Events category: Book launch

16 February 2023

Demarcating Japan

Histories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of territorial disputes. In contrast, Takahiro Yamamoto contends that the transformation of the islands from ambiguous border zones to a territorialized space emerged out of multilateral power relations. Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Tsushima, the Bonin Islands, and the Ryukyu Islands became the subject of inter-imperial negotiations during the formative years of modern Japan as empires nudged each other to secure their status with minimal costs. Demarcating Japan argues that the transformation of border islands should be understood as an interconnected process, where inter-local referencing played a key role in the outcome: Japan’s geographical expansion in the face of domineering Extra-Asian empires.

More info

5 December 2022

Voices from the Contemporary Japanese Feminist Movement

Voices from the Contemporary Japanese Feminist Movement introduces six influential activists from Japan’s contemporary feminist movement. The authors, both based in universities in Australia, wrote the book to fill a gap in Australia-based Japanese studies, which has overly focussed on research in cultural studies and linguistics to the exclusion of structural analyses of the status of women in Japan. For this book launch, the authors described Japan’s grassroots feminist movement based on testimonies they gathered, generating insights about some of the most serious problems faced by women and girls in Japan, as well as comparing the approaches of Japanese activists with those of the global feminist movement.

Fully bookedMore info

18 November 2022

Tokyo Story

Ozu Yasujirō’s Tokyo Story is universally acknowledged as one of the most significant Japanese films ever made, and regularly cited as one of the greatest films of all time in polls of leading critics and filmmakers around the world. Professor Alastair Phillips (University of Warwick), author of a new BFI Film Classic on Tokyo Story, gave an extended illustrated talk on the film. The presentation combined a close analysis of the film’s key locations with discussion of its representation of Japanese society at a time of great cultural change. He also situates Tokyo Story within various contemporary critical and industrial contexts and examines the multiple international dimensions of the film’s long after-life.

Fully bookedMore info

15 September 2022

Japan’s Effectiveness as a Geo-Economic Actor: Navigating Great-Power Competition

Geo-economic strategy has long been a key element of statecraft. In recent years, it has acquired even greater salience given the increasing willingness of both China and the United States to wield economic power in their strategic competition. While Japan’s post-war geo-economic performance often failed to match its status as one of the world’s largest economies, more recently Tokyo has demonstrated increased geo-economic agency and effectiveness. In this book, Yuka Koshino and Robert Ward draw on multiple disciplines – including economics, political economy, foreign policy and security policy – and interviews with key policymakers to examine Japan’s geo-economic power.

Fully bookedMore info

19 May 2022

Western Lives and Letters in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan

This talk celebrated the launch of a new book, Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia, in which scholars from the UK, US, Europe, and Japan present intimate, engaging, and largely untold portraits of Western lives and livelihoods in the world of the treaty ports. It examines how Westerners ‘chronicled’ their overseas lives in personal letters, diplomatic dispatches, business records, and academic papers. By utilizing these rich but often overlooked sources, Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia presents new insights into the pace and challenges of daily life, especially in the Japanese treaty ports of Nagasaki and Yokohama but also in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

More info

18 January 2022

Japan Stories

Japan Stories is an absolutely spellbinding collection of short fiction and poetry. Meet the sinister museum curator, a son caring for his dementia- struck father, a young woman who returns to haunt her killer, and a curious homeless man intent on cleaning your home with lemons. This captivating work also includes Joso’s stories, ‘I’m not David Bowie’ and ‘Maru-chan’ an homage to Yayoi Kusama. The book is illustrated by Manga artist, NAMIKO. At this book launch, Joso introduced Japan Stories, discussing the inspirations behind it. She also read from the book and took questions from the audience. 

Fully bookedMore info

3 February 2022

Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan

In August 1945 the Soviet Union seized the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the colony of Southern Sakhalin, capturing more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers, who were transported to labour camps across the Soviet Union but primarily concentrated in Siberia and the Far East. The Japanese prisoners became a workforce for the rebuilding Soviets, as well as pawns in the Cold War. In Eleven Winters of Discontent, Sherzod Muminov draws on extensive Japanese, Russian, and English archives, memoirs and survivor interviews, to piece together a portrait of life in Siberia and, for those who survived, life in Japan afterward.

More info

26 July 2021

Tokyo: Art & Photography

This beautifully designed book is a celebration of Tokyo: one of the world’s most creative, dynamic and fascinating cities. Visually bold and richly detailed, the publication looks at a city which has undergone constant destruction and renewal over its 400-year history and tells the stories of the people who have made Tokyo so famous with their boundless drive for the new and innovative – from samurai to avantgarde artists today. In this book launch, co-editors Lena Fritsch and Clare Pollard presented selected prints and photographs of the city, and discussed their research.

Fully bookedMore info

26 February 2021

Kintsugi - The Poetic Mend

The Japanese repair technique of kintsugi restores beauty and function to broken objects, leaving visible lines that appear as solid gold. These golden seams speak of kintsugi’s innate metaphor of fortitude, individuality, and the strength to be found in overcoming loss and hardship. Kintsugi: The Poetic Mend tells the story of this remarkable art form through its technical and practical elements, its origins, and its connections to today’s world. With a Daiwa Foundation grant, Dr Kemske interviewed maki-e artists and ceramicists in Japan, and their stories express kintsugi’s deep-rooted place in Japanese culture, giving the reader an experience of kintsugi on a personal level.

Fully bookedMore info

20 January 2021

Beyond Kawaii: Studying Japanese Femininities at Cambridge

Kawaii. The love of all things cute has become the dominant image of Japanese girls and women. Real Japanese women are, however, more complex. Some celebrate their uterus, others experiment with fashion and cross-dressing or embrace their chubbiness, and many struggle with motherhood. Some may even return as vengeful ghosts. This third collection of studies by young scholars from the University of Cambridge looks beyond the kawaii image and explores the diversity and complexity of being a Japanese woman in the new millennium. It explores gender issues in contemporary Japanese society by focusing on women’s lives and their identities in the twenty-first century.

Fully bookedMore info
Toggle navigation