Dear colleagues,

This is an updated version of the announcement of the meeting on 12 November (Saturday/tomorrow) of the Kansai Modern Japan Group. The KMJG is an interdisciplinary platform for scholars/students based in or visiting the Kansai area who work on modern and/or contemporary Japan.
The November meeting is our anniversary meeting, the festivities as usual consisting of three lectures in the afternoon followed by a dinner at a nearby izakaya.

The lectures will be in English, the comments and discussion either in English or Japanese. All interested are most welcome. If you will join us for dinner, please send a notice to:

Here are the data:

DATE: Saturday 12 November
TIME: 13:00 - 17:30; dinner from 18:00
PLACE: Kyoto University Institute for Research in
Humanities

SPEAKER: Hans Martin Kramer (Ruhr University Bochum)
TITLE: An Other 'Other': Japanese Views of Islam and
Translations of
the Qur'an in the Twentieth Century
DISCUSSANT: tba

SPEAKER: Aike P. Rots (University of Oslo)
TITLE: Shinto Environmentalism? The Rediscovery of
'Sacred Forests'
in Contemporary Japan
DISCUSSANT: tba

SPEAKER: Marie Thorsten (Doshisha University)
TITLE: American Sputnik Nostalgia and the Attraction
of Japan
DISCUSSANT: Peter Duus (Stanford University)

For the abstracts of the lectures, please see below.

We will use room 330 on the third floor of the main building of Kyoto University's Institute for Research in Humanities (IRH), also known as Jinbunken. You can find a map under 'Access & Contact' at http://www.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/
For those who cannot read Japanese, the IRH is on the northeast side of Kyoto University's main campus, immediately to your right when you enter through the north gate (kita-mon). It is a short walk from Hyakumanben, the crossing of Higashioji-dori and Imadegawa-dori. When walking east from Hyakumanben, the north gate is the second gate on your right hand side.

NB: For those who arrive after 14:00, the door of the IHR building may be locked. Please call 090-4643 8721.

Those willing to present at one of our monthly meetings, please send an abstract of the presentation you propose to and .

I look forward to welcoming many of you tomorrow.

Best regards,

Dick Stegewerns
Kyoto University & University of Oslo

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ABSTRACTS:

An Other 'Other' - Japanese Views of Islam and Translations of the Qur'an in the Twentieth Century

Scholarship on the question how discourses on Japanese cultural identity evolved in the modern era are dominated by the assumption that the West served as the overpowering 'other'. Be it as a model to be emulated or as a negative foil, it is only in reference to the West that Japanese have been able to define their own cultural identity. Or so we, especially Europeans and North Americans studying Japan, have come to believe.
In fact there have been alternative 'others' that have served as important points of reference in the quest of individual Japanese for a meaningful place of Japan in the modern world. One such 'other' is the Islamic world, a fact which has recently been acknowledged in the context of pan-Asianism. The present talk seeks to extend this acknowledgment to the religious sphere by focusing on Japanese translations of the Qur'an and appropriations of Islam since the 1920s.

Hans Martin Kramer is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at Ruhr University Bochum. He was a research fellow at the University of Tokyo and Harvard University. Currently he is a visiting fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken). His main publications are on the modern history of education and the history of religion in Japan.

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Shinto Environmentalism? - The Rediscovery of 'Sacred Forests' in Contemporary Japan

In the course of modern history, the concept of 'Shinto' has been defined and interpreted according to several competing paradigms. The term is an abstraction, onto which a variety of normative notions concerning the Japanese nation, land and imperial family are projected, that do not necessarily correspond to actual shrine practices. In recent academic and popular discourse, there has been significant interest in the notion of Shinto as an ancient tradition of nature worship, representing the 'harmony with nature' that supposedly characterises traditional Japanese culture and society. Some even argue that traditional Shinto worldviews may serve as a blueprint for a new environmental awareness and ethics.
In this presentation, I will analyse this development, and discuss its symbolic and ideological significance.
In particular, I will look at the concept of 'chinju no mori' (sacred shrine forests), which is central to much Japanese discourse on Shinto and the environment, and discuss some of the assumptions and activities of the movement that seeks to protect these forests. I will also give some examples of ways in which shrines reinvent themselves according to, and contribute to, the new paradigm; and describe some of the forest- and nature-related practices that have been developed by shrines and shrine-related organisations in recent years.

Aike P. Rots studied Japanese Studies and Comparative Religion at Leiden University. Afterwards, he followed the MA in Japanese Religions at SOAS, London. He has done research on the topic of Japanese expressions of Christianity, and published several articles about this.
Since last year, he works as a doctoral candidate at the University of Oslo. He is currently spending three months in Japan in order to collect materials and conduct interviews.

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American Sputnik Nostalgia and the Attraction of Japan

Obama's 2011 declaration that "Now is our generation's Sputnik moment"
is hardly original. Officials under the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations also summoned up reminders of the cold war satellite when the US was declining under their administrations. Their scripting of a narrative of decline against superior others - Soviets, Japanese, Asians, etc. - intended to spur greater mental productivity and achievements. Looking at Sputnik nostalgia around the 25th (1982) and 50th anniversaries (2007 until today) of the Soviet launching, this presentation critiques the extent to which representations of Japan have filled desires and designs for some moment of national renewal.

Marie Thorsten is an Associate Professor of Global Communications at Doshisha University. Her specialties are culture and globalization, US-Japan relations and visual communication, and her book [in press] is Superhuman Japan: Nation, Knowledge and Culture in US-Japan Relations
(London: Routledge, 2012)

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