'Reopening the Opening of Japan: Transnational Approaches to Modern Japan and the Wider World' is the result of the Meiji Restoration sesquicentennial conference held at St Antony’s College in 2019. It rethinks the way in which ‘the Opening of Japan’ constitutes a historical event that connected the archipelago to the wider world.

I was puzzled why Japanese sociologists who study social mobility or social inequality don't use the concept of "class" or kaikyu（階級）in Japanese, while using the term when writing in English. In Japanese, instead, they use kaisho (階層), whose literal translation in English is “strata.”

The coronavirus pandemic suddenly closed Japan’s doors to inbound tourism and migration in early 2020s. But those doors were never going to be closed indefinitely. The pandemic, originating in Wuhan, revealed the centrality of China in particular to Japan’s immigration dilemma. China’s transformation in the twenty-first century into an economic superpower has been an understudied possible motivation for Japan’s government to liberalise the country’s immigration regime as a tool for retaining influence in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.

This lecture examines the medical discourse of the ‘feebleminded’, which emerged in 1950s Japan in the process of implementing involuntary sterilization under the Eugenic Protection Law (1948-96). It shows how the medical discourse was gendered and caricatured their sexuality as a threat to social order. It then argues that the making of the medical knowledge about the ‘feebleminded’, though appearing as scientific, was a social act, by describing how the patient’s families were involved in the making of the knowledge.

Deep in the Fukuyama mountains, “the grave of the graves” houses acres of unwanted headstones. In the past, the Japanese dead became venerated ancestors through sustained ritual offerings at graves and butsudan. But in social atomised twenty-first Japan, this intergenerational system of care, along with the household and nation that once sustained it, is collapsing. This talk describes the practical and affective burdens imposed by the ruins of vanishing death rites and explores how new life (which is to say new death) may emerge.

China’s economy is at a crossroads, facing its most significant challenges in recent memory. Amidst this economic turmoil, a fierce debate has emerged among leading experts: Is the current economic downturn a result of ingrained structural issues, excessive state intervention, or escalating geopolitical tensions?

Introducing Oxford Data Academy: a 5-day intensive data science bootcamp for an interdisciplinary audience happening in the heart of Oxford at Reuben College.

During Oxford Data Academy, you will learn the basics of data handling in Python (pandas, numpy libraries), data visualisation (matplotlib, seaborn, plotly libraries), statistical modelling, and machine learning (scikit-learn library). On the final day, you will solidify your newly-acquired skills in a mini-hackathon, where you’ll be working in teams to solve real-world data challenges.