When talking about traditional Japanese stage-arts, many think of men in kimono. In most stage arts, to this day, female performers are either not trained at all or trained but not accepted to perform in their respective schools’ main stages. Today, about 5% of Tokyo’s rakugo performers are female and most enjoy a big fan following. However, the portfolio of rakugo stories has been created by men for mostly male audiences. This presentation gives an historic overview of the development of the involvement of female performers on Tokyo’s yose stages and discusses the different approaches they take on-stage, particularly looking into issues such as modification of stories, voice, tone, appearance and stage persona. This session of the DIJ History and Humanities Study Group is part of the DIJ Gender and Sexuality in East Asia Lecture Series. Details and registration here

Speaker:
Sarah Stark, University of Ghent

Miho Funamori (National Institute of Informatics), Jeroen Sondervan (Utrecht University), and Helmuth Trischler (Deutsches Museum and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) will be the speakers in the third session of our MWS Web Forum Series ‘The Digital Transformation’ on October 14. This session’s focus will be on ‘Data Infrastructures and Open Science’. Miho Funamori’s paper “Who owns research data at universities?” will provide an analysis of research data management practices and policies from the perspective of university management. In his presentation “Notions on the differences in form and speed of the transformation to Open Science in Europe”, Jeroen Sondervan will give an overview of open science policy developments in Europe and will take the developments at Utrecht University as an example. Helmuth Trischler’s paper “Why and how should we establish research data infrastructures in the historical sciences?” will present recent initiatives to create research data infrastructures according to the FAIR principles in Germany. Details and registration here

Back in the 1970s, Japanese policymakers earned the reputation of being the most competent within advanced economies for successfully weathering the second oil shock. Where has this reputation gone? The high growth of the late 1980s proved to be transient as a succession of financial crises led to the “lost decade” of the 1990s. Ben Bernanke (1999) famously described the initial measures to fight deflation that would dominate the 2000s as “a self-induced paralysis”. A more forceful set of policies called “Abenomics” in the 2010s ultimately failed to achieve its ambitious goals of 2% GDP growth and 2% inflation, a shortcoming blamed on either error in design or pusillanimity in implementation. This presentation focuses on three cases (the lost decade, Abenomics, Covid-19) to discuss to what extent the narrative of a never-ending crisis reflects hindsight bias, theoretical assumptions, and narrowly defined comparisons. Details and registration here

Speaker:
Brieuc Monfort, Sophia University

Kawabata Yasunari’s (1899–1972) literary works have often been discussed in relation to the objectification of the (female) body as well as his orphan background. Having witnessed a number of deaths in his early life, Kawabata’s acute attention to the loved object seems inseparable from his fundamental awareness of its unreachability. In this talk, Fusako Innami will examine how writing as a medium functions as a mode of connection through special attention to Kawabata’s writing of adolescents. Often attracted to the untouched, not yet touched, or unreachable, his writing cre­ates and re-creates the loved object while extending the self with an extent of reciprocity. This session of the DIJ History and Humanities Study Group is part of the DIJ Gender and Sexuality in East Asia Lecture Series. Details and registration here

Speaker:
Fusako Innami, Durham University