イベントカテゴリー: Book launch

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, will give an extended illustrated talk on the film. The presentation will combine 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 will also situate Tokyo Story within various contemporary critical and industrial contexts and examine the multiple international dimensions of the film’s long after-life.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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26 January 2021

Pleasure in Profit

In the first comprehensive study of the birth of Japanese commercial publishing, Dr Laura Moretti investigates the world of popular literature. She marshals new data on the magnitude of the seventeenth-century publishing business and highlights the diversity and porosity of its publishing genres. Moretti explores how booksellers sparked interest among readers and demonstrates how they tantalized consumers. In this book launch, Dr Moretti presented some of the key arguments that she puts forward in ‘Pleasure in Profit’. She also introduced a number of primary sources and fleshed out the wealth of information packed in this monograph.

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1 December 2020

The Shogun’s Silver Telescope

This book takes up the matter of the arrival of the English in Japan in 1613. It addresses why they sought access to Japan, and how they prepared themselves to enter the market. Screech argues that the English presence in Japan in this period was extremely important. His argument centres on the decision to send the spectacular present of a silver-gild telescope to the retired shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. It was the first telescope to leave Europe and the first built to be a royal present. This book thus outlines a key but forgotten answer to the vexed question of why the missions were closed in Japan, after so many decades of successful evangelism.

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