Meiji at 150: Recent Episodes
The University of British Columbia
In the Meiji at 150 Podcast, host Tristan Grunow interviews specialists of Japanese history, literature, art, and culture located at the University of British Columbia or who come to campus for public events. Follow us to hear about the recent research of prominent scholars of Japan along with their pedagogical approaches to one of Japan’s most transformative periods.
In this episode, Dr. Millie Creighton (UBC) revisits the Meiji Period through the lens of tourism, exploring the way the Restoration is repackaged and resold at local tourist sites from Kagoshima to Kochi today. We discuss the popularity of “historical theme parks” such as Meiji Village and Nikko Edo Village, the UNESCO designation of Meiji-era industrial sites, and the recent boom in TV dramatizations of the Meiji and Showa periods.
In this Episode, Dr. Naoko Kato (UBC) catalogues the impact of the Meiji Period on Sino-Japanese relations through the person of Uchiyama Kanzo and the Uchiyama bookstore in Shanghai. We also discuss the numerous Japan-related resources located at the UBC libraries and the Meiji at 150 Digital Teaching Resource.
In this episode, Dr. Eiji Okawa (University of Victoria) documents how the Meiji Restoration impacted the epistemology of history in Japan and Japanese overseas migration in the late 19th-early 20th centuries. We discuss ideas of “Japanese-ness” in premodern Japan and find continuities with conceptualizations of identity, language, and group among Japanese diasporic communities in British Columbia in the face of systemic racism and violence.
In this episode, Dr. Gideon Fujiwara (Lethbridge) positions the Meiji Restoration in the comparative context of a global “Age of Revolution.” We discuss the “revolutionary” aspects of the Restoration, including popular involvement, political upheaval, and cultural change during the Meiji Period, touching on the political significance of the Utakai Hajime poetry-reading ceremony and global approaches to the Restoration in the classroom.
In this lecture, Dr. Gideon Fujiwara (Lethbridge) discusses the ritualization of the “Utakai Hajime” imperial poetry reading-ceremony in the early Meiji Period. Within the context of nation-building programs carried out by the Meiji government, the inclusion of poems composed by civilians in the poetry ceremony represented an attempt to make the imperial family more visible to the people.
This presentation was delivered on 24th November, 2017 at the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
In this episode, Dr. Sharalyn Orbaugh (UBC) sheds light on the story of Nogi Shizuko and her gruesome suicide alongside husband Nogi Maresuke on the day of the Meiji Emperor’s funeral in 1912. Noting the relative silence on Shizuko’s role in the story, we discuss the absence of Shizuko as a figure in anti-war or women’s movements in the prewar period, her reappearance in the postwar, and the position of women more broadly in Japanese wartime ideology.
In this episode, Dr. David Howell (Harvard University) situates the Meiji Restoration as one moment in Japan’s longer nineteenth century of social, cultural, and political transformations. We consider the “spirit of 1868″ that informed many of the early Meiji state’s reforms, along with their impacts on people in different areas of Japan, including the Ainu population of Hokkaido.
In this presentation, Dr. David Howell (Harvard University) argues that the night-soil economy of Edo offers a novel way to situate late Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan into the broader history of the nineteenth-century world, while at the same time challenging the tendency to essentialize the “greenness” of early modern Japanese cities.
This presentation was delivered on 10th November, 2017 at the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
In this episode, Dr. Ignacio Adriasola (UBC) paints a picture of how “modern Japanese art” was first defined during the Meiji Period. We discuss the relationship between artists and the Meiji state, the popularity of Japonisme in Western Europe, and the impacts of Japanese art and artists on Western artists and artistic practices.
In this episode, Dr. Yi reads the Meiji Period from the perspective of literary studies and discusses the impacts of the Meiji Restoration on writers in Japan, especially Korean and Korean-Japanese writers composing literature in Japanese. We discuss issues of language and identity in the prewar Japanese empire, definition of the “modern” Japanese literary canon in the Meiji Period, and increasing recognition of Korean-Japanese writers in Japanese literature.
In this episode, Dr. Nosco dispels several misconceptions about individuality in Japan prior to the Meiji Restoration. We then contrast the protest movements of the 1860s in Japan to those of the 1960s, with Dr. Nosco sharing several fascinating anecdotes of personal experiences of the 1960s student protests in the US and Japan.
In this episode, Dr. Dierkes analyzes how the Meiji Restoration is presented in history textbooks in Japan. We compare the historiography of the Restoration in Japanese and Western scholarship, as well as discuss recent issues surrounding textbooks in both Japan and the United States.
In this episode, Dr. Ruoff explains the impact of the Meiji Restoration in global history and the role of the emperor system in Japanese modernization. We discuss the longevity of the emperor system in relation to its flexibility, as well as its centrality in both the prewar and postwar Japanese political and cultural environments.
In this episode, Dr. Craig offers a glimpse of the Meiji Restoration as it was viewed from peripheral regions, in this case rural Miyagi prefecture. We discuss power dynamics between the central and prefectural governments during the early Meiji Period, and how central government policies were shaped and reshaped at local levels.
In this episode, Dr. Conlan gives us a view of the Meiji Restoration from the perspective of late-medieval Japan. We discuss how viewing the Restoration in the longue durée reveals transformations and developments, especially in military technology, that are obscured when the story is started in 1868.