Though little studied, letter sutras help us recover the stories of love, loss, and mourners turning to the things left behind in the wake of death to make something meaningful. This talk explores Japanese medieval makers who reused and recycled the epistles of their dead for the copying of sacred Buddhist text to create potent palimpsests known as letter sutras – objects that have lurked beneath the surface of Japanese material culture and punctuated the personal histories of famous figures since the ninth century.

A growing literature finds high returns to firms with legislative connections. Less attention has been paid to returns from bureaucratic connections and to organizations beyond for-profit firms. Using data recording the first post-bureaucracy position occupied by all former civil servants in Japan, Dr. Incerti reveals a bifurcated job market for former bureaucrats. High-ranking officials from elite economic ministries are more likely to join for-profit firms, where they generate returns such as increased government loans and positive stock market reactions.

Professor Jones will summarize a recent paper in which he offers a new heuristic for understanding how and why constitutional claims are litigated in Japan. He offers a number of common features to the small and seemingly unrelated instances in which the Supreme Court of Japan has found a statute unconstitutional. He uses this heuristic to understand certain constitutional challenges currently in the news, including those relating to marriage equality and spousal surnames. 

This presentation is based on a collaborative research project with Tadashi Iwami (Hokkaido University) and Marc Barcelos (Aarhus University), exploring how Japan’s longest-serving prime minister Abe Shinzō strategically used emotional rhetoric to garner international support for his Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) vision. The study introduces an innovative methodology using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a machine learning model capable of detecting and analysing syntax-sensitive emotional expressions in texts.

We’re a day too late for Mr. Fawkes, but plenty of sparks still flying tonight. Join us, on the one-year anniversary of Suzuki Izumi’s most recent anglophone rebirth, as we delve into the process of translating emotions and psyches through words and movement. Alice Baldock and Helen O’Horan will be in conversation about the avant-garde in 1970s–1980s Japan, bodies and gender across languages, working with modern classics, Japanese sci-fi, and speculative “fiction.” And trashy dating shows!

Japan has long been known for its commitment to a pacifist foreign policy as stipulated in Article 9 of the post-World War II constitution. Despite some opposition, for much of Japan’s postwar history there has been a mainstream foreign policy consensus to maintain a security treaty with the United States and limit rearmament. In the years since the end of the Cold War, however, there has been a concerted movement urging constitutional revision in order to legalize militarisation.

Regional Financial Arrangements (RFAs) in East Asia emerged in response to the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) of 1997–1998, which revealed significant vulnerabilities in the region’s financial safety nets. In 2000, the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) was launched, establishing a network of bilateral swap arrangements (BSAs) among ASEAN+3 member economies (China, Japan, and South Korea). While this arrangement represented a pioneering step toward regional financial cooperation, its design was limited by the absence of a dedicated economic surveillance mechanism and a lack of institutional capacity.

Since the early Meiji period, Japan's 'catch-up' development strategy has been heavily reliant on the importation of 'advanced knowledge' from the West. Japanese higher education has assumed a pivotal role in the dissemination of Western knowledge through translation. This seminar addresses how cultural transmissions, facilitated by translation, have impacted Japanese higher education and the manner of thinking cultivated thereby.

For far too long now the Edo period has been pigeonholed as a ‘print culture’. It is time to explode this myth, and Professor Kornicki will do so by exploring some of the huge quantity of manuscript books that circulated in the Edo period. Sceptical? Well, consider why it is that so many printed books survive in only one copy or in no copies at all, while many manuscript books survive in hundreds of copies. And consider why so many collections of books private and public contain so many manuscript books.

Beyond the Mountains: Social and Political Imaginaries in Gilgit-Baltistan (Raachi, 2024) is a multilingual, indigenous volume and collaborative research endeavor with the aim of decolonizing knowledge. This talk will focus on the politics of race and anthropology historically in Gilgit-Baltistan, the necessity of local knowledges, and rethinking publishing and the academy in this historical conjuncture.