| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s13e03
Thursday, October 22, 2026, 18:00~19:30 (CEST, UTC +2h)

| Location | 

| Platform & Link |

| Abstract |

In the 1960s a new kind of expert appeared across the industrialised world who claimed that the future could be studied systematically. In the United States, forecasters at bodies such as the RAND Corporation used computers and systems analysis to calculate the likely consequences of present decisions. In Europe, figures such as Robert Jungk argued that thinking about the future should be imaginative and participatory, a way for ordinary people to envisage other possible worlds. Historians now call this broad movement future studies and argue that it left a lasting mark on think tanks, long-range planning and scenario methods still in use today. Yet despite a futurology boom in 1960s Japan, culminating in the second International Future Research Conference in Kyoto in 1970, Japan’s part in the development of future studies is little discussed today.

This talk examines Japanese futurology (miraigaku), founded in the mid-1960s by a small group that included the anthropologist Umesao Tadao, the science-fiction writer Komatsu Sakyō and the government planner Hayashi Yūjirō. For these thinkers the great problem Japan faced was a consequence of its own success. Having caught up with the West, the nation no longer had a model to follow, and technological change was reshaping people’s desires faster than government could respond. Their answer was to entrust the future to the state and its experts, who would put the new science of futurology to work for the good of the nation and whose visions of the future would take over the role religion had once played in restraining and guiding the masses. The talk argues that this approach made Japanese futurology a conservative body of thought, treating change as a force to be managed rather than a matter for public choice, and it considers why critics at the time accused the futurologists of removing politics from the future.

| Speaker Bio |

Christopher Perkins is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is Chief Editor of Japan Forum, sits on the council of the British Association for Japanese Studies, and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. His research examines the history of Japanese student politics, media representation and state policing responses, with particular focus on Japan’s New Left movements of the 1960s and 1970s. He is Principal Investigator on the AHRC Responsive Mode Curiosity Award ‘Contesting Japan’s Future: Mapping Crisis, Governance, and Activism in the 1970s’ (APP94840).
His recent work includes The Tokyo University Trial and the Struggle Against Order in Postwar Japan (Palgrave, 2024), which explores how the largest trial in Japanese legal history became a battleground over legal process and social order in the postwar period. With Ferran de Vargas he co-edited Political Thought and Japan’s New Left Movements: Transformations in Radical Theory (Bloomsbury, 2025), the first comprehensive collection examining the radical theorists who shaped Japan’s 1960s intellectual landscape. His earlier book, The United Red Army on Screen (Palgrave, 2015), analyses media memory of Japan’s radical left. His work has also appeared in journals including the European Journal of Social Theory, Global Society, Japan Forum, Television and New Media, the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema and Asiatische Studien, as well as in numerous edited collections.

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s13/#e03.

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s13e04
Thursday, October 29, 2026, 18:00~19:30 (CET, UTC +1h)

| Location | 

| Abstract |

In this talk, I introduce my work-in-progress project that repositions Yasashii Nihongo (literally “easy” or “considerate” Japanese) not merely as an outcome of linguistic simplification but as a socially and politically consequential form of language policy. Yasashii Nihongo was initially developed by a small group of linguists and educators in response to the Great Hanshin Earthquake disaster in 1995, in which the mortality rate of foreign residents proved significantly higher than that of Japanese residents. Because foreign residents with limited Japanese ability were unable to access vital information, these academics aimed at grammatical and lexical simplification of the Japanese language to deliver clear emergency communications to non-native speakers.

In a different direction from linguistic simplification in the context of crisis communication, a separate group of scholars have taken up and expanded Yasashii Nihongo in the 2000s. Their academic attempt advances a comprehensive language reform and reframes it as a response to Japan’s demographic shifts and the rapid increase in migrant population. As a result, national and local government bodies, media outlets as well as researchers have actively justified and promoted Yasashii Nihongo until today. It has been considered and even used as a form of accessible communication means, almost equivalent to officially endorsed language policy, taking effect over wider domains such as municipality websites, news reports, healthcare communication, and notably Japanese language education.

Although Yasashii Nihongo has gained national/institutional visibility and academic endorsement, scholarship fails to move beyond celebratory and affirmative accounts. Only a few scholars interrogate its ideological foundations and examine consequences for societal multilingualism and migrant inclusion. To follow suit, my current project aims to provide a critical counterbalance to dominant discourses that frame Yasashii Nihongo as a self-evident “solution” to communication barriers. In this talk, I share a preliminary result of a scoping review that analyses academic discourses surrounding Yasashii Nihongo and identify academic trends which, at least in part, contribute to the justification of Yasashii Nihongo.

| Speaker Bio |

Ruriko Otomo is an Associate Professor at Hokkaido University’s Graduate School of International Media, Communication, and Tourism Studies. She has an academic background in Hong Kong (PhD) and Australia (Masters). She works at the nexus of migration and language policy and planning, with a focus on corporate language policies, healthcare labor mobility to Japan, and the linguistic impacts of free trade agreements. This has been addressed in her monograph Linking Language, Trade and Migration Partnership Agreements as Language Policy in Japan (Springer Nature, 2023) which theorizes how free trade policy framework intersects with managing language diversity. Other publications include book chapters on language policy in Japan (Routledge Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics, 2019), institutional policing and language (learning) practices in eldercare workplace (Language, Global Mobilities, Blue-Collar Workers and Blue-collar Workplaces, 2020) and the lived experiences of migrant healthcare workers (Routledge Companion to Cross-Cultural Management, 2026).

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s13/#e04.

| Abstract |

Immigration (gaikokujin-ukeire) was a de-politicized issue in Japanese elections for a long time. This changed after the 2024 general election, when Sanseito, an anti-immigrant right-wing party, mobilized voters through nativist appeals and subsequently expanded its electoral support in the 2025 and 2026 elections. This development raises two related questions: To what extent did Sanseito itself drive the politicization of immigration, and how did the established parties’ response contribute to this process? More broadly, how has interparty competition over the politicization of immigration evolved in Japan?

Existing studies of immigration politics in Western Europe often identify anti-immigrant parties as issue entrepreneurs that can activate immigration as an electoral issue. Other studies suggest that established right-wing parties play a pivotal role in activating or amplifying politicization. The Japanese case provides an opportunity to examine whether patterns identified in Western Europe also emerge in a markedly different political and social context, where immigration had long remained weakly politicized.

Japan's immigrant population remains relatively small compared to many established democracies, and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the country's dominant center-right party, has long maintained that Japan has never formally adopted an immigration policy. At the same time, the LDP gradually expanded admission of foreign workers under the Abe government after 2012 despite its conservative stance on immigration.

Using party manifestos and candidate surveys, I examine changes in the salience of and positions on immigration issues, focusing on the LDP. My preliminary analysis suggests two findings. First, Sanseito's electoral success led the LDP to slightly increase references to immigration in its 2026 manifesto. Second, LDP candidates took more restrictive positions on the issue in the 2026 election. In other words, the LDP responded to Sanseito's politicization challenge through a limited accommodative strategy. The implications for Japanese politics and the politics of immigration will be discussed.

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s13e01
Thursday 2026-10-08, 18:00~19:30 (CET, UTC +1h)

| Place | 

| Platform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s13/#e01.

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s13e02
Thursday, October 15, 2026, 18:00~19:30 (CET, UTC +1h)

| Location | 

| Platform & Link |

| Abstract |

Notions of purity and pollution occupy a central place in Shinto thought and ritual practice. However, far from being immutable, these categories provide versatile symbolic resources that can be mobilised for diverse ends. Through them, boundaries are drawn, misfortunes explained and managed, and social distinctions articulated. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in western Japan, this lecture examines how ideas of purity and pollution are alive and entangled with gender, social hierarchies, and ritual authority at one of Japan’s major Shinto shrines and its community.

To shed light on these issues, I begin by outlining how purity and impurity are conceived and managed in contemporary Shinto. I then analyse two matsuri (religious festivals) from the same shrine, as contrasting case studies, to show how Shinto notions of purity are enacted as spatiotemporal and gendered forms of social ordering. These two case studies pose a puzzle: at one of Japan’s most important Shinto shrines, one matsuri has recently accommodated the ritual participation of a female priest, while another continues to strictly enforce the prohibition on women’s participation. Interlocutors commonly explain this exclusion through two related idioms: the physical dangers of the festival and the potential for ritual defilement associated particularly with menstrual blood. Rather than treating these explanations simply as survivals of traditional pollution beliefs, I ask what women’s ritual exclusion actually accomplishes within the social context to which the ritual belongs.

Tracing how ritual restrictions are justified and enforced in a Japanese community, I show how matsuri function not only as forms of worship and communal techniques for managing misfortune, but also as powerful social statements and instruments. In particular, I argue that pollution and ritual exclusion are used to articulate and (re)produce social distinctions and hierarchies while allowing local men to lay claim to special social roles and to a privileged relationship with the home. I therefore approach ideas of purity and pollution not merely as remnants of the past or a system of religious classification, but as live symbolic and practical resources through which gendered authority, hierarchy, and social relationships are enacted, publicly asserted, and reproduced.

| Speaker Bio |

Guilherme Figueiredo is a doctoral research student at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. His current doctoral research focuses on contemporary Shinto and ritual practice and how ritual form is related to various aspects of the fabric of social life. He is also interested in broader ideas of religiosity, secularism, and how traditional religious institutions and practices are changing and adapting to modern and post-industrialised contexts. He has conducted fieldwork in Dazaifu Tenmangū (Fukuoka Prefecture), a major Shinto shrine in Japan. In the past, Guilherme has worked on philosophical and theoretical aspects of anthropology and the social sciences, a topic he is still devoted to and that informs his current research. Drawing mainly on three philosophical traditions (pragmatism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology), he has published on the issues of intercultural interpretation, the role of ‘ethnocentrism’ in anthropological practice, objectivity, and relativism.

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s13/#e02.