitive sport for women iron and steel industries and iron and steel companies in Japan used rugby as the sport for men it was seen as an appropriate, masculine sport for men to play and those teams became very competitive and good at rugby as well basically I was just looking for an excuse to go out for field work next year and watch the All Blacks win the rugby world cup so hopefully I can do that but the threads go through there and Kameishi is very interesting because it's the only purpose built stadium so the rugby world cup will be staged in 12 cities across Japan and Kameishi is the only purpose built stadium and it's very significant because it's built on the grounds of the junior high school and elementary school that were completely wiped out in the tsunami therefore the staging of it in this small town is quite symbolic and rugby has been used by the town to re-energize the town so rugby is used in these slogans there and the slogan I'm standing there that's a little bit of field work there to reinvigorate people and get people behind the rebuilding of the region so that's my current project thank you right, thank you Helen for pulling this all together when you look at this heading in search of sign of Japanese relations you could pointedly say that there isn't much to look for because Japanese and Chinese relations are notoriously bad however I have tried to venture into that as I was also travelling Europe to come here because it was as well as much a personal journey as it was an academic one I started my career as a PhD candidate in a project looking at how Japan appropriated other Asian countries based at the University of Tria which is for those of you not familiar with German geography basically pretty close to in the middle of nowhere it's a very beautiful campus in the middle of nowhere, it's very green and belongs to a very small and very insignificant city so nothing ever was set out for me to end up at SOAS in London however shortly before completing my PhD I by chance as many other things happened in this in these talks SOAS had a job opening and within five minutes of this job opening being released through the European Association for Japanese Studies mailing list about five people had sent me the advert so I applied not thinking I would indeed end up here, but I ended up here in quite the opposite of the middle of nowhere finishing my PhD and here on and eventually also publishing it as a book so I did find some sign of Japanese relations albeit only on screen and I've put it here because it is part of the SOAS series Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan so there is a little SOAS logo on the book which I'm very proud of however as it always happens with professional and academic journeys there are a lot of loose ends lying around when you complete a research in my case I'm still working busily as you can see and tying them up so my loose ends are more memory because at some stage during my project I had to leave out images of wartime China representations of wartime China in the contemporary as well as in the present so by no means that Japanese war memory tends to concentrate on the perhaps most iconic picture I put here there are many more facets to Japanese war memory then we tend to think here and also the production context that shapes these kinds of productions what can be produced how can it be produced so in particular currently under the current government there is a lot of debate about what kind of direction the media can take or kind of function the media can fulfil and that then in a sense also leads to how things even if it is fiction can be produced and what is acceptable to be to put out there my journey is far from being complete but I hope to be able to continue here at Sawa's because it was one of the best chances to actually really end up here in such a vibrant research environment as the JLC is and with this I pass on to something very related hello my name is Ryotaro Miara I am an anthropologist and lecturer in international management Japan and Korea at the School of Finance and Management one might ask how can anthropologists be hired at the School of Finance and Management but it sounds like commercialized anthropologists it sounds like less anthropological but that's another story by the way we have real anthropologists next to me so but as shown I would like to talk about latest research fieldwork relating to the anime so as shown here I'm interested in the global spread of anime Japanese animation by the way Japanese animation is called anime so my overarching question is how can we understand this phenomena the global spread of anime and my aspiration is in understanding what does it mean for Japan and what does it mean for Asia and for the world at large so here are some kind of spectacular symbolic picture that shows anime's global popularity so they are all pictures of anime conventions being held around the world including at Mumbai Manila, Los Angeles Paris and London of course and they attract hundreds of thousands of people every year and the numbers of tendons are continuously growing so so definitely something is going on and many people have tried to give intellectual explanations to this global spread of anime so there is a kind of a brief list of the accumulation of debate some argue that it enhances Japan's soft power some other people argue it will save Japanese economy and another way of capitalism it enhances more reciprocal creative exchange it is due to anime's high quality of artworks it nuances consumer experience it re-centres globalization it is a sign of the rise of the post for this lifestyle and it subversed the global dominance of Hollywood so these are all the accumulation of the list of what has been already discussed in terms in regarding the global spread of Japanese animation but what I myself found in this accumulation of debate is that they don't really look at the business people involved in anime the main focus of the previous arguments is anime's creators and fans and most of them are not based on their observations regarding the business side of anime and I found this void is very kind of counterintuitive because anime is one of the most commercially oriented enterprises in any other forms of animation in the world so what I decided to do is they decided to see anime's globalization from the perspective of its business people hoping to provide different intellectual angle in understanding anime's globalization so I conducted one year 12 months field work in an entrepreneurial start-up venture that tried to expand anime business from Japan to India why I chose India is another story but the company's objective is to establish an Indo-Japanese online merchandising platform through which the Japanese animation sector could distribute its products to the India market in order to streamline that transnational flow of anime goods Ikiyama-san in the center Ikiyama-san the founding entrepreneur by the way Ikiyama-san is a fake name so you cannot find anyone by searching it Ikiyama-san he's a founding entrepreneur in my central field work interlocutor so he kind of negotiated both with Japan Japanese animation sector in Tokyo and Indian distributors in Delhi so I accompanied Ikiyama-san and observed all his kind of activities that took place so these are the pictures I took in the field so picture on the left this is me obviously attending Japanese popular culture festival held in Delhi and welcome in the Indian way and picture on the upper right hand side that man in white shirt he's Ikiyama-san so I took his picture while he working in his office in Tokyo and the pictures on the lower left hand side is the picture of Ikiyama-san negotiating one of his prospective business partner in Delhi so I took this picture in Delhi and they are kind of discussing the provisions of joint venture agreements so I kind of did this kind of field work in 2014 and 15 and I am now working on this ethnography to make it into the monograph and I'm kind of still exploring the theoretical implications of field work but what I am preliminary thinking is that the global spread of anime tells us a bit less about how people are already connected globally but more about how people proactively make transnational connections in terms of their differences like differences in the business custom between Japan and India or the differences between creators and business people so I think they by so I think that how people by having the perspective of the business aspects might kind of give some kind of implications of this kind of proactive connection to creating activities so previous arguments on anime's globalization is a bit too euphoric in my view in celebrating how we are connected in terms of and so are we already connected in terms of anime but on the other hand the business perspective of anime's globalization would I believe highlight the dynamics of the moment in which we proactively make connections that are overcoming our differences like Ikeama-san tried to do what hard to do in his business which is still continuing and his company is still growing so that is good for anthropologists to have this kind of continuous relationship with the angelokitus but that is what I am doing right now in this introduction for my research thank you very much right thank you very much I'm the last obstacle between you so I'll try to make it very short and it's actually quite interesting to see that Mihara-san and I we share quite a lot of things obviously we're both anthropologists we both work on animation although as you will see in a quite different sense and we all perhaps have as anthropologists a slight fetish for diagrams because I also I want to show you later on I came up with this diagram I just got here I don't really have a book to pedal or anything I would just like to make a brief argument about the idea of animism my first field work was on hoarding in Japan so I was working with people who can't throw things away helping them clean out their flats and when doing so what often struck me was that there are two different kinds of explanations that are being put forward on one side if you talk to folklorists or to Japanese cultural commentators or experts they all say well it may have to do with the idea that in Shintoism you have a notion that things are imbued with life that there is some kind of soul in things and this can also be applied to modern material culture this is something that has very long roots here on the left you can see an illustration from the Tsukumagami Ki then you have sort of a robot and of course dolls as being sort of something element so this idea is still around and of course the Japanese government is very interesting in promoting this idea because the idea that robots are also inhabited by souls will allow you to take care for the elderly with a brand new robot population so I was thinking about this idea of animism and technoanimism this is the way it is currently formulated and I'm not going to bore you with the details but I want to illustrate a different way to think about animism as animation so literally not as a form of belief but as a form of ritual technology that allows you to imbue things with life so when we talk about that and here's the diagram you may want to think of the different ways in which a thing can come to life and so I use a lot of highfalutin words here on one side of the self you have the idea of catechces a thing can come alive if it's perceived to become one with the body of the person who uses it and this is of course a very well widespread notion in martial arts here Chiba Kazawa sensei for example with the sword on the other side you have the living national treasure Yoshimura Yuki using the fan so this is a very well established idea the thing becomes one with you it becomes part of your body your life force extends through it but that relationship ends as soon as you put it down so what happens if you move towards the other direction the direction of non-self when thing become different from you and there you have a completely different idea of opacity things become sort of secretly imbued with life because they're opaque because we don't know what's happening because we don't know what they are thinking and of course sometimes as in the example on the far right actually statutes do come to life this is the Micarino Amida from the Eicando in Kyoto that miraculously sort of came down from the altar when the priest Eicando was worshiping it so you have an idea of animation that is on the other side of the spectrum that is not familiar that is non-self and then of course you have all kinds of material culture that is in between that constantly changes from being self and non-self but there's another sense in which we can say a thing can come to life and that is when it resists us so the idea of recalcitrance down there and that's quite interesting there's a very interesting research being done on the Ibo this is the new version of the Ibo and if you have an Ibo you know of course if you use it in a traditional room it is quite likely to poke its head through the Shoji screen now when you talk to the engineers they will say well it's because the censors can't pick up the paper but if you talk to the owners they will say no no no because it's the Uchi no Jantan Ibo it's our mischievous little Ibo who does that right and there's a very different understanding of personality and personhoods but that and this is the final point is of course not something that is unique to Japan in many ways you can see here on the other side Basil faulty sort of castigating his car in faulty towers in something that Alfred Gelder the anthropologist called vehicular animism and I think we would all believe in vehicular animism because if the car breaks down especially at a point in time when you really need to use it there's no way you understand that event without attributing some kind of malevolent agency to the car but nobody therefore would say oh the British are animists though that will end with that thank you very much I'm just going to say thank you for coming along and celebrating with us I hope we've given you an insight into the 40 years of the JRC and the kinds of very many topics that we study here that's just the tip of the iceberg and there's no Q&A it's a celebration so I want to invite you to step out the door and join us for wine and sake and food if you go ahead I want to invite all the JRC members everybody who's a member of the JRC to come up here for a celebratory photo everybody else go ahead and start drinking and we'll join you in a second thank you for coming