Eurasia Group is a leading global political risk research and consulting firm. Its geo-technology practice, founded in 2016, helps the firm’s clients navigate the complicated intersection of technology and geopolitics globally – from the political risks associated with emerging technologies like 5G/6G, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence, to global regulatory and technology policy developments, including investment restrictions, export controls, and industrial policy.

This talk tells the story of the unknown 100 000 people Ukrainian diaspora in Manchuria and its leader, Ivan Svit (1897–1989), a forgotten Ukrainian journalist, editor, historian, and social activist, and their active communication and collaboration with Japanese authorities under the occupation (1932-1945). During this time, Ukrainians tried to negotiate about creating a Ukrainian national state in the Far East and broader North-East Asia.

Co-convenors Juliana Buriticá Alzate, Jenny Guest, Hugh Whittaker

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The concept of "Japan's Black Studies" is not at all an oddity. Much like various Black intellectual and disciplinary formations forged in the struggle for liberation across the African diaspora, Black studies in Japan possesses a dynamism of its own. My presentation will introduce this curious history, including seemingly idiosyncratic ways in which Japanese scholars of Black studies and ordinary people connected to the Black intellectual tradition contributed to critical knowledge and engaged in the practice of transpacific antiracism throughout the Civil Rights and Black Power eras.

The 1860 Japanese Embassy was the first Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States and arrived at a time rife with racial tensions. Within the African American press, stories of the Japanese embassy inspired hope for the future and a sense of brotherhood with the samurai visitors. Amidst the confusion and racial controversy sparked by the embassy’s visit, African American and abolitionist newspapers embraced the 1860 embassy as “Negroes from Japan” and used race to create an imagined solidarity that subverted state hierarchies of “civilization” and race.

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Japan has an unusual and complicated history of engaging with concepts of race. In the past, many Japanese people asserted the concept of
Japanese racial superiority and justified colonialism by positioning indigenous people as racially inferior. In Western society, Japanese
people have historically been targets of racism, and racist ideologies within Japan persist today and, in many ways, have been made invisible.
In this lecture, I would like to discuss the discrimination experienced by Ainu women in marriage, and consider the racial symbols of “red,” “