May 2012 | Jackson School calendar | archive and advanced search
This Week
Click on the title for more details.- Japan Today: Currents of Disaster: Radiation, Ocean, and Safety in Post-Fukushima Japan
Thu May 17, 2012
All Events
May 2012
Japan Today: Currents of Disaster: Radiation, Ocean, and Safety in Post-Fukushima Japan
Thursday May 17, 2012
7:00 PM
Gowen 201
Devastated by the 3/11 multi-fold disaster, fishing communities in northeastern Japan have faced new tests intimately connected to Japan’s earlier coastal modernization project. The earthquake and tsunami seriously damaged the fishing ports, and radioactive contamination of the coastal waters has rendered some of the fish unsalable. This presentation explores the production of risk by coastal Japan’s postwar modernization, and traces how radiation unleashed from the crippled nuclear reactors has physically and conceptually traveled through ocean currents, fish consumption, and media in post-Fukushima Japan.
Satsuki Takahashi (PhD, Anthropology, Rutgers University, 2010) is currently a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. Based on her dissertation and ongoing NSF RAPID-funded follow-up research, she is currently preparing a book manuscript on “unending modernization,” human-ocean relations, and discourses of survival in pre- and post-3/11 Japan.
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Democratic Breakdown and Party System in Interwar Japan — Part II
Tuesday May 29, 2012
10:00 - 11:00 AM
Thomson Hall 317, Seattle Campus
Yamamoto revisits the issue of the democratic breakdown in interwar Japan. First, he briefly summarizes his first lecture and reintroduces his thesis — the democratic collapse was a function of a two-party system dogged by profound political instability and labor defection. The core argument of this second lecture is that the partisan divide and labor defection are legacies of the antecedent conditions that shaped the subsequent developmental trajectories of the party system and the pattern of labor incorporation in early twentieth-century Japan. He elaborates the two proximate causes, the partisan divide and labor defection, as direct consequences of the cross-class coalition between oligarchic military elites and wealthy landowners, which was consolidated in 1900. The cross-class coalition of 1900 served as a critical juncture that locked the country onto a path of democratic breakdown by making it too costly for political parties to reverse either the fragmentation of the parliamentary system or labor alienation.
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| Japan Studies Program | |
| University of Washington | |
| Box 353650 | |
| Seattle, WA 98195-3650 | |
| ► | japan@uw.edu |
| Marie Anchordoguy | |
| Program Chair | |
| 206.543.4994 | |
| ► | anchor@uw.edu |
| Ellen Eskenazi | |
| Outreach and Program Development | |
| 206.685.9997 | |
| ► | japan@uw.edu |
| Martha Walsh | |
| Senior Program Associate | |
| ► | masako@uw.edu |
| Keiko Yokota-Carter | |
| Japan Studies Librarian | |
| 206.543.7051 | |
| ► | kyokotac@uw.edu |