East Asian Studies

On Naked, Eiko Otake ,Artist-in-ResidenceEiko will share videos from Naked and discuss the process of creating a durational performance and notions of intimacy between audience and performer. She will also reflect on the cultural perceptions of nakedness and nudity, referencing her upbringing in post-war Japan and current world affairs.

Chris James, Senior Associate, Regulatory Assistance Project talks about China's plan to improve air quality.

Sustained economic growth and the most significant rate of urbanization ever have transformed China in just a few decades. China's economic growth differs from that of the USA or Europe, as China has grown during a period when the science and public health data about air pollutants and their affects are robust. China. And with nearly every city in China exceeding public health standards for many air pollutants, aggressive actions are needed to reduce pollution. While the Beijing citizen's use of US Embassy air quality data was a cause celebre during the fall of 2011, China has announced plans to require major cities to substantially improve air quality by 2015. These plans now apply to areas covering over half of China's population and more than half of the GDP. require reductions of multiple pollutants at the same time, and a restructuring of the energy sector. What does China's attention to air pollution mean for its economic development? What can the USA or Europe learn from China's focus on environmental problems?

Democracy can be but is not always associated with stronger protections against environmental degradation. Thailand's environmental regime has become stronger over the past two decades and its policy processes more participatory over the last decade. The accompanying environmental gains, however, have been uneven and in some cases have been associated with authoritarian interludes rather than democratic politics

In this talk, I will focus on the emergence and development of tantei shosetsu (lit. sleuthing fiction), or horror/mystery fiction more broadly, as a case study in the development of modernism in early twentieth-century Japan. First, I will show how the genre served as a medium through which writers sought to explore and cultivate concerns and techniques historically identified with modernism as a global artistic phenomenon, including the complexities of personal psychology, challenging the epistemological assumption of realism, formal experimentation, and foregrounding the multiplicity of perspectives. Second, I will examine in particular the efforts of the leading benshi and writer, Tokugawa Musei and his benshi performance for French director Jean Epstein's silent film, The Fall of the House of Usher. In doing so, I will discuss some of the facets of Poe's complex reputation within modern Japanese culture, especially his role in the development of Japanese modernism as a multimedia phenomenon.

Assistant professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature, Boston University. Recent work in cognitive narratology has given us a new language with which to talk about the representation of consciousness in narrative. Rather than being localizable in a Cartesian interiority cut off from the world and from others-- what Virginia Woolf called "the dark places of psychology"--consciousness may in fact be "out there" in the web of intersubjective relations and "action-loops" criss-crossing multiple subjects and their environments. In this talk, I apply these insights about consciousness to the field of queer literary studies as a way of understanding of how sexual desire gets attributed to literary narrators and characters. Through close readings of 'homosocial narratives" by Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) and Mori Ogai (1862-1922), I show how desire circulates among multiple agents without ever being "owned" by any of them. This is surprisingly easily mapped in--and perhaps enabled by--literary texts, but may be true of "real life" as well.

About 16,000 Jews who managed to escape from the Third Reich just before the war landed in Shanghai, the only place in the world which did not require a visa for entry. Their survival there depended on the attitudes of the Japanese, who controlled the city after December 1941. But the quality of their daily lives depended on their relationships with their Chinese neighbors. Instead of seeing the refugees as a despised race, as did antisemitic Europeans, or as another group of white colonial oppressors, the Chinese population of Shanghai saw Jews as fellow victims of persecution. Jews and Chinese in Shanghai developed friendly if somewhat distant relations. But after the war's end, many Chinese wished all whites to leave, and relations became tense. This lecture traces the shifting relationships between Jews and Chinese, as described by former refugees.

In the past thirty years economic reforms have changed almost every facet of Chinese society. Marriage is no exception. Today the divorce rate in the largest Chinese cities is comparable to that of the US and prenuptial agreements are increasingly popular. Dating often entails sexual intimacy and cohabitation is common. Since 2003 a scholar form the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has petitioned the National People's Congress to legalize same sex marriage. Yet there is almost no child bearing outside marriage, parents remain deeply invested in their children's choice of spouse, and intergenerational reciprocity remains strong. Thus post-socialist marriages are pulled in multiple directions. More fragile than in the Mao years, yet still highly valued and nearly universal

In 1994 Matsuo Yumi created a minor sensation with her series, Murder in Balloontown, which parodied the childbirth culture in Japan. Several years later, Aoi Natsumi created a detective series with a midwife detective. Through the exploration of these two series, I will explore changes in attitudes toward childbirth in low fertility Japan and offer some thoughts on why detective fiction is a genre which allows this kind of analysis.