he historiography of postwar Japan often tells the stories of those with the status and power to make themselves remembered – usually those who were members of elite families or institutions, with social, political or financial power. They were, moreover, often male. Yet we have ignored many other submerged voices which tell a qualitatively different story. Historians have never seen these figures as providing an intellectual or coherent response to the conditions of postwar Japan, perhaps because they did not belong to institutions or recognized organizations and movements.

The burgeoning social scientific debate about urban commons rarely focuses on the visual aspects of public space, the most elementary shared good in cities. In the former Japanese capital of Kyoto, however, the townscape has been intensely debated over the last decades. Reacting to widespread discontent with the previous laissez-faire policy, the city now boasts one of the strictest building codes of the nation.

In 1988, the Japan Foundation expressed concerns that as a symptom of declining interest in Japan among American readers, sales of Japanese literature in translation were falling. Thirty years later, following the reintroduction of the National Book Awards for Translated Literature in 2018, two titles originally published in Japanese (The Emissary and Tokyo Ueno Station) received the top prize while a third (The Memory Police) reached the shortlist.

In 2023 Japan will assume the presidency of the Group of 7 (G7) and host the forty-ninth summit of this informal gathering of leaders in May. This talk will look ahead and outline what to expect of Japan's presidency within the historical context of its participation in the G7 since 1975. It will also focus on an overlooked aspect of global summitry - logos. Global summitry does not simply revolve around discussions across the summit table or resulting communiqués.

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Join us for the Nissan Institute's newest conference on the 17th and 18th of February at the Säid Business School. The event brings together great minds from across business, government, and academia to discuss what we can learn from Japan to help us navigate our future. Two days of free talks, networking opportunities (and even free Sake and Sushi!).

----What is the conference about?-----

On February 2, 1901, the Krishna Press in Bhagalpur published 1000 copies of Bābū Bṛj Bihārī Lāl Maṇḍal’s Mithilā Nāṭak. This was an ambitious undertaking for a small-town press since Maṇḍal was still to gain renown as a playwright and poet.

As Ambedkarite Buddhists have increasingly migrate outside India in the past thirty years, they interact with other Buddhist traditions and socio-political contexts that prompt new considerations of Buddhism and marginality. Ambedkar’s rationalist vision of Buddhism focused on social transformation, explicitly responding to caste-based discrimination in modern India. Ambedkarite Buddhists carry on this legacy while exploring further what Buddhism means to them.