| Abstract |

The planetary crisis and the urgent need for sustainability demand a radical re-evaluation of the epistemologies underlying modern academic knowledge production. Within this context, intellectual history has traditionally revolved around human-centered narratives that compartmentalized ideas of the historical past into what Arthur Lovejoy termed "unit-ideas" such as ‘philosophy,’ ‘religion,’ ‘art,’ and ‘science.’ This talk argues that there are identifiable paradigms from the past that do not neatly fit into these established categories and that recognized nonhuman organisms as crucial ‘actors.’ One such case study is the Japanese independent naturalist and polymath Minakata Kumagusu (1867-1941).

In 1893-1894 London, Kumagusu created what Honda call cellular metaphysics: a study of metaphysics inspired by philosophical underpinnings of Daijō Buddhism and the ever-changing forms of slime moulds and other associated unicellular and multicellular organisms like amoebas and fungi. This historical research shows how epistemological binaries and hierarchies between humans and the nonhuman organisms evaporated as his ways of knowing came to resemble the nonhuman actors.

Building on this historical research, Honda discusses her experiments in creating a new field of study she calls multispecies intellectual history, driven by interdisciplinary thinking and collaborations. She will introduce an overview of the research agenda, its broader implications and significance, and examples of the approaches she employs in resolving the conundrums posed by conventional intellectual frameworks—without compromising the rigorous inductive analysis of primary sources.

| Bio |

Eiko Honda is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Global Studies, the Aarhus University, Denmark. She specialises in the intellectual history of modern Japan and the environmental humanities. Her historical research interrogates boundary-defying works and (inter-)actions of Japanese scientist-polymaths whose epistemologies do not conform to the model of ‘civilisational progress’ led by the vision of human domination over non-human ‘nature.’ She concurrently collaborates with scholars and practitioners of various fields to investigate shifting roles and methods of History and Area Studies in the time of climate crisis. She is the PI of Unearthing Multispecies Intellectual History: Earthing Trajectories of Area Studies (2023-2026) funded by the Aarhus University Research Foundation and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. Her recent publications include curatorial-editorial of ‘Multispecies Intellectual History’ Collection with the journal Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History (2024-2025) and article “Minakata Kumagusu and the Emergence of Queer Nature: The Civilisation Theory, Buddhist Science and Microbes, 1887-1892” in Modern Asian Studies (2023).

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s09e05
Thursday 2024-11-21, 18:00~19:30

| Place & Preparations | 

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s09/#e05.

| Abstract |

This lecture examines the complex role of digital platforms in constructing counter-hegemonic collective memory in Japan, focusing on audience reception of the documentary Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women Issue. Produced by Japanese-American filmmaker Miki Dezaki, Shusenjo addresses the historical controversy surrounding the so-called “comfort women” (ianfu)—a euphemistic term for Asian women forced into providing sexual services to Japanese soldiers before and during WWII. The film captures the sociopolitical tensions surrounding Japan’s wartime and colonial responsibility, presenting both traditional and revisionist-nationalist perspectives on Japanese war memory.

The Shusenjo case study forms part of a broader research program on the critical intersections of media, technology, and suppression/liberation, specifically examining the contemporary institutionalization of nationalism entangled with racism, xenophobia, historical revisionism (e.g., denial of wartime atrocities), and misogyny. This research addresses the politics of war memory surrounding cultural products and their implications for the (re)construction of national identity—specifically how everyday people actively problematize, make sense of, and narrow or expand the meaning of the nation.

By analyzing audience review comments through critical discourse analysis, this study offers nuanced insights into ongoing public discourse and sentiment surrounding this controversy. The documentary creates a space for the (re)construction of perspectives on collective war memory, adding layers of complexity to this process. The research demonstrates how digital spaces—such as discussion boards, user comments, and film reviews—become enmeshed into a gestalt that both stirs and structures the memory production process. This participatory and evolving construction of memory not only influences interpretations of Japan’s wartime history but also reflects contemporary debates over Japan’s role in regional relations, gender equality, and migration. The analysis finds the prominence of “shame”-based nationalism within a dialectic of memory production, wherein contemporary visions of Japan’s future inform retrospective understandings of its past, with war memory serving as a rationale for national identity and future/prospective goals.

| Bio |

Junki Nakahara is a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL, aparc.fsi.stanford.edu/snapl ), housed within the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Her research interests include nationalism and xenophobia, critical and cultural studies, feminist media studies, and postcolonial/decolonial international relations. She studies the contemporary dominance and institutionalization of nationalism, entangled with racism, xenophobia, historical revisionism (e.g., denial of wartime atrocities), and misogyny, primarily focusing on East Asia. She earned her PhD in Communication (2023) and MA in Intercultural and International Communication (2019), both from American University. Her publications include contributions to New Media & Society, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, and Discourse Approaches to an Emerging Age of Populism (edited by I. Íñigo-Mora & Lastres-López). As an inaugural member of SNAPL, she leads the "Nationalism and Racism" research team, investigating how nationalism and racism intertwine to create various forms of suppression and intolerance across the Asia-Pacific region, where entanglements among race, ethnicity, nation, and postcoloniality add complexity to these debates.

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s09e04
Thursday 2024-11-07, 18:00~19:30

| Place & Preparations | 

| Plattform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s09/#e04.

| Abstract |

For more than half a century, research on rural Japan has been casted by the doomsday discourse on the devastating regional effects of outmigration, infrastructure decay and population aging (kaso chiiki). The negative assessment has been aggravated by newer key notions of ‘marginal settlements’ (genkai shūraku) and the ‘extinction of communities’ (chiiki shōmetsu). Cities, by contrast, are said to be better prepared for the future due to the spatial concentration of institutions and resources that enable urban places to excel over the countryside in terms of labor and employment opportunities, social welfare, health care, education and entertainment. But there is no evidence that the general trend toward urbanization is paralleled by an overall increase in happiness: “There are many benefits of big-city living; high levels of happiness are not among them” (Berry and Okulicz-Kozaryn 2011: 872).

Wolfram Manzenreiter‘s research on rural life in Japan challenges the master-narrative of rural decline by engaging in ethnographic fashion with local notions of happiness and the significance of social relatedness for making life worth-living to those who stayed (behind) or moved into the countryside. His approach is situated in the tradition of the Vienna School of Japanese Studies, evidently by revisiting the same research site in southwestern Japan that Josef Kreiner and other researchers from Vienna chose in the late 1960s for the first time-ever field research project in Japan by a European research team. Drawing back on lessons from the first and the current project, he adopts a long-term perspective to explore the notions of rural happiness in the light of changing family and social relations, new mobilities and shifting moralities.

| Bio |

Wolfram Manzenreiter is Professor of Japanese Studies at the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna and Head of the Japan research unit. His research is concerned with social and anthropological aspects of sports, emotions, work and migration in a globalising world. He is author of several books and numerous articles and book chapters on cultural globalization, body culture, transnationalism and well-being. His most recent publications include Japan through the lens of the Tokyo Olympics (2020; co-editors I. Gagne, B. Holthus, F. Waldenberger); Life course, happiness and well-being in Japan and Happiness and the good life in Japan (both 2017 and coedited with B. Holthus). Currently he is working on community happiness in Japan’s rural peripheries.

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s09e03
Thursday 2024-10-31, 18:00~19:30

| Place & Preparations | 

| Plattform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s09/#e03.

| Abstract |

Some single Japanese women go abroad to places such as London, Los Angeles, and Southeast Asia for a variety of reasons, and work as hostesses entertaining Japanese (and other Asian) men in nightclubs. These women – transnational Japanese hostesses – are a subject from the North largely overlooked in surveys of global intimate labour.

This talk focuses on Japanese hostesses working in London. These women, typically in their 20s and 30s, are often working holidaymakers or students. Their personal narratives reveal that they try to compensate for their lack of social and linguistic capital by selling femininity, Japaneseness and communication. Moreover, their stories disclose some structural factors, such as the diversification of intimate work on a global scale, that influence their decision to pursue this line of work, which eventually led them to gendered migration.

First, Nanase Shirota will present these hostesses’ personal narratives and explain the structural elements that influence their work choices and career paths. Second, based on these analyses, she argues that they use hostess work as a stepping-stone for their own goals, whilst these jobs and strategies eventually draw them back to ‘their own place’, which they had initially decided to leave. Finally, she will share some findings from her most recent fieldwork in Amsterdam, Ho Chi Minh City, and Kuala Lumpur.

| Bio |

Nanase Shirota is an affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, where she earned her PhD. She holds an MA from Keio University, studying Arabic and Islamic studies, and a second MA in Sociology from the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on communication (particularly listening), work, and gender in contemporary Japan, with a specific current focus on transnational Japanese hostesses working abroad. She is also methodologically interested in ethnography, interviews, and oral history.

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s09e02
Thursday 2024-10-24, 18:00~19:30

| Place & Preparations | 

| Plattform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s09/#e02.

| Abstract |

The Fukushima nuclear accident eroded trust in the safety of nuclear power plants and prompted anti-nuclear protests. Instead of the nuclear phase out many observers expected, the nuclear safety agency was reorganised and nuclear power goals were adjusted to reduce Japan's reliance on nuclear power to 20-22 per cent by 2030. But why is Japan still not on track to achieving these targets? In this lecture, Florentine Koppenborg argues that the regulatory reforms taken up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster on March 11, 2011, directly and indirectly raised the costs of nuclear power in Japan. The new Nuclear Regulation Authority resisted capture by the nuclear industry and fundamentally altered the environment for nuclear policy implementation. Independent safety regulation changed state-business relations in the nuclear power domain from regulatory capture to top-down safety regulation, which raised technical safety costs for electric utilities. Furthermore, the safety agency's extended emergency preparedness regulations expanded the allegorical backyard of NIMBY demonstrations. Antinuclear protests, - mainly lawsuits challenging restarts - incurred additional social acceptance costs. Increasing costs undermined pro-nuclear actors' ability to implement nuclear power policy and caused a rift inside Japan's "nuclear village." Small nuclear safety administration reforms were, in fact, game changers for nuclear power politics in Japan.

| Bio |

Florentine Koppenborg is a Senior Research Fellow at the Chair of Environmental and Climate Policy at the Technical University of Munich. Her research interests address energy and climate policy, particularly energy transitions ("Energiewende") and interactions with climate policy. She has authored several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on Japan's nuclear energy and climate policy. She has been the principal investigator of a research project on "Governing Sustainability Transitions: Technology Phase-outs in Germany and Japan." In 2023, she published her book on "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance" (Cornell University Press).

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s09e01
Thursday 2024-10-17, 18:00~19:30

| Place & Preparations | 

| Plattform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s09/#e01.