Join us on Tuesday, April 22, 2025 at 5:30 PM in Kane Hall 225 for a special evening lecture: Consolidating Constitutional Legitimacy in Japan: Concepts, Metrics, and Pathways Forward Kenneth Mori McElwain, University of Tokyo and Columbia University Amidst global challenges to established institutions, rights, and norms, the role of constitutions in preserving democratic governance

Join us for the 2024 Griffith and Patricia Way Lecture Thursday, April 25 5:30 – 7:00 PM Kane Hall 225 Walker-Ames Room Reception to follow What was the moment of death supposed to look like for people living in premodern Japan? While most people surely envisioned seeing the Buddha and his retinue descend at this

Join us for a special book talk: Public Interest and State Legitimation: Early Modern England, Japan, and China. Wenkai He (Ph.D., MIT, 2007), is associate professor of Social Science at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Before joining HKUST, he was An Wang postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at

Juan Felipe Arroyave (MA/PhD Japanese) spent the summer in Japan with support from the Kasai-Buerge Scholarship. “Thanks to this award, I was able to spend two weeks in Japan as a Seminar Leader for the last edition of Komatsu Summer School (KSS),” reports Arroyave. “This bilingual summer camp, held in a rural area of Ishikawa Prefecture,

Christopher B. Johnstone, senior adviser and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, explores the evolution of the U.S.-Japan alliance over the last 30 years from the view of a policy practitioner who was directly involved in key developments at the White House and the Department of Defense. The U.S.-Japan alliance slowly,

Ken Tadashi Oshima, UW professor of architecture, has long been a keen observer and researcher of the work of architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright. ‘Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture that Connects the World’ an exhibit curated by Oshima, is the first full-scale retrospective of Wright’s work in Japan in 26 years and shows the breadth

Kicking off our Diversity and Inclusion film series this year, is “Close-Knit” (2017 2 hr. 7 min.),  a drama by writer and director Naoko Ogigami about Tomo, an 11-year old girl who discovers her mother has abandoned her. Tomo’s uncle and his transgender girlfriend, Rinko, take her in. November 13 also marks the beginning of

Keijiro Suga (b. 1958) is a poet and critic based in Tokyo. Formerly the president of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) Japan, his work covers ethnopoetics, ecocriticism, contemporary world literature, and translation theory. He was awarded the Yomiuri Prize for Literature in 2011 for his travel essays Transversal Journeys. With nine collections

Join us via Zoom for a talk with Dr. Mina Qiao of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies about the meanings behind coronavirus narratives taking us back, not forward. Rather than “neo-” or new, a “re-”: returning to the past, revealing existing problems, and reclaiming memories lost and lessons forgotten. In her 2021 short story collection Unsocial Distance, Japanese

The UW Japan Studies Program is Proud to Sponsor Spaces of Creative Resistance 2021, a research initiative by UW Faculty Andrea Gevurtz Arai (JSIS & UW Japan Studies Program) and Jeff Hou (Dept. of Landscape Architecture & UW Taiwan Studies Program). The three day workshop, called “Public Spaces, Creative Action, Democratic Practices in East Asia,”