Date and time: June 14, 2017 (Wed.), 3:00-5:00PM

Venue: 1st Meeting Room (3rd Floor), The Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo

Speaker: Patricia Steinhoff (Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, University of Hawaii at Manoa)

Language: English

Abstract: 

Using basic sociological ideas about globalization, this talk will reflect on two different components of my research on Japan and Japanese Studies. First, Japanese Studies has been the most studied and well-documented area studies field in the United States. As a participant observer and scholar, I have traced the domestic growth and change in Japanese Studies in the United States and Canada through a series of surveys funded by the Japan Foundation from the late 1980s through 2016. These studies have documented that Japanese Studies is already thoroughly globalized as a field of study and an academic community. Second, in my longterm research on the Japanese New Left, a globalization perspective has led me to ask different questions and pursue new directions. Globalization has broad implications for research, teaching, and networks of interaction in the study of Japan. The University of Tokyo’s program in Global Japan Studies has a role to play in all of these areas.

About the Lecturer：

Patricia Steinhoff is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii. Her primary research interests are social movements, civil society, and radical left groups in Japan. Most of the 20 books and monographs and more than 100 articles and book chapters that she has written, co-authored, edited, or co-edited concern Japan, including three books published in Japanese. She has conducted four major studies of Japanese Studies in the United States and Canada for the Japan Foundation, and recently completed a partial update of the 2013 study. Her latest edited work is Destiny: The Secret Operations of the Yodogō Exiles, the English translation of Takazawa Kōji, Shukumei: Yodogō Bōmeishatachi no Himitsu Kosaku. (University of Hawaii Press, forthcoming July 2017). As a longtime collaborator of Takazawa Kōji and curator of the Takazawa Collection of Social Movement Materials at the University of Hawaii, she edited, annotated, and helped to translate his best-seller, which won the Kodansha Prize for Non-Fiction for 1998. Her best known Japanese book is Nihon Sekigunha: Sono Shakaigakuteki Monogatari [Japan Red Army Factions: A Sociological Tale] (Kawade Shōbō Shinsha 1991, 1993), which was subsequently republished as Shi eno Ideology: Nihon Sekigunha. [Deadly Ideology: the Japanese Red Army Factions] Iwanami Modern Classics Series, Tokyo: Iwanami Publishing Company, 2003. She is currently working on an English update of this work, The Red Army Faction in Japan and Its Impact, and a separate volume on the Japanese Army in the Middle East, The Japanese Red Army: the Reality behind the Myths.

Organizer: The Global Japan Studies Network (GJS)

Co-organizer: Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the University of Tokyo

Contact： gjs[at]ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp