Galapagosizing Japan?
The Challenges of Participation and the Costs of Isolation
May 12-13, 2015, Tel Aviv University
Gilman-Humanities Building, Room 496
Language of the Conference: Japanese, English, Hebrew
Abstracts
(by order of appearance in the conference)
In this lecture, I propose outlining a process that began with the failure of the left
wing activities in early 1970s Japan, extending into the 1980s, in which the generation
of former left wing activists and zenkyt protestors began constructing "imagined
saga narratives" within the worlds of Japanese subcultures. This was the starting point
of the contemporaneous historical revisionism in Japan. More concretely, by referring
to the first trilogy by Murakami Haruki, Nakagami Kenji, Gundam anime series,
anime by Ghibli Studio etc., I will show how subcultures and subcultural literature
experimented with the "virtual story" and not with "the real history". It provided the
origin of the that underlined the Aum Shinriky Incident in the 1990s. Aum
committed a coup d'tat based on a narrative that replaced "actual history" with a
1
subcultural "virtual history". This was the starting point of the contemporaneous
historical revisionism in Japan.
that would accept non-Japanese bank cards by the time of Tokyo Olympics 2020. The
paper argues that this insulated Galapagos phenomenon is a result of the remaining
convoy system in Japanese retail banking and a legacy of developmentalism (Jonson
1982) aimed at realizing producers economic interests at the cost of consumers.
Theoretically, this phenomenon can be explained with the theory of regulation
(Rosenbluth 1989) based on an analysis of collective action.
The Toei-Tezuka Trilogy: Three Films that Paved the Way to the Global Appeal of
Anime
Raz Greenberg, The Orthodox College, Jerusalem, Israel
' :
, ,
) 9191 . ' (
, '.) 9199 . (,-
, , ,9111 ,9191
, , ' , . 79
. , ,
, , ' :'
, ,
. '
5
,
, .
, '. ,
" "
.
, , ,
, .- ,
, , 9191 ,
." " ,
, ,) (
,
' .
. 91- ,
North Korean security threat, which allowed it to unwrap the "brown bag" and
become a "normal state".
On any but an openly racist list of criteria, Japan could aspire to be one of the major
loci of philosophy. In spite of this, its relevant premodern traditions have usually been
subsumed under categories other than philosophy, such as thought, religion,
ethics, or shis. In the modern era, the term Japanese philosophy was virtually
ursurped by the distinctly parochialist Kyoto School, which has received most
attention by Western commentators and translators. In contrast, non-parochial
tetsugaku or professional academic philosophy in Japan is widely regarded as a
largely sterile scholastic discourse that only regurgitates Western models, and some
Japanese universities have moved to replace this unpopular discipline by other, less
narrowly defined subjects.
All this is not due to the lack of originality or philosophical substance in the
pertinent Japanese literature. It is, or so I shall argue, more a question of the historical
timing of contacts between Japanese and Western philosophers, and the discursive
formations in place at crucial instances on the trajectory of the globalization of
Western and Japanese philosophies. This leaves Japanologists with the task of
understanding the mechanisms at work that seem to always place tetsugaku in
awkward spots, and to correct philosophical historiographies and amend canons that
exclude it.
Sohn-Rethel, and others, have however not been given much attention in Japanese
academic theoretical formation after the War. To give a striking example: the first
translation of The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Japan appeared as late as 1990.
By examining the conditions of social sciences after the war, this paper aims to
point out the reasons for this hesitant appropriation by critically addressing the cleft of
capitalism-centered theories as performed by pre-War and post-War Marxists as well
as psychological theories of fascism as a collective pathological phenomenon,
performed by modernity theorists such as Maruyama Masao or Otsuka Hisao
(Maruyama 1946, Otsuka 1946). By suggesting that the cleft could not be closed with
the rising popularity of social psychology (1950s-1960s), Habermasian Theory of
Communitative Action (1970s-1980s) or the post modern thought of Associationism
(Karatani) (1990s-today), this paper will also ask if the present political crisis,
expressed in the nationalist backlash of the Abe government, could be explained by
Japanese critical theory's shortfall in providing an attempt to integrate the problem of
capitalist thought-forms, such as the commodity form, into its theories of fascism and
vice versa.
The paper will argue that the negligence of this problem setting continues to
haunt the critical political climate in Japan today.
Van Gogh Museum, A pilgrimage site for millions of people from all over the
world, who worship one of the greatest cultural heroes of human history, is located
between the Rijks Museum and the Stedelijk Museum of modern art and the famous
national concert hall Concertgebouw, the beating heart of the cultural heritage of
Holland.
The traits of the irregular and different building in his architectural
surroundings will show how Kurokawas architecture tries to function as the Soft
Power of Japan foreign policy, and how by the unique visual language of the
Japanese Space he loads Japanese cultural cods at the heart of western cultural
fortress in Holland.
" :
"Cool Japan
, ,
" , , ,
, . ,
" ... ". ,
, ,
.
, , , ,
.
,
, Cool Japan ?
?
,
,
.
. , ,
.
,
. ,
,
, , ,
.
,
Soft Power of Japan
" "
.
11
2020
, , , , ,
, ,
Discourses Around Modernist Built Legacy Before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
Erez Golani Solomon, Waseda University, Japan and Bezalel Academy of Arts and
Design, Jerusalem, and Christian Dimmer, Tokyo University, Japan
On September 7, 2013 the International Olympic Committee announced that Tokyo
would host the 7171 Summer Olympics. Although less than two years have passed
since then, the announcement appears to have catalyzed a significant re-evaluation of
heritage conservation in Japan, and in particular of its modernist iconic buildings and
infrastructure built in the 1950s and 60s. Structures that have been completed in the
context of another key moment in Japans modern historynamely the 1964 Tokyo
Olympicshad so far only been appreciated by a handful of academics, professionals
and architecture tourists but werent broadly recognized as valuable historical assets
worthy of material preservation. Significant modernist buildings have been steadily
and quietly disappearing for years, without much ado, or public protest. It seems that
the decision to host the summer Olympic Games once again after 56 years has created
a sincere sensitivity to the post-war built legacy. Ironically, this novel preservation
effort is only paralleled by a similar sense of urgency that had these structures built in
anticipation of the mega events of 1964.
The lecture explores the new wave of heritage conservation from two
perspectives. On the one side it examines the inclusion of heritage as a central
category in Tokyos failed bid of 2009 and the following successful bid of 2013. Here,
along with the declared intension to re-use 1964 Olympic facilities such as Kenzo
Tanges Yoyogi National Gymnasium or Mamoru Yamadas Nippon Budokan Hall
[Arena for traditional Japanese martial arts] heritage functions also as part of a
dubious language that appeals to a global common sense for preservation, without
feeling a genuine commitment to this cause. On the other side the chapter examines
those heritage discourses that have been spurred around controversial events such as
the imminent destruction of Yoshiro Taniguchis Hotel Okura [1962] or Mitsuo
Katayamas National Stadium [1958], and the adoption of Zaha Hadids plans for the
new Olympic Stadium. It looks at a new and rich preservation rhetoric of post-war
architecture as well as important infrastructures like the inner city expressway system
or the Tsukiji fish market and sets them against the background of a new national
11
explanation of what is light and on routes to reach the original documents which
were used in this study.
1. A Speech on the Japanese Nation 1784 delivered by the botanist Thunberg.
Original Swedish hand written faccimillia and its English translation are
presented in a book of 2007, published by The Swedish Royal Academy of
Sciences in Stockholm. The beautiful red bound book was donated to the
Japanese Emperor on his visit in Sweden.
2. Translations of Lavoisier French Chemistry book of 1789 into English, Dutch,
and Japanese. Documents describing light were gathered from the British
Library, London; Kyo-U Library of Takeda Science Foundation in Osaka;
National French Library Website. Changes of terms and descriptions in the
various versions shed light on Japanese and others understanding of science
at that time.
3. Roscoes Chemistry book of 1871 and its Japanese translation of 1873. Griffis
teaching chemistry in Fukui, asked his sister Maggie in a letter to Philadelphia
to send him that book in July 1871. Recently I received a Japanese translation
from a Kyoto University scholar and a digitized English copy from Oxford
University Press Website.
During the period between 1906, when Majima thought out his research strategy and
attempted to apply it to urushiol, and 1950, when Tsuda Kyosuke (19071999) started
to study tetrodotoxin, the poison from puffer fish, the Japanese became well prepared
to compete on an equal footing with their Western counterparts without taking
advantage of locality; Majimas approach gave some lead time to those chemists with
good accessibility to natural products for their research. Organic chemistry in Japan
completed its transformation at the end of the 1950s, and since then, Japanese
chemists reached the stage of universality and began to study equally in terms of
facilities and theoretical settings with overseas top researchers.
16