The Contemporary Japan Group at the Institute of Social Science (ISS, or Shaken), University of Tokyo, welcomes you to a lecture by Andrew Gordon, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University, on

Making Sense of Japan's "Lost Decades"

Wednesday, May 15th 6:30-8:00 p.m. at Akamon Sougou Kenkyuto Room 549, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, Hongo Campus, University of Tokyo.

ABSTRACT

The change in domestic and global understanding of Japanese society and economy over the past twenty years has been extraordinary, from Japan as miracle, model, or menace in the 1960s-80s, and into the mid-1990s, to Japanese as declining land of systemic failure. Surely the former perceptions were exaggerated, and the recent drumbeat of a discourse of decline may be so as well.
How might we parse the grammar of the discourse of decline? And how does it connect to social trends and political economy? At the early stages of a project to examine these questions, I hope to use this occasion to raise them (rather than to answer them), and to seek thoughts and guidance from the audience on ways to approach them.

SPEAKER

Andrew Gordon is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University. His teaching and research focus primarily on modern Japan.
His most recent English publication is Fabricating
Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2011), on the emergence of the modern consumer in Japan, using the sewing machine as window on that story. A Japanese translation will be published in July 2013. Gordon's first book was The Evolution of Labor Relations in
Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853-1955 (Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies Monographs, 1985). A Japanese translation and expanded edition was published by Iwanami Shoten in 2012, with two additional chapters covering the period from the 1960s to the present. His talk will focus on issues addressed in the final chapter of this translation, which examines the 1990s and 2000s.

CONTEMPORARY JAPAN GROUP:

The ISS Contemporary Japan Group provides English-speaking residents of the Tokyo area with an opportunity to hear cutting-edge research in social science and related policy issues, as well as a venue for researchers and professionals in or visiting Tokyo to present and receive knowledgeable feedback on their latest research projects. Admission is free and advance registration is not required. Everyone is welcome.

For more information, please visit our website:
http://web.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/cjg/
or contact

Gregory W. NOBLE (noble[at]iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp)

Gregory W. Noble
Institute of Social Science
University of Tokyo
Email: noble[at]iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Visit the website at http://web.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/cjg/