Europe Japan Research Centre Podcasts

Japanese anime, a global phenomenon and a locally powerful industry, has a tendency to be viewed outside Japan in relation to its extreme content, lending it a ‘cult’ air. Through such discussions, it becomes easy to paint all anime as ‘cult’ without ever considering the wider implications of this Euro-American concept for Japanese media texts. Therefore, in this talk, I re

Aesop’s fables bookend early modern Japan’s image of a “closed country”. Their appearance in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, their disappearance and subsequent reappearance in the later nineteenth century, seems to symbolize the bracketing of Japan’s isolation from European literature. However, throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,

Hikikimori is a category coined in the late 1990s to refer to 'youth social withdrawal,' and has been considered a social problem in Japan since the 2000s afflicting (mostly male) youth. Drawing on Mathews and Izquierdo (2009)’s four-dimensional model of well-being, this paper will examine what well-being means for youth in Japan by posting hikikomori as an issue that symbolizes

The Edo-period Japan (1603–1868) saw the emergence of an art music genre called Jiuta-sōkyoku. Some of the song texts were taken from classical literature, some were descriptions of nature, some celebratory, and some were songs about the emotions and thoughts of less fortunate women. Especially those in the last category were written for the specific purpose of being song texts,

On 15 August 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s defeat in the Second World War to millions of his subjects. “Enduring the unendurable”, the nation was now to start on the road of peace and rebuilding. Yet for over 600,000 Japanese soldiers, the war was not to end on that August day. Defeated and captured by the Soviet Red Army in northeast China, these former soldiers w

It is a strange and bitter irony that the US naval bombardment which launched the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 was called the ‘typhoon of steel’, invoking the turbulent winds that annually buffet this small island. Okinawans in coastal villages, such as Sunabe where the US forces made their landings, sought shelter from this mechanical, yet elemental force of destruction in one of

Japan is increasingly characterised by late age at marriage and rising rates of singlehood. Women’s growing educational attainment and labour market participation are often argued to be the key reasons behind these trends. In particular, it is frequently assumed that the dominant gender norms which prescribe that women must shoulder most of the burden of domestic work and childca

This paper seeks to examine several manifestations of futurity in contemporary Japan through readings of a science fiction manga. It is interested in the relationship between historical time and subjectivity or, in other words, how people make sense of their contemporary experiences within discourses of the past, present and future. The paper offers no uniform vision of a future fo

Between 1989 and 2004, over 40 Japanese directors were introduced to major festivals and distribution networks. In the last decade, barely a handful of young directors have managed to find an audience. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Katsuya Tomita, Momoko Ando count among the exceptions. How and why did this happen? On the other hand, the number of retrospectives of Japanese filmmakers, establ

My presentation will approach the issue of Dowa Project Policies (DPP) by trying to suggest answers to the following questions: Should we regard the introduction of DPP as the acceptance by the Japanese state of its ‘positive obligations’ avant la lettre? Does an examination of the evolution of Dowa policy suggest a commitment by the Japanese government to human rights that has