Hiraku Shimoda

Bio: Hiraku Shimoda is an academic researcher from Waseda University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Sense of place & Meiji Restoration. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 4 publications receiving 26 citations. Previous affiliations of Hiraku Shimoda include Harvard University.

Japan since 1945: from Postwar to Post-Bubble

Abstract: The fifteen multidisciplinary essays that comprise this book examine the social, cultural, and political underpinnings of Japan’s postwar and post-industrial trajectories Unique for their integration of gender, class and ethnicity within four thematic narrative frames, the essays of this volume explore topics that range from the last twenty years of the Japanese state’s efforts to formulate industrial policy and foster financial reform to the unconnected efforts of a Japanese broadcaster and an American airline to construct personal and national identification around nostalgic notions of a reified ‘self’

Lost and Found: Recovering Regional Identity in Imperial Japan

Abstract: Lost and Found" offers a new understanding of modern Japanese regionalism by revealing the tense and volatile historical relationship between region and nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aizu, a star-crossed region in present-day Fukushima prefecture, becomes a case study for how one locale was estranged from nationhood for its treasonous blunder in the Meiji Restoration, yet eventually found a useful place within the imperial landscape. Local mythmakers--historians, memoirists, war veterans, and others--harmonized their rebel homeland with imperial Japan so as to affirm, ironically, the ultimate integrity of the Japanese polity. What was once "lost" and then "found" again was not simply Aizu's sense of place and identity, but the larger value of regionalism in a rapidly modernizing society. In this study, Hiraku Shimoda suggests that "region," which is often regarded as a hard, natural place that impedes national unity, is in fact a supple and contingent spatial category that can be made to reinforce nationalist sensibilities just as much as internal diversity.

Bad sushi or bad merchant? The "dead fish poisoning incident" of 1852.

Abstract: The strange affair began innocuously enough. In the summer of 1851, Zeniya Gohei, a prominent merchant in Kaga han, started a land reclamation project on Kahoku inlet, which lies about three miles northwest of Kanazawa upon the Sea of Japan. Early in the eighth month of 1852, a large number of dead fish floated to the surface of the inlet near the construction site. Within weeks, there were reports of several local residents who apparently died from having eaten the dead fish. In the ensuing flurry of accusations, speculations, and indictments Gohei and his family members were deemed responsible and imprisoned. By the end of the eleventh month of 1852, the eighty-year old Gohei succumbed to 'urinary blockage' and died in captivity. Despite its seemingly simple sequence, the so-called 'dead fish poisoning incident' (Shigyo chadokujiken) is a complex convergence of several perspectives, each offering its own sub-narrative. Perhaps the most obvious is the dramatic fall of a man and his family fortune. Only months before his ignominious death, so eminent was Gohei's stature in his han that it inspired the saying, 'Shall one speak of

Cold War Cosmopolitanism

Abstract: South Korea in the 1950s was home to a burgeoning film culture, one of the many “Golden Age cinemas” that flourished in Asia during the postwar years. Cold War Cosmopolitanism offers a transnational cultural history of South Korean film style in this period, focusing on the works of Han Hyung-mo, director of the era’s most glamorous and popular women’s pictures, including the blockbuster Madame Freedom (1956). Christina Klein provides a unique approach to the study of film style, illuminating how Han’s films took shape within a “free world” network of aesthetic and material ties created by the legacies of Japanese colonialism, the construction of US military bases, the waging of the cultural Cold War, the forging of regional political alliances, and the import of popular cultures from around the world. Klein combines nuanced readings of Han’s films with careful attention to key issues of modernity—such as feminism, cosmopolitanism, and consumerism—in the first monograph devoted to this major Korean director. “Christina Klein shines a brilliant klieg light on the still largely unknown South Korean classic films of the 1950s by placing them in a global context of Cold War culture and politics. This is an original and engaging study with broad scholarly and popular appeal.” CARTER J. ECKERT, author of Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea “Cold War Cosmopolitanism makes a unique contribution to multiple fields. Using Han Hyung-mo’s career and female characters as a springboard, Klein charts the historical and theoretical trajectories of the formation of Cold War cosmopolitanism in 1950s Korea under US hegemony.” HYE SEUNG CHUNG, author of Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema “This book belongs on the bookshelf of everyone interested in the Cold War culture of Asia.” POSHEK FU, author of Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas CHRISTINA KLEIN is Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Boston College.

Nation-Building and Education

Abstract: Democracies and dictatorships have different incentives when it comes to choosing how much and by what means to homogenise the population, i.e., ‘to build a nation’. We study and compare nation-building policies under the transition from dictatorship to democracy in a model where the type of government and borders of the country are endogenous. We find that the threat of democratisation provides the strongest incentive to homogenise. We focus upon a specific nation-building policy: mass primary education. We offer historical discussions of nation-building across time and space, and provide correlations for a large sample of countries over the 1925–2014 period.

The Jeweled Broom and the Dust of the World: Keichu, Motoori Norinaga, and Kokugaku in Early Modern Japan

Abstract: Author(s): Foulk, Emi Joanne | Advisor(s): Ooms, Herman | Abstract: This dissertation seeks to reconsider the eighteenth-century kokugaku scholar Motoori Norinaga’s (1730-1801) conceptions of language, and in doing so also reformulate the manner in which we understand early modern kokugaku and its role in Japanese history. Previous studies have interpreted kokugaku as a linguistically constituted communitarian movement that paved the way for the makings of Japanese national identity. My analysis demonstrates, however, that Norinaga--by far the most well-known kokugaku thinker--was more interested in pulling a fundamental ontology out from language than tying a politics of identity into it: grammatical codes, prosodic rhythms, and sounds and their attendant sensations were taken not as tools for interpersonal communication but as themselves visible and/or audible threads in the fabric of the cosmos. Norinaga’s work was thus undergirded by a positive understanding of language as ontologically grounded within the cosmos, a framework he borrowed implicitly from the seventeenth-century Shingon monk Keichū (1640-1701) and esoteric Buddhist (mikkyō) theories of language. Through philological investigation into ancient texts, both Norinaga and Keichū believed, the profane dust that clouded (sacred, cosmic) truth could be swept away, as if by a jeweled broom.The dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first chapter takes a historiographical look at the study of kokugaku and Norinaga’s central role therein. It also sets out the thesis that the remaining three chapters of the dissertation attempt to substantiate: that kokugaku, at least up to Norinaga’s time, ought to be considered as a form of philology, traditionally conceived. It was, in other words, an attempt to uncover cosmological truth from the language of ancient texts. In the second chapter, I present a genealogy of Norinaga’s kokugaku, tracing Norinaga’s thought back to Keichū. This chapter attempts to demonstrate that Keichū’s empirical methodology was a direct result of his esoteric Buddhist training and background and, indeed, was grounded firmly within an esoteric Buddhist doctrinal system. It then goes on to argue that Norinaga’s philology and positive valuation of language, too, is predicated on a Buddhological framework that stresses the immanence of the truth in the world known by ordinary people. The third and fourth chapters explore Norinaga’s conception of language and its role in the world, looking specifically at his studies of teniwoha and his much celebrated theory of mono no aware. In these final two chapters, I demonstrate that mono no aware and teniwoha lie at the foundation of both Norinaga’s epistemology and ontology, offering a means for knowing and apprehending the cosmos as well as a model for how that cosmos itself exists.

The ambiguity of violence : ideology, state, and religion in the late Chosŏn dynasty

Abstract: .........................................................................................................ii Preface.........................................................................................................iii Table of