Lecture

K-16 educators are invited to join the Asian Studies Center for this free presentation and curriculum workshop on Thanhha Lai's "Inside Out & Back Again." Lai's award-winning book of poems chronicles the Vietnam War through the eyes of 10 year-old Ha, whose family flees Saigon for the promise of a better life in the United States. The hardships endured by Ha and her family during the war fade into the past as they struggle to adjust to a new way of life in America—one that is often at odds with the promise of their new country. Act 48 hours available.

Drawing on a new book, Subnational Hydropolitics, this talk will explore the role that water has played in Chinese politics, its rapid economic growth, and its struggle to make its development sustainable. It will also discuss new and old tensions between China and its neighbors over shared water resources, and the role that conflict over water might play in China’s rise.

Taiwan's popular music has shaped China's music and culture to a surprising degree. The roots of Taiwan's music industry can be found in the 1930s Jazz era in Shanghai. Sixty years later, Taiwan was the hub of Chinese-language pop music industry--a sonic movement that shaped Chinese understandings of music, gender, and individuality in the contemporary age.

Please join us for a poetry reading by Takako Arai at the Humanities Center (Cathedral of Learning Rm 602) on September 18 at 4pm. Ms. Arai will read a selection of her poems in Japanese and with English translation. She is in the U.S. as part of The University of Iowa’s prestigious creative writing residency, the International Writers Program. Arai is known for writing socially engaged poetry. She writes in particular about the lives of working women as they are affected by such forces as globalization, economic decline, and the 2011 triple disaster in northeastern Japan.

Prof. Shunsaku Miyagi (University of Tokyo) is one of Japan's most eminent landscape architects. He is also the representative director of the Byodoin Temple, a temple in Kyoto that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and so important in Japan that an image of it is on the back of every 10-yen coin. Trained and educated in the US and Japan, his guiding philosophy is "Life is Design Itself." He will discuss Japanese gardens and connecting Pittsburgh and Japan through landscape design.

K-pop is a dynamic field with many faces: for the South Korean government, it is a prominent tool for the nation to promote its growing influence through soft power; for Asian American youth it provides an occasion to claim their cultural coolness; for industry insiders and consumers, it presents a unique entertainment form where various media formats converge; for business communities, it provides effective marketing opportunities.

The steel industry has historically held a central place in the development of all modern industrial economies. Supporting the rise of East Asia in the postwar world, the rise of resource import-dependent steel industries in Japan, Korea and China has emerged alongside export-oriented mining industries in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India and South Africa, etc., and steel products exported to the rest of world. These processes formed the global production network of East Asia’s iron and steel industry.

Start the day of the JASP Annual Golf Outing with a lecture from JASP Board Member and author of Asia Ascending: Insider Strategies for Competing with the Global Colossus Dennis Unkovic on the current business situation across East Asia. It is $50 to register for the seminar, which includes coffee, pastries, and a picnic lunch. Registration, along with options for attending the full day, are available here.

Beyond his fame as Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Tales of the South Pacific and Hawaii,James A. Michener was an enthusiastic collector of fine art. He managed to assemble the third largest collection of ukiyo-e in the United States, which he donated to the Honolulu Museum of Art. Join us at the Carnegie Museum of Art to learn about Michener's collecting journey with Stephen Salel, Curator of Japanese Art. Please register at japansocietypa.org/events.