With the support of Waseda University’s Top Global University project and in collaboration with Columbia University, a core partner of the Global Japanese Studies Model Unit, a public seminar and a workshop for graduate students were organized. This event was co-organized with the ‘ Humanities in the Anthropocene’ seminar series of the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study and the ‘Environmental Humanities’ seminar series of the Research Institute for Letters, Arts and Sciences.
In the past, the Global Japanese Studies Model Unit has implemented research and educational programs in response to current academic trends through its partnership with Columbia University. In this, the final year of the Global Japanese Studies Model Unit, seminars and workshops were organized around ‘environment’, an important theme in future Japanese studies, with the intention of broadening the scope of the graduate students’ research to include culture and society.
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- Haruo Shirane (Professor, Columbia University)
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- Takeo Onishi (Professor, Gifu Niversity)
Tomi Suzuki (Professor, Columbia University), Takuya Tsunoda (Assistant Professor, Columbia University)
On the first day, Professor Haruo Sirane, a leading researcher in environmental humanities, and Professor Takeo Onishi, a researcher in global environmental studies from the perspective of water and soil cycles, gave keynote lectures from their respective fields of humanities and natural sciences. Their talks opened the door to considering how water and soil, the fundamental materials for our living environment, have formed an interaction with human cultural activities such as literature, culture and art. In the following roundtable, Professor Tomi Suzuki and Associate Professor Takuya Tsunoda of Columbia University provided comments from their respective specialties of modern literature and media studies, while three graduate students from Columbia and Waseda, Yuki Irikura (modern Japanese film studies), Shohei Yamayoshi (religious literature) and Daniel Penner (modern Japanese literature), took the stage to provide comments and questions from their respective research fields. The event was held in a hybrid face-to-face and online format in the Okuma Small Auditorium, and there were many questions and comments from the audience. 
In the graduate student workshop on the second day, doctoral students gave presentations on the originality of their research and future directions, while faculty members of both universities commented, not only promoting their research but also developing a discussion between the students and the faculty as a whole. The graduate student generation’s cross-disciplinary discussion points and expanding analytical methods were particularly noteworthy, providing an opportunity to literally explore the future of Japanese literature and cultural studies.
* Please click here for the January 12 Zoom recording.
* Click here for January 13′ workshop Program and Proceedings.
Event Overview
- Date: January 12, 2024
- Time: 10:00-13:00 (JST)
- Speaker: Haruo Shirane (Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University)
Takeo Onishi (Professor of the Faculty of Applied Biological Sciences, Gifu University) - Venue: Okuma Small Auditorium
- Language: English and Japanese
- Participation: Free
- Open to the public
- Schedule:
10:00-11:00 Keynote Lecture 1) by Professor Haruo Shirane, Columbia University “Environment, Society, and The Future of Humanities”
11:10-12:10 Keynote Lecture 2) by Professor Takeo Onishi, Gifu University ”Water, Soil, Humans, and Environmental History”
12:15-13:00 Roundtable on the Future Directions in Japanese Studies with Prof. Shirane, Prof. Onishi and Graduate students
Moderated by Professor Satomi Yamamoto (Waseda University)
Commentators: Professor Tomi Suzuki (Columbia University) , Professor Takuya Tsunoda (Columbia University)
