Japan Archives - Public Seminar

Migration

The Dilemma of a Fragmented Self

Mass migrations, language, and the future of identity

November 9, 2022 • by Ken Hu

How can language create such a convoluted way of experiencing the everyday world? We can explore this phenomenon with two linked concepts: the speech act and the discourse community. ...

Politics

How Donald Trump Facilitated the Current Racist Attacks on Asian Americans

The long history of America’s hostility toward immigrants from China, Japan, and Korea

March 18, 2021 • by Nadia Y. Kim

_____ EDITORS NOTE: Last summer, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter uprisings around the country, Public Seminar published a prescient piece by Nadia Kim, a professor of sociology and the author of several books, including Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA, and Refusing Death: Immigrant Women ...

How Donald Trump Facilitated the Current Racist Attacks on Asian Americans

Race

Asian Americans Suffer From Trump’s Racist Attacks Too

The long history of America’s hostility toward immigrants from China, Japan, and Korea

July 23, 2020 • by Nadia Y. Kim

We are all familiar with the racist tactics that vaulted Donald Trump into the Oval Office. He demonized Mexicans, he denounced Muslims, and he cozied up on Twitter to ardent White supremacists. In recent weeks, he’s relentlessly attacked the Black Lives Matter protests. Amid all the vitriol, it’s easy to overlook ...

Asian Americans Suffer From Trump’s Racist Attacks Too

Feature

The KonMari Method as Consumer Theory

How Marie Kondo helps us re-learn to love the things we buy

February 11, 2019 • by Andrew C. McKevitt

This essay was originally published on February 11 2019. I first sat down to watch Tidying Up with Marie Kondo only after “Bookgate” had already erupted and passed. In early January, a series of viral tweets criticized Kondo and her “KonMari” tidying method for the suggestion that one ought to keep no more ...

Feature

Adventures of a Postmodern Historian

An excerpt from the new book

September 29, 2017 • by Robert Rosenstone

Eight years after the end my Fulbright, at the beginning of April 1983, I return to Japan for ten weeks in an effort to connect to the world of the nineteenth century, return in an attempt to share experiences and feelings buried in the past -- theirs and my own. How ...

Feature

What’s With Japanese Women?

Motherhood and Gender Inequality

June 26, 2017 • by Frances McCall Rosenbluth

Japan ranks 114th out of 144 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Gender Equality Index. Fewer than half of working age women have jobs, and many of those are part time positions without benefits. Women working in full time jobs can expect 73% of the hourly wage of their male ...

Multi Media

Aleppo, Japanese Internment, and Kwanzaa

Past Present: Episode 64

December 22, 2016 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this week's episode, Niki, Natalia, and Neil debate US involvement in Syria, the legacy of Japanese-American internment, and the 50th anniversary of the first Kwanzaa.

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Aleppo, Japanese Internment, and Kwanzaa

Uncategorized

Otaku Philosophy

On Hiroki Azuma

September 23, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Tokyo was a real metropolis centuries before any European city got much beyond the small town stage. By the 80s it had a heavy overlay of pervasive media culture, of a kind that would not happen anywhere else for decades. The contemporary media-urban landscape was born here. Not speaking the ...

Uncategorized

The War on Fascism

April 2, 2014 • by Eli Zaretsky

By my title,“The War on Fascism,” I do not mean the war between the US, the Soviet Union and Great Britain, on the one hand, and Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and imperial Japan on the other, the war that took place between 1939 and 1945. Rather I mean an unspoken ...

Uncategorized

The Book of Job as Community Theater

Readings after Superstorm Sandy and other disasters

March 10, 2014 • by Mark Larrimore

The only American member of the original General Seminar after which this website is named was the philosopher Horace Kallen. Kallen is mainly remembered now for his theory of “cultural pluralism,” but among scholars of the Book of Job he is known for the quixotic idea ...