| Abstract |

Is the future of democracy at stake? As population aging advances in many liberal democracies, intergenerational equity, societal sustainability, and the general capacity to implement reforms come under pressure. This paper focuses on the case of Japan, where the political participation and representation of the elderly seems to dominate the core democratic institutions of the nation. Many scholars even attest the young to be apathetic to politics. But is the story that simple? We take a closer look at how young people in Japan respond to and understand their role in the nation’s aging democracy. In this lecture, Gabriele Vogt addresses the following research questions: What are the attitudes of young Japanese towards political participation? Do they feel neglected and withdraw from politics or do they develop new strategies in informal politics to make their voices heard?

If so, how do they participate, and to what degree do they experience self-efficacy in the process? To answer these questions, in the fall of 2024, we conducted focus group interviews with Japanese university students. By basing the analysis on insights from group discussions among young Japanese and thus minimizing the researchers’ effect, we strive for an unfiltered view on generational attitudes towards political participation and dynamics in problem perception. We want to understand how young Japanese negotiate the future challenges for Japan’s political realm among their peers. This lecture is based on a joint research paper with Anne-Sophie L. König, Stefanie Schwarte and Antonia Vesting as part of the DFG-funded research project “Demography and Democracy: How Population Aging Alters Democracy – The Case of Japan” at LMU Munich.

| Bio |

Gabriele Vogt is Full Professor and Chair in Japanese Studies and serves as Director to the Department of Asian Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich). She is the author of “Population Aging and International Health-Caregiver Migration to Japan” (Springer International, 2018). She currently spearheads two DFG-funded research projects, one highlighting the interconnectedness of demography and democracy in Japan (DFG 510553228), which this presentation is based on, and the other focusing on Japan’s pandemic management amidst a culture of vigilance (part of CRC 1369 at LMU Munich). Her latest journal publication is a co-authored paper with Yosuke Buchmeier on: “The Aging Democracy: Demographic Effects, Political Legitimacy, and the Quest for Generational Pluralism” (Perspectives on Politics, 2024, 22:1, pp. 168-180, open access).

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s09e09
Thursday 2025-01-09, 18:00~19:30

| Place & Preparations | 

| Plattform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s09/#e09.

| Abstract |

In the first decades after World War II, one of the most important questions in Japan was how to prevent Japanese society from being drawn back to totalitarian political phenomena. Asking this question implied the need to understand the reasons why fascism had taken over Japanese society in the 1930s and 1940s with relatively little internal resistance. Interpretations from different ideological spheres arose from the endeavor to address these key issues. Orthodox Marxism focused on the economic structure of Japan, characterized by capitalist relations of production marked by strong feudal remnants that facilitated the political manipulation of oligarchic elites with their own particular class interests. Liberal progressivism focused instead on the social-cultural superstructure, especially regarding the individual-collective relationship, which was regarded as underdeveloped in terms of modernity.

Finally, the New Left tended to view the particularly rapid development of capitalist modernity in Japan as having abruptly separated individuals from their original communities, giving rise to an increasingly extreme collective attraction toward the substitute, abstract community embodied in the nation. On the other hand, the theoretical controversy over the origins of Japanese fascism hardly transcended the closed limits of intellectual circles. In this regard, cinema, as mass art par excellence in postwar Japan, sometimes became a mediating instrument between the theories of intellectuals and the consciousness of the masses through the critical representation of fascism in the big screen. This lecture will address the way in which postwar Japanese cinema, through the example of specific films, conveyed to the general public those debates on fascism thus taking them beyond the narrow world of the intelligentsia.

| Bio |

Ferran de Vargas (Barcelona, 1989) is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh. His main research interest is the study of political ideologies, democratic processes, and aesthetic movements in East Asia, with a special focus on transwar Japan. Dr. De Vargas has been researching left-wing movements, Marxist theory, and the intersection of politics with cultural productions such as cinema in Japan, publishing his research results in journals such as positions: asia critique, Modern Asian Studies, Japan Forum, Film-Philosophy, The Sixties and Arts. He is also the author of a book on the political history of postwar Japan. Dr. De Vargas is currently working on Japanese left-wing political theories and cultural representations of fascism, and on the conversion of left-wing intellectuals into right-wing ideologists in 1960s and 1970s Japan.

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s09e08
Thursday 2024-12-12, 18:00~19:30

| Place & Preparations | 

| Plattform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s09/#e08.

| Abstract |

Numerous countries around the world are interested in recruiting international skilled migrants to stay economically competitive in the region, including an emerging immigration regime like Japan. Skilled migrants have often been touted as mobile with few obstacles. However, they do not necessarily undergo smooth or linear upward socio-economic, social and career mobilities. Pressured by the severe labour shortage, Japan seeks to recruit foreign skilled professionals, while simultaneously maintaining strong resistance in introducing an officials migration policy. Despite the resistance, the number of foreign residents has continued to increase over the past decade, and Vietnamese-nationals, including those working as skilled migrants in the IT sector, are one of the growing groups of migrant workers in Japan. The current multi-year research project focuses on the socio-economic, career and transnational (im)mobilities of Vietnamese IT professionals in Japan.

The study is based on offline and online ethnographic fieldwork in Japan and Vietnam since 2021, including over 70 interviews. Despite differences in entry channels to the country and work contracts in the Japanese labour market, some of Vietnamese IT professionals are able to opt for job mobilities driven by the strong labour demand. Nevertheless, after several job changes, they cannot project further upward career mobility. Although their working life may not be necessarily fulfilling, their staying process in the host society is heavily shaped by social and family factors that often prevent and/or postpone their further mobility/return. The study presents the process of how Vietnamese IT professionals in Japan end up prologuing their stay-ing, not necessarily projecting a permanent settlement.

| Bio |

Aimi Muranaka is a post-doc researcher at the Institute of East Asian Studies in the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She works for a collaborative research project “Qualification and Skill in the Migration Process of Foreign Workers in Asia (QuaMaFA)” funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany. Her current research project sheds light on transnational and internal (im)mobility of Vietnamese IT professionals in Japan. Her research interest centres on skills/qualifications in international migration, marketisation of migration and brokerage in Asia. Her recent publications include “Perks or burdens? Being ‘nearly (Im)mobile’ as IT foreign professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan” in Contemporary Japan and “Immigration and Quality of Life in Ageing Societies” (co-edited with Aeneas Zi Wang and Florian Coulmas).

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s09e07
Thursday 2024-12-05, 18:00~19:30

| Place & Preparations | 

| Plattform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s09/#e07.

| Abstract |

Since the late 2010s, sexual violence has increasingly gotten attention in Japan becoming a topic of discussion in media, politics, and society. In 2017, Ito Shiori went public accusing a senior journalist of raping her and in the same year the Penal Code’s articles on sex crimes were reformed for the first time in 110 years. In 2019 a series of non-guilty verdicts for rape cases sparked public outrage which was channelled by feminist activists into the Flower Demo movement. In 2023 the Penal Code was reformed once again and the BBC released a documentary exposing the sexual abuse of young boys perpetrated, since the 1970s, by Johnny Kitagawa, founder of one of the most famous talent agencies in Japan.

However, sexual violence is neither a new problem in Japan nor a new issue discussed by feminists. While it certainly has been, and still is to a degree, a taboo topic in Japanese society, women’s groups in Japan have been tackling the problem since the early 1980s. They established the first support services for victims filling in an institutional void, they spoke out about rape myths and deep-rooted sexism, and they engaged in social actions to raise awareness about the issue. This lecture will explore an often-forgot page of Japanese feminism retracing the history of anti-rape activism in Japan: the first grassroots women’s groups in the 1980s and 1990s, the first advocacy efforts for legal reforms in the 2010s, the emergence of the #MeToo movement and the Flower Demo in recent years, and the two reforms of the Penal Code.

| Bio |

Chiara Fusari is currently pursuing her PhD and serves as a teaching assistant at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at the University of Zurich. She earned her Master’s degree at Leiden University, where she conducted research on the involvement of buraku women in the Buraku liberation movement. Recently, part of her findings was published as a peer-reviewed article titled “Buraku Women: Literacy as a Path to Empowerment.” Her research focuses on gender, minority issues and social movements in Japan. For her doctoral dissertation, she is investigating anti-sexual violence activism in Japan, conducting in-depth interviews with advocates and participant observation.

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s09e06
Thursday 2024-12-28, 18:00~19:30

| Place & Preparations | 

| Plattform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s09/#e06.

| Abstract |

The planetary crisis and the urgent need for sustainability demand a radical re-evaluation of the epistemologies underlying modern academic knowledge production. Within this context, intellectual history has traditionally revolved around human-centered narratives that compartmentalized ideas of the historical past into what Arthur Lovejoy termed "unit-ideas" such as ‘philosophy,’ ‘religion,’ ‘art,’ and ‘science.’ This talk argues that there are identifiable paradigms from the past that do not neatly fit into these established categories and that recognized nonhuman organisms as crucial ‘actors.’ One such case study is the Japanese independent naturalist and polymath Minakata Kumagusu (1867-1941).

In 1893-1894 London, Kumagusu created what Honda call cellular metaphysics: a study of metaphysics inspired by philosophical underpinnings of Daijō Buddhism and the ever-changing forms of slime moulds and other associated unicellular and multicellular organisms like amoebas and fungi. This historical research shows how epistemological binaries and hierarchies between humans and the nonhuman organisms evaporated as his ways of knowing came to resemble the nonhuman actors.

Building on this historical research, Honda discusses her experiments in creating a new field of study she calls multispecies intellectual history, driven by interdisciplinary thinking and collaborations. She will introduce an overview of the research agenda, its broader implications and significance, and examples of the approaches she employs in resolving the conundrums posed by conventional intellectual frameworks—without compromising the rigorous inductive analysis of primary sources.

| Bio |

Eiko Honda is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Global Studies, the Aarhus University, Denmark. She specialises in the intellectual history of modern Japan and the environmental humanities. Her historical research interrogates boundary-defying works and (inter-)actions of Japanese scientist-polymaths whose epistemologies do not conform to the model of ‘civilisational progress’ led by the vision of human domination over non-human ‘nature.’ She concurrently collaborates with scholars and practitioners of various fields to investigate shifting roles and methods of History and Area Studies in the time of climate crisis. She is the PI of Unearthing Multispecies Intellectual History: Earthing Trajectories of Area Studies (2023-2026) funded by the Aarhus University Research Foundation and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. Her recent publications include curatorial-editorial of ‘Multispecies Intellectual History’ Collection with the journal Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History (2024-2025) and article “Minakata Kumagusu and the Emergence of Queer Nature: The Civilisation Theory, Buddhist Science and Microbes, 1887-1892” in Modern Asian Studies (2023).

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s09e05
Thursday 2024-11-21, 18:00~19:30

| Place & Preparations | 

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s09/#e05.

| Abstract |

This lecture examines the complex role of digital platforms in constructing counter-hegemonic collective memory in Japan, focusing on audience reception of the documentary Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women Issue. Produced by Japanese-American filmmaker Miki Dezaki, Shusenjo addresses the historical controversy surrounding the so-called “comfort women” (ianfu)—a euphemistic term for Asian women forced into providing sexual services to Japanese soldiers before and during WWII. The film captures the sociopolitical tensions surrounding Japan’s wartime and colonial responsibility, presenting both traditional and revisionist-nationalist perspectives on Japanese war memory.

The Shusenjo case study forms part of a broader research program on the critical intersections of media, technology, and suppression/liberation, specifically examining the contemporary institutionalization of nationalism entangled with racism, xenophobia, historical revisionism (e.g., denial of wartime atrocities), and misogyny. This research addresses the politics of war memory surrounding cultural products and their implications for the (re)construction of national identity—specifically how everyday people actively problematize, make sense of, and narrow or expand the meaning of the nation.

By analyzing audience review comments through critical discourse analysis, this study offers nuanced insights into ongoing public discourse and sentiment surrounding this controversy. The documentary creates a space for the (re)construction of perspectives on collective war memory, adding layers of complexity to this process. The research demonstrates how digital spaces—such as discussion boards, user comments, and film reviews—become enmeshed into a gestalt that both stirs and structures the memory production process. This participatory and evolving construction of memory not only influences interpretations of Japan’s wartime history but also reflects contemporary debates over Japan’s role in regional relations, gender equality, and migration. The analysis finds the prominence of “shame”-based nationalism within a dialectic of memory production, wherein contemporary visions of Japan’s future inform retrospective understandings of its past, with war memory serving as a rationale for national identity and future/prospective goals.

| Bio |

Junki Nakahara is a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL, aparc.fsi.stanford.edu/snapl ), housed within the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Her research interests include nationalism and xenophobia, critical and cultural studies, feminist media studies, and postcolonial/decolonial international relations. She studies the contemporary dominance and institutionalization of nationalism, entangled with racism, xenophobia, historical revisionism (e.g., denial of wartime atrocities), and misogyny, primarily focusing on East Asia. She earned her PhD in Communication (2023) and MA in Intercultural and International Communication (2019), both from American University. Her publications include contributions to New Media & Society, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, and Discourse Approaches to an Emerging Age of Populism (edited by I. Íñigo-Mora & Lastres-López). As an inaugural member of SNAPL, she leads the "Nationalism and Racism" research team, investigating how nationalism and racism intertwine to create various forms of suppression and intolerance across the Asia-Pacific region, where entanglements among race, ethnicity, nation, and postcoloniality add complexity to these debates.

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s09e04
Thursday 2024-11-07, 18:00~19:30

| Place & Preparations | 

| Plattform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s09/#e04.

| Abstract |

For more than half a century, research on rural Japan has been casted by the doomsday discourse on the devastating regional effects of outmigration, infrastructure decay and population aging (kaso chiiki). The negative assessment has been aggravated by newer key notions of ‘marginal settlements’ (genkai shūraku) and the ‘extinction of communities’ (chiiki shōmetsu). Cities, by contrast, are said to be better prepared for the future due to the spatial concentration of institutions and resources that enable urban places to excel over the countryside in terms of labor and employment opportunities, social welfare, health care, education and entertainment. But there is no evidence that the general trend toward urbanization is paralleled by an overall increase in happiness: “There are many benefits of big-city living; high levels of happiness are not among them” (Berry and Okulicz-Kozaryn 2011: 872).

Wolfram Manzenreiter‘s research on rural life in Japan challenges the master-narrative of rural decline by engaging in ethnographic fashion with local notions of happiness and the significance of social relatedness for making life worth-living to those who stayed (behind) or moved into the countryside. His approach is situated in the tradition of the Vienna School of Japanese Studies, evidently by revisiting the same research site in southwestern Japan that Josef Kreiner and other researchers from Vienna chose in the late 1960s for the first time-ever field research project in Japan by a European research team. Drawing back on lessons from the first and the current project, he adopts a long-term perspective to explore the notions of rural happiness in the light of changing family and social relations, new mobilities and shifting moralities.

| Bio |

Wolfram Manzenreiter is Professor of Japanese Studies at the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna and Head of the Japan research unit. His research is concerned with social and anthropological aspects of sports, emotions, work and migration in a globalising world. He is author of several books and numerous articles and book chapters on cultural globalization, body culture, transnationalism and well-being. His most recent publications include Japan through the lens of the Tokyo Olympics (2020; co-editors I. Gagne, B. Holthus, F. Waldenberger); Life course, happiness and well-being in Japan and Happiness and the good life in Japan (both 2017 and coedited with B. Holthus). Currently he is working on community happiness in Japan’s rural peripheries.

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s09e03
Thursday 2024-10-31, 18:00~19:30

| Place & Preparations | 

| Plattform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s09/#e03.

| Abstract |

Some single Japanese women go abroad to places such as London, Los Angeles, and Southeast Asia for a variety of reasons, and work as hostesses entertaining Japanese (and other Asian) men in nightclubs. These women – transnational Japanese hostesses – are a subject from the North largely overlooked in surveys of global intimate labour.

This talk focuses on Japanese hostesses working in London. These women, typically in their 20s and 30s, are often working holidaymakers or students. Their personal narratives reveal that they try to compensate for their lack of social and linguistic capital by selling femininity, Japaneseness and communication. Moreover, their stories disclose some structural factors, such as the diversification of intimate work on a global scale, that influence their decision to pursue this line of work, which eventually led them to gendered migration.

First, Nanase Shirota will present these hostesses’ personal narratives and explain the structural elements that influence their work choices and career paths. Second, based on these analyses, she argues that they use hostess work as a stepping-stone for their own goals, whilst these jobs and strategies eventually draw them back to ‘their own place’, which they had initially decided to leave. Finally, she will share some findings from her most recent fieldwork in Amsterdam, Ho Chi Minh City, and Kuala Lumpur.

| Bio |

Nanase Shirota is an affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, where she earned her PhD. She holds an MA from Keio University, studying Arabic and Islamic studies, and a second MA in Sociology from the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on communication (particularly listening), work, and gender in contemporary Japan, with a specific current focus on transnational Japanese hostesses working abroad. She is also methodologically interested in ethnography, interviews, and oral history.

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s09e02
Thursday 2024-10-24, 18:00~19:30

| Place & Preparations | 

| Plattform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s09/#e02.

| Abstract |

The Fukushima nuclear accident eroded trust in the safety of nuclear power plants and prompted anti-nuclear protests. Instead of the nuclear phase out many observers expected, the nuclear safety agency was reorganised and nuclear power goals were adjusted to reduce Japan's reliance on nuclear power to 20-22 per cent by 2030. But why is Japan still not on track to achieving these targets? In this lecture, Florentine Koppenborg argues that the regulatory reforms taken up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster on March 11, 2011, directly and indirectly raised the costs of nuclear power in Japan. The new Nuclear Regulation Authority resisted capture by the nuclear industry and fundamentally altered the environment for nuclear policy implementation. Independent safety regulation changed state-business relations in the nuclear power domain from regulatory capture to top-down safety regulation, which raised technical safety costs for electric utilities. Furthermore, the safety agency's extended emergency preparedness regulations expanded the allegorical backyard of NIMBY demonstrations. Antinuclear protests, - mainly lawsuits challenging restarts - incurred additional social acceptance costs. Increasing costs undermined pro-nuclear actors' ability to implement nuclear power policy and caused a rift inside Japan's "nuclear village." Small nuclear safety administration reforms were, in fact, game changers for nuclear power politics in Japan.

| Bio |

Florentine Koppenborg is a Senior Research Fellow at the Chair of Environmental and Climate Policy at the Technical University of Munich. Her research interests address energy and climate policy, particularly energy transitions ("Energiewende") and interactions with climate policy. She has authored several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on Japan's nuclear energy and climate policy. She has been the principal investigator of a research project on "Governing Sustainability Transitions: Technology Phase-outs in Germany and Japan." In 2023, she published her book on "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance" (Cornell University Press).

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s09e01
Thursday 2024-10-17, 18:00~19:30

| Place & Preparations | 

| Plattform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s09/#e01.