Within literary history, women's writings of the Kamakura period (1185-1333) are usually situated along a trajectory of decline. Opportunities for patronage decreased, and court appointments became more competitive, making for few female-authored literary works. Despite this, extant works written by women show that they were still producing diaries, poetry collections, and tales, as well as actively transcribing and studying texts. In what contexts were these women able to write? This presentation will examine the courts of Princess Ankamon'in (1209-1283) and Retired Emperor GoFukakusa (1243-1304) through the writings of Abutsu-ni (1222-1283) and Lady Nijo (1258-?), focusing on how motherhood, mentorship, and nunhood are related to Kamakura-era literary production by women.

Autobiographies by shamans, particularly female ones, are rare. But in 2002 Shodo Kuni published an account of her life that challenges scholarly representations of female shamans and suggests that the categories used to understand them are too constricting. Her autobiography also shows how a woman born into a traditional household of Okinawan shamans, at first rejects becoming a shaman and then comes to find the role empowering. The text is a rare example of how a contemporary female shaman constructs a meaningful life by taking on a traditional role and weaving her understanding of that role with scholarly discourse and with common problems faced by women living today in urban areas of Japan.

In 1977, Jean-Louis Barrault (1910-1994), the renowned French stage director and actor (both on stage and in film), took time from his company’s Japan tour to visit the Tessenkai Noh Theatre in Tokyo. He was invited by a long-time acquaintance, Noh actor Kanze Hisao (1925-1978), himself a renowned performer. The occasion was a workshop in which these master actors of differing backgrounds would come together to pit their skills in front of an audience. Also enlisted to participate was the master Kyōgen actor, Nomura Mansaku (1931-). The event was open to the public, and numerous journalists, performers, and drama critics attended.

The theme of the workshop was a cross-cultural exploration of the expressive capacities of the actor’s body. The Japanese classical arts of Noh and Kyōgen would go up against Barrault’s signature style of modern mimodrama, influenced by the work of such mentors as the mime, Etienne Decroux, the stage director, Charles Dullin, and the playwright, Paul Claudel. Kanze and Barrault had agreed ahead of time on a sequence of themes on which their demonstrations would be based. Three of these foci, for instance, were “The Genesis of Movement,” “Breathing Technique—Determinant of Gestural Meaning,” and “The Interior and the External World.”

A portion of the workshop was preserved on videotape, though never released commercially. Selected excerpts from it will compose the centerpiece of my presentation. I will offer an interpretive commentary on the footage and will situate it within the context of Barrault and Kanze’s professional acquaintance of almost two decades. I hope to explore what the two had to gain as artists from such collaborations. Just how solid was their common ground?

The classical noh theatre, intimately connected with the late feudal order of the Edo period, fell on hard times after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Actors who had received salaries from the shogun and his lesser lords to serve as in-house performers, lost their official patronage, and had to fend for themselves in what one might call a "free-market" situation. Several actors, most notably Umewaka Minoru, stepped into the breach and found support from members of the royal family, nobility, and new bourgeoisie, who wanted to show that they were properly cultured. By the end of the century noh had begun to recover its position as Japan's premier classical theatre.

Foreigners also helped out. Prominent foreign teachers in Japan, most notably Ernest Fenollosa and Edward Morse, famous respectively for bringing Japanese art to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Peabody Essex Museum, studied with Umewaka, and gave noh a Western seal of approval as Japan's foremost classical theatre. Fenollosa made, but never published, noh translations, at least until Ezra Pound reworked them and put out, Noh or Accomplishment, a book of translations, in 1917. Arthur Waley, published his, The Nô Plays of Japan, four years later in 1921. But two books predated the works of these two famous poets, Osman Edward's Japanese Plays and Playfellows, a history of Japanese traditional theatre, in 1901, and Marie C. Stopes' Plays of Old Japan: The Nô, in 1913. Both Edward's and Stopes' books included illustrations by the ukiyoe artist, Tsukioka Kôgyo (1869-1927).

As noh was beginning its comeback in the late nineteenth century, Kôgyo undertook to produce three major sets of woodblock prints, five dozen paintings, and 100s of magazine illustrations of noh performances. His works received widespread recognition-the empress even purchased several of his paintings. All were published with bilingual envelopes and explanations, indicating that his audience was foreign as well as Japanese. The Prague National Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the University of California at Berkeley, Scripps College in Pomona, the Library of Congress, the Frick Fine Arts Library of the University of Pittsburgh, and Richard and Mae Smethurst, own complete or partial sets of Kôgyo's three major sets of prints.

The purpose of this paper will be to try to place Kôgyo's work in the broader context of the modern revival of noh. Much work remains to be done, but this is an early effort.

Kabuki productions in the United States fall into two broad categories: Replications and Adaptations. This presentation will examine the different purposes for and approaches to each of these tasks, taking into consideration issues of authenticity and varying educational missions and programmatic constraints for different university programs and different productions. The presentation will include video excerpts from preparation and stage production at the University of Hawaii, Portland State University, and San Francisco State University.

Dr. Wetmore will examine the popular film adaptations of Yamada’s novel, how and why the Christian characters are constructed the way they are, and place the films into a larger context of Japanese popular cinema. Yamada Futaro was the pen name of Yamada Seiya (1922-2001), a popular writer of speculative, mystery, and historical fiction discovered and promoted by the legendary Edogawa Rampo. In 1967, he wrote the second novel in his Yagyo Jubei trilogy, Makai Tensho. The novel has subsequently served as the source material for numerous adaptations to popular film (1981, 1996, 1997, 2003), stage plays (including one in 1981 by future film director Fukusaku Kinji), and video games.

What is unique about the novel and the subsequent films based on them is the way in which certain villains are historical Christian figures, brought back from hell by a Buddhist monk to fight the Bakufu during the Tokugawa Shogunate. The leader is Amakusa Shirō (1621-1638), one of the figureheads of the Shimabara Rebellion. Also resurrected to fight samurai are other Christian characters such as Hosokawa Tama Grazia (1563-1600), alongside other historical figures such as Miyamoto Musashi.

In a quiet, little remarked upon manner, a new style Japanese youth film has emerged over the last decade. It bears almost no resemblance, save for a focus on young people, to the famous taiyo-zoku (sun tribe) films of the 1950s as in the paradigmatic and remarkable Crazed Fruit (1956), and even less to the more politicized New Wave youth films as in the fierce works of Oshima Nagisa, such as Cruel Story of Youth (1960), The Sun’s Burial (1960) and the later Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1968) and The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970). Covering much the same territory as more critical and angry youth films of the contemporary era, such as Go (Yukisada Isao, 2001) and All About Lily Chou-chou (Iwai Shunji, 2001), these more gentle films eschew violence, death, intense drama, political and social issues, in favor of a humorous slice of life. With a reliance on school settings, a group of protagonists and a sports-film structure of underdogs overcoming unlikely odds (even without a sports-themed story) these films are a far cry from so many of the images Japanese directors have relied upon to imagine youth in postmodern Japan. We may think of these films as “post-postmodern” for the way they understand that their gentle tone, sweet nature and feel-good plots seem highly old-fashioned while at the same time the films cannot escape a Japan that is, in some sense, mired in the postmodern condition.

Dr. Inouye will study the celebrated veteran Japanese film director Yamada Youji. Yamada made his career filming the successful and long-running series It's Tough to be a Man (Otoko wa tsurai yo). With the death of Atsumi Kiyoshi, who played Tora-san for those many years, Yamada turned to making samurai films. As depicted in Twilight Samurai (Tasogare seibei) and The Hidden Sword, as well as The Oni's Claw (Kakushiken oni no tsume), Yamada's samurai show a domestic gentleness. Their struggles are against poverty and the powers-that-be. Perhaps for this reason, the films resonated with office workers at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Japan's role in the development of the digital games industry is indisputable, as Japanese developers and corporations have provided innovation, leadership, and influence that continue into contemporary designs. This presentation maps some of that history, but then focuses on current industry practices, in particular exploring how Japanese companies are refocusing their efforts at globalizing the games industry, which is in the midst of a transformation. The work of developers including Square Enix, Nintendo, and Capcom (among others) will be used as case studies in that regard.

Creative resources nurtured by popular cartoons and the animation sector had a significant role in the emergence of video game industry in Japan. In this presentation we explore how cross-sectoral transfer of skills occur differently across national contexts, and how social legitimacy and strength of pre-existing industries, socio-economic status of entrepreneurs/pioneer firms in an emerging industry, and the socio-cultural cohesiveness between the pre-existing and emerging industries shape such cross-sectoral fertilization in three countries: Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. We also examine how technological progress affects the formation of industry-specific skills.

In this presentation, we argue that the concept of the posthuman remains a timely and usefully concept for analyzing the constantly shifting notion of the human (and its circumscription from the non-human).  Viewing the posthuman as a site of anxiety that materializes at the boundaries—at the edges of the national, the social and the corporeal—we explore the ways in which the interactive nature of videogames and their transnational circulation helps to triangulate contemporary understandings and negotiations of these boundaries.  How does the common practice of mediating globally circulating games through processes of translation and localization challenge our notions of the nation(al)?  How does the offline virtual world of videogames (where gamers become engaged and form social relationships with computer coded avatars and artificial intelligence) and the online connection of disembodied tele-present users, question understandings of what it means in fact to be social?  And finally, what are the consequences of the interactive nature of videogames (the intimate extension of the human and the technological into each other) and their distinctly incentivized form of action?

TBA