Description

The lecture will detail selected aspects of political communication in Japan. It will focus in particular on the Japanese media structure, newsgathering methods, and on the rhetoric used by high-echelon politicians, government officials, and news media reporters. It will look at a small but representative selection of expressions used, and their meanings, in prime ministers $B+c (B policy speeches, during media $B+c (Bs briefings and televised interview sessions, and deliberations in the National Diet, to illustrate the role language plays in Japanese political culture.

Ofer Feldman (Ph.D. 1987, University of Tokyo; major: Social Psychology) is a Professor of Political Process & Psychology at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. He is the author, editor, and co-editor of 13 books and monographs, and the author of more than 80 journal articles and book chapters and more than 100 encyclopedia items, in the fields of political behavior/psychology, communication studies, and Japanese politics. His most recent publications include The Japanese Political Personality (St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Talking Politics in Japan Today (Sussex Academic Press, 2005); and, Political Psychology (Mineruba, 2006).

Description

This presentation examines principles of humanitarian assistance, focusing in particular, on the moral dilemmas of assisting North Korea in responding to famine. Should the international community provide humanitarian or development assistance in such a setting? What are the implications of channeling assistance through multilateral as opposed to bilateral channels? With respect to overcoming food shortages in North Korea, how should donors respond to pressure to shift from humanitarian assistance to development assistance in the agricultural sector? How should donors engage North Korea not only to relieve current suffering, but also to encourage a more positive future for its citizens? How do broader geo-strategic considerations in the Korean peninsula factor into the mix when devising a coherent aid strategy for North Korea, especially with respect to addressing human hunger and starvation?

Gregory T. Chin (Ph.D., York University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University (Canada), where he teaches global politics and East Asian political economy. Dr. Chin is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). He is on the editorial board of the New Millennium Books Series of Rowman & Littlefield, and an academic member of the editorial board of the China and International Organization Books Series jointly published by Shanghai People’s Press and Shanghai International Studies University. He has held a visiting fellowship at Peking University (1997-98).

Prior to joining York University in 2006, Dr. Chin served as a diplomat in the Canadian Embassy in China, responsible for Canadian foreign aid to China and North Korea. From 2000 to 2003, he served in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (Bureau of North Asia and Pacific Affairs), and the China and Northeast Asia Division of the Canadian International Development Agency. Dr. Chin has been a consultant to the International Development Research Centre and the Canadian International Development Agency, and an advisor to the United Nations Development Program, and the Asian Development Bank.

Description

Sometime in the 1830s, Peero, a Muslim courtesan, left the life she knew and joined the religious establishment of a maverick guru, Gulab Das. This action of hers created a furore, and her clan members tried to persuade her to return to her former life and religion. When she refused, they abducted her. Peero wrote about this incident in her Ik Sau Sath Kafian or 160 Kafis, in the process commenting sharply on religious identities and religious conflict in her time. Yet there is also a place for an alternative religiosity in her writing, a world of common cultural inheritance, uplifting spirituality, and syncretistic practices.

Anshu Malhotra is a Reader (Associate Professor) in the Department of History, Faculty of Social Science, University of Delhi. Her current research interests focus on the history of gender and religious sensibilities in early to mid nineteenth century Punjab. Dr. Malhotra is the author of Gender, Caste, and Religious Identities: Restructuring Class in Colonial Punjab, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2002. (Paperback 2004). Recent publications include: ‘The Body as a Metaphor for the Nation: The Satyarth Prakash of Swami Dayanand Saraswati’ in Avril Powell & Siobhan Lambert Hurley (eds), Rhetoric and Reality: Gender and the Colonial Experience in South Asia, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2006; ‘Of Dais and Midwives – Middle Class Interventions in the Management of Women’s Reproductive Health: A Study from Colonial Punjab’, in Sarah Hodges (ed.), Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies, Orient Longman, New Delhi, 2006; ‘The Quack of Patran and Other Stories,’ Seminar, No.569, 2006, and ‘Shameful Continuities: The Practice of Female Infanticide in Colonial Punjab’ in Doris Jakobsh (ed), Sikhism and Women, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2008 (forthcoming).

Description

This presentation looks at the Hanryu, or Korea boom as it engulfed Japan. It explores the impact through popular culture of the tension ridden Japanese-Korean relationship. It addresses gender roles and how Japan’s ‘ethnic erotic economy’ suddenly shifted to a romantic interest in Korean men, including companies that arrange marriages between Japanese women and Korean men. It explores the statements being made by Japanese women through their espoused infatuation with Korean male stars, and the Japanese male-backlash through the ‘anti-Korea Boom’ movement. It shows the active drama tourism involvement of Japanese to Korea to visit the sites of Winter Sonata, looks at women’s associations booking tours to the drama sites as a new group travel option, at how fans form their own friendship associations to consume numerous new magazines devoted to Korean stars, and at how groups of Japanese engage in Korean language learning as part of the Winter Sonata boom. In focusing on the raging popularity of Korean dramas in Japan, and the corresponding Korea boom, the presentation attempts to ask larger questions of about persisting hierarchical concepts of nation, gender, ethnicity and race within Japan, the relative impact of planned political interventions and popular culture phenomena in shaping specific international relations, the impact of this boom on attitudes towards Korean residents of Japan, and the impact on discussions of gender roles within Japan including shifting understandings of Japanese women and men in relationship to society.

Dr. Millie Creighton is a Japan specialist and Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where she also serves as a faculty member of the Institute for Asian Studies, and on the Executive Management Boards of the Centre for Japanese Research and the Centre for Korean Research. She has done extensive research in Japan on department stores, consumerism, tourism, popular culture, minorities, ethnicity, work and leisure, place, nostalgia and identity. She was awarded the Canon Prize for research on Japanese department stores and consumerism. She has conducted research in Korea on the Korean Wave, noraebang/karaoke, and gender.

Description

“Zomia” is a shorthand reference to the huge, massif of mainland Southeast Asia, running from the Central Highlands of Vietnam westward all the way to northeastern India and including the southwest Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, and western Guangxi. Zomia has, I contend, been peopled over the last 2,000 years largely by runaways from several state-making projects in the valleys, most particularly Han state-making projects. They have, in the hills, acquired, and shifted, their ethnic identities. Far from being ‘remnants’ left behind by civilizing societies, they are, as it were, “barbarians by choice”, peoples who have deliberately put distance between themselves and lowland, state-centers. It is in this context that their forms of agriculture, their social structures, and much of their culture, including perhaps even their illiteracy, can be understood as political choices.

James Scott, Ph.D., Yale University is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is Director of the Agrarian Studies Program. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, Science, Technology and Society Program at M.I.T., and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism.

Description

Three groups of students (from anthropology, geography and planning) who participated in a PLA 1150, a recently completed field studies course based in Bandung, Indonesia will briefly present their research focusing on dynamic change in urban Indonesia. The course, which was sponsored by the Asian Institute, the David Chu Scholarships, the Department of Anthropology and the Friends of Planning, was conducted during three weeks in May 2008. It involved travel as well to Yogyakarta, one of Indonesia’s most important cultural centres, and a number of meeting and research activities with Indonesian bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, academics and urban activists.

The topics to be presented and discussed include creative city policy, housing provision and cultural consumption.

Presentation 1: Public Space for Sale: Contested Practices of Consumption and Street Life in Bandung by Sabrina Conrad, Brittany Cryder, Sharon Kelly, Katherine Mitchell and Behzad Sarmadi As commercial developments proliferate in Bandung and the city is further branded as a shopping locale, it is necessary to examine the relationship between these spaces of consumption, each of which is marked by a different history, clientele and function. Each space of consumption isolates a certain element of Bandung public life, and their claim to public space and street life is defined in differing ways. This group examines four dramatically different sites and focus on three themes which resonate with each site: the creation of boundaries, the maintenance of security, and the facilitation of social interaction.

Public space in Bandung is increasingly scarce, and there is an ongoing negotiation between government, private enterprises, and citizens at all levels of society for the right to use that space. In the context of this scarcity, the sites we examined have attempted to emulate, replace, or illegally inhabit public spaces with varying degrees of success. As more and more of the “public” spaces left in Bandung are becoming privately owned, the understood definitions of public space and the ways in which people are permitted to use it are being contested.

Presentation 2: The Bandung Creative City Movement: An Exploration of the Social and Spatial Implications of Policy Transfer by Kristen Anderson, Dan Cohen, Alexis Kane Speer, Michael Noble, Morgan Skowronski The city government of Bandung has recently fashioning a policy focused on Bandung becoming a Creative City and has recently gone as far as changing its English motto to “home of creative minds.” This new policy is indirectly inspired by the “creative city” discourse, as termed by economic geographer and planner Richard Florida (2002), which was developed within a Western context. Wildly embraced by some, the Creative City discourse has also been scrutinized as an elitist view of the city by many scholars (Peck, 2005). This exploratory study asks how the “creative city” discourse travelled to Bandung and the implications of transferring such ideas to a developing nation.

Presentation 3: Poor Communities in Bandung by Erica Duque, Francisco Obando, Jennifer Simons and Cassandra Vink.
This project examines forms of assistance, competing needs, community solidarity and capacity building in impoverished areas. This project applies van Horen’s (2004) analysis of poverty alleviation programs to several slum communities within Bandung with a focus on informal housing. Given the widespread prevalence of informal housing in Indonesia, the importance of relevant and effective poverty programs cannot be overstated. The research presents some basic, yet crucial, insights into Indonesia’s squatter settlements and the more formal arrangements that the government hopes to replace them with.

Description

In 1960 tens of thousands of middle school, high school, and university students took to the streets in cities throughout South Korea to force the resignation of the country’s first president, Syngman Rhee. What became known as the April Revolution went on to earn archetypal status as the explosive antigovernment protests that presaged the youth-driven movements of the subsequent three decades – and, ultimately, the democratic transition of 1987. This presentation turns to the eve of the Revolution in order to examine the statist production of students as a nationwide social organization of youths well-versed in nationalist discourse and conversant in patriotic practices. Throughout the heady weeks of 1960, South Korean youths drew on elements of this ideological training in unlikely fashion to employ them in protests against the state. In doing so, April Revolutionaries catapulted idealistic student protest to a position of newfound importance in South Korea’s emerging political landscape.

Charles Kim (Ph.D., Columbia University) is a historian of twentieth-century Korean culture and society. In his recent dissertation, he explores the cultural origins of South Korea’s April Revolution (1960). His research interests include nationalist discourse, cross-cultural perceptions, social relations, and historical methodology. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for the Study of Korea and will next year take up a position as Assistant Professor, University of Madison – Wisconsin.

Description

This information session is highly recommended for anyone interested in participating and/or researching with the North Korea Research Group (NKRG). In particular, the presentation will clarify the goals of the NKRG, potential research topics, dicuss possible workshops/seminars, and expectations of student researchers. If you cannot make the information session and have questions, please contact us through the NKRG email at info@nkrg.org.

Light refreshments will be served.

Description

The non-interference approach to the conduct of international relations embodied in ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) appears to be gaining ground. Importantly, the TAC norms have their roots in anti-colonialism and the opposition to Cold War and are direct decedents of the Ten Principles enunciated at the end of the 1955 Bandung Conference. They also have a clear Asian lineage. This approach is of growing importance because of China’s economic rise and its commitment, along with 14 other signatories, to promoting the TAC as a way of conducting regional and international relations. For their part Western states remain equally committed to humanitarian intervention, especially in the case of failed or failing states. Given the sometimes ambiguous nature of both approaches, is common ground possible? Indeed, what impact will the rise of East Asia over the next few decades have on attempts to develop a global governance regime?

Richard Stubbs is Professor of Political Science, McMaster University and Research Associate with the Asian Institute, University of Toronto. He has published widely on security and political economy issues in East and Southeast Asia.. His most recent books are Rethinking Asia’s Economic Miracle: The Political Economy of War, Prosperity and Crisis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); as co-editor with Geoffrey R.D. Underhill, Political Economy and the Changing Global Order, 3rd Edition (Toronto and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and, as co-editor with Amitav Acharya, Theorizing Southeast Asian Relations: The Emerging Debates (London: Routledge, 2008).

Description

Kojin Karatani is widely renowned as the most important literary critic and philosopher of contemporary Japan. Moving across philosophy, literary theory, economics, aesthetics, and politics (East and West, Past and Present), Karatani possesses one of the most intense, profound, and critical voices of our time. Awarded the Gunzo Literary Prize for an essay on Natsume Soseki in 1969, he began working actively as a literary critic, while teaching at Hosei University in Tokyo. In 1975 he was invited to Yale University to teach Japanese literature as a visiting professor, where he became acquainted with Yale critics such as Paul de Man and Fredric Jameson. After publishing “Origins of Modern Japanese Literature” (Duke) in 1980, Karatani proceeded from literary criticism to more theoretical studies ranging from “Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money” (MIT) to “Transcritique: On Kant and Marx” (MIT). “Transcritique” (2003) has received widespread recognition as one of the most exciting re-readings of the two philosophers in recent years. Slavoj Zizek calls it “one of the most original attempts to recast the philosophical and political bases of opposition to the empire of capital of the current period.” Together with these English translations, Karatani has written over twenty books in Japanese. At the same time, he made a political commitment to editing the quarterly journal “Critical Space” with Akira Asada. For over a decade “Critical Space” was the most influential intellectual journal in Japan. In 2000, Karatani also organized the New Associationist Movement (NAM)–NAM was conceived as a counter–capitalist/nation-state association, inspired by the experiment of LETS (Local Exchange Trading System, based on non-marketed currency). Since 1990 he has taught regularly at Columbia University as a visiting professor of comparative literature. He was a regular member of ANY, the international architects’ conference which was held annually for the last decade of the 20th century. In 2006, Karatani retired from teaching in Japan to devote himself full-time to writing and lecturing. He will present this lecture in English.

Description

This seminar focuses on the complex interactions between ‘North Korean issues’ and Japanese foreign policy. From the Japanese point of view, the main components of the issues are abduction, missile launch, and nuclear development. Although Japan considers the abduction issue to be their top priority, there are presently no international forums that could exert pressure of this issue on North Korea. Thus, the resolution of the abduction, to no small extent, depends on the multilateral negotiation on nuclear disarmament, and on the political pressure by the United States. What kinds of effects does this complex political configuration have on Japanese diplomacy and regional security? What kinds of effects do the other issues such as democratization and humanitarian assistance have on them?

Norihito Kubota (Ph.D. candidate, University of Tokyo) is an assistant professor in the Department of International Relations at the National Defense Academy of Japan, where he teaches international politics and the United Nations. His main focus of study is the states’ motivations in military contribution to multilateral peacekeeping. He has published several articles in academic journals using the quantitative method and contributed in editing books on theoretical analysis of security issues and on application of psychological decision-making theory to international crisis. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto (2008-2010).

Description

The ways of industrial upgrading are not necessarily the same among countries. Understanding the respective characteristics in industrial development orbits and underlying socio-economic factors that have created them will be of great use in order to further progress business cooperations among countries. By the lecture, the author will introduce his findings, observed after the intensive firm-based research in motorcycle industry, on the different ways in upgrading the skills in the manufacturing firms in China, India, and Japan. He will show that, whereas Indian indigenous manufactures are using “unified-style” interfirm relations, which is very near to Japan, to upgrade the whole production system, Chinese firms are using more “isolated-style” system of division of labor.

This inter-firm system is another side of the basic principle of internal skill upgrading within the firms. Chinese firms are more “result (profit) -oriented” and taking more standardized ways in raising skills of engineers and workers, whereas Indian counterparts are more “process-oriented” and taking more firm-specific ways in human resource development. The author suggests that such different principles explains the different firm strategies and performances in the sector among the three countries.

Description

The town of Tiruppur in South India underwent a dramatic boom at the end of the 20thc, through the global production and export of knitted garments. Tiruppur’s networks of small firms were seen as emblematic of new global possibilities beyond the conventional struggle between labour and capital. Breaking from this ‘common sense’, my research in the late 1990s confronted innovation combined with intense exploitation. Most strikingly, a fraternity of subaltern capitalists of Gounder ‘peasant’ caste and working-class origins commanded the helm of this industrial town. I explore how these ‘self made men’ of modest means fashioned a booming industry through elements of their agrarian past. Crucially, I explore why these Gounder ‘self made men’ hinged their retrospective narratives of transition and class mobility on what they call their ‘toil’. In their explanations, ‘Gounder toil’ is a ‘value theory of labour’. More importantly, it is in the non-referential or indexical uses of the sign that elements of an early 20th century agrarian past are revived in the industrial present. My archeological ethnography of Tiruppur’s industrial boom shows how certain subalterns have steered the accumulation of capital and of proletarian insecurity, held together by tenuous relations of gender, caste and class. As Tiruppur shifted towards global markets, its fraternal hegemony would shift as well, dramatizing the gap between wealth and insecurity in new ways.

Sharad Chari is a human geographer at the London School of Economics, and Honorary Research Fellow in Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He is the author of Fraternal Capital: Peasant-workers, self-made men, and globalization in provincial India (Stanford University Press, 2004), co-editor of The Development Reader (Routledge, 2008), and articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, The South Atlantic Quarterly and other journals. He is working on a monograph on spatial politics and the remains of racial capitalism and Apartheid in past and present Durban, South Africa.

Description

The Bangladesh State’s discourse on Islam and Gender have shifted over the years, both distinctively as well as in relation with each other. I will explore this trajectory and highlight two specific cases on how the Bangladesh state has viewed notions of gender and Islam. They are the (1) the Fatwa incidences and (2) the Taslima Nasrin case.

Meghna Guhathakurta ( Ph.D. University of York, UK) until recently was Professor of International Relations at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh and is currently Executive Director at Research Initiatives, Bangladesh, an organization funding research on poverty alleviation. Her area of interest is development, gender and politics in South Asia. She has published extensively on gender, development, minority rights as well as conflict and peace-building. She served as member of the Netherlands Development Research Council from 1996 to 2002, where she chaired the sub-committee on post-conflict development. She was also member of the South Asian Peoples Committee on the Rights of Minorities, a commission formed by the organization South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR).

Description

Concerned with the question of why governments display varying degrees of success in implementing social reforms, (judged by their ability to arrive at coherent policy outcomes), my dissertation aims to identify the most important factors responsible for the stagnation of the social benefits reform in Russia, as opposed to its successful implementation in Kazakhstan.

I argue that the effectiveness of policy implementation was ultimately determined by the capacity of state actors to act cohesively and form such a policy coalition that would advance the reform’s original objectives despite unstable institutional structure and/or unfavorable socioeconomic and political conditions. In case of Kazakhstan, the successful implementation of the social benefits reform was the result of bold and skillful actions of Kazakhstani authorities who successfully used the existing conditions to advance the reform’s original objectives. By contrast, in Russia, the failure to effectively restructure its social welfare system had a lot to do with weak political and institutional capacities of the Russian state under Yeltsin and the lack of commitment to reform on part of the key political actors. And when the reform was finally launched, the poor quality of its content and the failure of the government to form a broad and viable policy coalition required to properly organize the implementation process and gain the support of the people resulted in massive public protests and subsequent reform stagnation.

Situated on the crossroads of the theory of the state, the welfare state theory and the theory of the public policy process, this study intends to refine the existing theory of state capacity and add important details to the central puzzle in the literature on public policy, that is, when and why policies change. The proposed study aims to illustrate that states may be capable of successful policy implementation even in unstable institutional contexts or unfavorable socioeconomic conditions provided that they are led by bold and determined state actors, who are willing and able to effectively navigate and overcome the political, bureaucratic and socioeconomic hurdles in an effort to form coherent policy coalitions and bring about the desired policy change.

Description

People empowerment ‘operationalized’ in the form of community-based environmental monitoring and management (CBEM) has been hailed as strategic to realizing sustainable natural resource protection and restoration.Yet, prevailing Philippine approach to information campaign on environmental protection have focused largely on urban and town-based, 1iterate-groups. The media used for communicating vital information resource on the environment has largely catered to middle and upper income, and/or educated groups. Also, the carriers of the environmental message have largely come from the educated or elite social class, based in the national capital. The continuing rapid destruction of the country’s for­est, mangrove and aquatic resources is an indicator that the too global, Manila-centric environmental advocacy programs of the government and national NGOs, have not made any visible impact on the critical mass on the ground – the pumuluyo, katawhan, masa. Also, there is a dearth of studies, whether qualitative or quantitative, which delineates the socio-economic and political context under which it best operates. .

The study on which this summary finding is based , documents a successful instance of people empowerment and mobilization for sustainable resource use and management in Negros island, was funded in part, by the Canadian International Development Authority. Negros, particularly the Occidental side, is known for the persistence of semi-feudal relations rooted in the hacienda system. Prior to the rise of non-government organizations (NGOs) in the late 1980s, the grassroot communities comprised of the hacienda workers, marginal fisherfolks and upland farmers are virtually powerless. The rural poor are completely dependent on their “amo” for their existence from birth until their death. Owing to the monocrop economy of the island, hunger is a chronic problem. Dependent on the vagaries of the world market price for sugar its principal crop, Negros would cyclically experience serious socio-economic, political crisis.

Due to widespread hunger, military abuses, labor disputes and other forms of harassment, Negros became fertile ground for the insurgency movement. Negros was once declared as one of the stronghold of the insurgents in the whole Philippines.

Beyond social theory and the academic ivory tower, the burning passion of Dr. Violeta Lopez Gonzaga (MA, Ph.D Anthro, U of T, 1981) is the ‘praxis’ of people empowerment,especially among the poorest of the poor and their fast diminishing, ravaged natural resource base in the Philippines, particularly, the Visayas. Because of her pioneering work in the application of her research studies to development work, she has received various prestigious national and ASEAN-wide award.

As an anthropologist, she has gone beyond mere conduct and write up of research studies into books &monographs and publications to articles in local and international journals. At halftime of her life she opted for early retirement from the academe and be full-time civil society advocate through two TV shows, and through an NGO,the Southeast Asian Center for Resource Studies Consultancy & Training (SEACREST).Presently, she serves as senior fellow and lecturer of the Asian Dialogue Society (ADS), a collegial body of Asian civil society leaders and thinkers.

Description

During the twenty-plus years of doi moi (economic renovation) policy, the spatial fabric of Vietnam’s cities has undergone significant transformation. In a now-familiar pattern from cities the world over, Hanoi has predictably though with alarming rapidity developed outward into seemingly ever-expanding suburbs, and upward into high-rise hotels and apartment complexes. More importantly, the landscape of urban everyday life has been resculpted through the middle class’ role in consumption, actual and aspirational, with effects on modes of shopping, leisure, transportation, and, critically, attitudes towards the use and users of public space. In this paper I consider the impact of socio-economic reform on the capital city of Hanoi, focusing specifically on the ways in which the middle class, made possible by doi moi, has and continues to alter the urban landscape.

Lisa Drummond is Associate Professor of Urban Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. After living and working in Hanoi, Vietnam in the early 1990s, she completed a degree in Human Geography at the Australia National University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the National University of Singapore. Her research has focussed primarily on urban social life in Vietnam, including analyses of popular culture, specifically in television serials and women’s magazines, women’s roles in Vietnamese society, and the application of western concepts such as public and private to the use of space in Vietnamese cities. Her publications include several co-edited books, most recently Consuming Urban Culture in Contemporary Vietnam, with Mandy Thomas, and Gender Practices in Contemporary Vietnam, with Helle Rydstrom.

Description

TICKETS $10 GA | BUY TICKETS AT EVENT WEBSITE

CinemAsia GALA SCHEDULE:

6:30-8:15 Toronto premiere screening of MONDAY [Innis Town Hall]
8:15-8:30 Brief break
8:30-9:30 Japan/film lecture “FITS OF LAUGHTER” by Eric Cazdyn (Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies) [Innis Town Hall]
9:30-12:00 Post screening party [Innis Café transformed by Dinah Koo; catering by Koo & Co and herriott grace]

For more CinemAsia/Reel Asian co-presentations, please check the website on Nov 13 (6:00 pm Hong Kong panel) and 14 (2:30 pm THE BLESSING BELL by Sabu; 6:00 documentary films panel).

INTRODUCTION BY Joseph Wong, Director of Asian Institute at the Munk Centre for International Studies

This is the 12th edition of the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. The festival has grown in size and reach to become the premier platform dedicated to Asian cinema and Asian-Canadian films in the country. This year also marks the debut of CinemaAsia, a collaboration of the Asian Institute at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, and Reel Asian. Bridging filmmakers, film critics and scholars, CinemAsia offers a series of special screenings and crucial talks and panels supplementing the rich offerings of the film festival. The premier CinemaAsia features a retrospective of the extraordinary and challenging Japanese director Sabu and a presentation on his films by U of T Professor Eric Cazdyn, author of THE FLASH OF CAPITAL. During the festival itself, CinemaAsia will feature two panels, one on the past and future prospects of Hong Kong Cinema, in this its centenary year; and a second, a moderated conversation between Canadian doc-maker Yung Chang and American filmmaker and NYU professor Christine Choy.

The Asian Institute is Canada’s leading centre devoted to research and teaching, centred on Asian research and teaching. The Asian Institute is committed to bringing the community and university closer together and so we are thrilled to form this partnership with Reel Asian in the form of CinemaAsia. The festival’s strong support for Canada’s Asian communities in its programming and critical élan has always been one of its hallmarks. The 12th edition of the festival once again affirms a common spirit of intellectual curiosity and Canada’s cultural diversity in which the Asian Institute is an eager participant.

MONDAY
Special Feature Presentation | Tue Nov 11 | 6:30 PM | Director: Sabu (Hiroyuki Tanaka) | Japan | 2000 | 100:00 | 35mm | Toronto Premiere
Cast: Shinichi Tsutsumi, Naomi Nishida, Yuko Kirishima, Akira Yamamoto, Susumu Terajima

Waking to the Monday morning weather report, salaryman Koichi Takagi finds himself in an empty hotel room. He cannot remember where he has been or how he got here and he is suffering from an intense hangover. Reaching into his pocket, he begins to remove items that trigger his memory, slowly unravelling the events of the past few nights: an explosion at a bizarre funeral, a hysterically dull conversation with his girlfriend, accidentally falling in with the Yakuza, etc. The more he recalls, the more sinister his circumstances prove to be. Bouncing back and forth across moments in time in order to make sense of the present, director Sabu playfully confuses reality, emphasizing the instability and rewritability of history.

Shinichi Tsutsumi’s turn as the hapless salaryman should also be applauded, both for his nuanced, endearing performance of a man scrambling to reorder his life and for his jaw-dropping dance moves in a sequence that should be recognized among the great cinematic dances of all time.

MONDAY, winner of the Don Quixote Award and FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival (2000), is crafted with knife-sharp wit, astute social satire and a hypnotic cinematography that diffuses the film with an air of surrealism. Such qualities can be found in Sabu’s previous efforts, but in MONDAY they have been honed to perfection.

— synopsis by Eric Cazdyn and Peter Kuplowsky

SABU was born in 1964 as Hiroyuki Tanaka. He began his film career as an actor. His performance in Katsuhiro Otomo’s WORLD APARTMENT HORROR (1991) won him an award at the Yokohama Film Festival 1991, and he went on to appear in several other films, working under Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hideo Nakata and Takeshi Miike. In 1996, he debuted as both a writer and director with D.A.N.G.A.N. RUNNER. Celebrated for his inventive style and humorous storytelling, Sabu quickly became a highly regarded director in both Japan and overseas, particularly in Europe.

FITS OF LAUGHTER: SABU’S MONDAY
Following the presentation of MONDAY, and departing from Sabu’s MONDAY (with special attention granted to laughter), this lecture will discuss current cultural and political trends in contemporary Japan and beyond.

Speaker: Eric Cazdyn, Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies, University of Toronto
In conversation with: TBA

CinemAsia GALA CO-PRESENTERS
CinemAsia [Asian Institute at the University of Toronto]
Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

— and generously sponsored by
Dr. David Chu Distinguished Leaders Program
Toronto After Dark
Donderdag
Photographer Joyce Wong
Toben Food by Design
Koo & Co
herriott grace
Holiday Inn Midtown

Description

Praise for South Korea’s transformation from a “mission-receiving” country to the second largest “mission-sending” country in the world is typically accompanied by applause for Korea’s economic growth and advancement in the capitalist world order. Optimistic observers forecast that Korean Protestant missions will soon eclipse centuries of European and American-led missions and herald a new era of South-to-South mission flows. In such triumphant evangelical narratives, Korea is seen as having successfully progressed from poverty to prosperity as a result of Christianization and capitalist development. How do Christians missions nurture faith in capitalist deliverance, and what is at stake in this evangelical-capitalist assemblage in the era of neoliberal globalization? This talk draws from ethnographic research of missions in Tanzania and Uganda where Korean missionaries organized a month-long series of events including economic development seminars based explicitly on Korea’s model of state-led modernization and rural development. I will discuss how the missionaries presented Saemaul Undong from the 1970s—with its authoritarian roots trimmed and foundations recast in Christian terms—as a wellspring for a distinctly Korean/American political theology of development, and offered it as a blueprint for both economic and spiritual progress..

Ju Hui Judy Han is a doctoral candidate in geography with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Berkeley, California. Her dissertation concerns the geography of contemporary Korean/American evangelical Christian missions. Her research interests include the political economy of global English; perceptions of distance/proximity, stranger/neighbor; illegal aliens; and the narrative structures of class mobility and achievement.

Description

This year is the 100th anniversary of Hong Kong cinema. Films were shot in the colony by foreign cameramen as early as 1898, but it was a Russian-American, Benjamin Brodsky, who hired theatre director Lian Shaobo to make two comic shorts, RIGHT A WRONG WITH EARTHENWARE DISH (WA PEN SHEN YUAN) and STEALING A ROASTED DUCK (TOU SHAO YA). Lian Shaobo later joined two brothers, Li Minwei and Li Beihai, in the Minxin Company in Hong Kong and made the first HK feature, ROUGE (YANZHI, 1925). The fledgling era quickly formed a complex web, with Shanghai’s maturing industry and with the U.S., where Chinese-American filmmakers Kwan Manching and Chiu Ahu-sun first founded Hong Kong’s pioneering Grandview studio.

These inaugural developments foreshadowed the pragmatic commercialism that would drive Hong Kong cinema’s success in post-war Asia. Mandarin-speaking mainland studio veterans then joined in competition with Cantonese studios, and Hong Kong films dove headlong into the international arena. Commercial triumphs came soon with martial arts, urban stories, comedies and eventually a locally born art cinema that enabled a city of just six million to sustain the second largest film industry in Asia.
In the two decades since the 1980s, Hong Kong filmmakers have faced severe challenges in the cinema marketplace. They have also achieved ever-wider international critical recognition.

This panel of critics, archivist-historians and film programmers will discuss the past and prospects of Hong Kong cinema — 100 years after they started.

Panelists:
Kenneth Bi, director of “The Drummer”
Colin Geddes, Unit 8
Jessica Li, visiting fellow, York University
Raymond Phathanavirangoon, international programmer, Toronto International Film Festival and Reel Asian

Moderator:
Bart Testa, professor of Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto

*** Informal reception to follow ***

PANEL CO-PRESENTERS
CinemAsia [Asian Institute at the University of Toronto]
Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

SPONSORS
Hong Kong Economc and Trade Office (Canada)

Dr. David Chu Distinguished Leaders Program
Toronto After Dark
donderdag
Photographer Joyce Wong
Holiday Inn Midtown

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TICKETS $10 GA $7 Students | BUY TICKETS AT EVENT WEBSITE

Special Feature Presentation | Fri Nov 14 | 2:30 PM | Director: Sabu (Hiroyuki Tanaka) | Japan | 2003 | 87:00 | 35mm | Canadian Premiere
Cast: Susumu Terajima, Naomi Nishida, Seijun Suzuki

Laid off with the unexpected closing of a local factory, a laborer opts to take a walk rather then join his co-workers in protest. Hands in his pockets, wearing an aimless gaze and never uttering a word, his walk takes him to various places and people, including a ghost played by Seijun Suzuki. When he can go no further, he turns around and walks home.

Having established himself with energetic screwball crime capers like POSTMAN BLUES and UNLUCKY MONKEY, Sabu’s THE BLESSING BELL is a markedly distinct work. The bumbling of Yakuza, the lamentations of murderers and the Rube-Goldberg machine plotting that Sabu is so elegant at constructing persist from previous works, but what differs is how Sabu approaches these episodes visually. For the most part, Sabu has the camera capture the action on a proscenium. Like the unfurling of a tapestry the protagonist walks from the left to right across a series of shots, only to pass through them all again on his way home. The effect is an extremely absorbing cinematic representation of Zen philosophy.

In the pivotal role of the wanderer is veteran Japanese actor Susumu Terajima. A familiar face from both Takeshi Miike and Kitano, but rarely assuming anything more then a supporting role, Sabu takes advantage of Terajima’s wonderful face and its seemingly perpetual grimace for his patient protagonist. It is a deadpan, but moving performance of exquisite subtelty.

THE BLESSING BELL, winner of the Netpac Award at the Berlin International Film Festival (2003) and the Grand Jury Prize at Cinemanila International Film Festival, is a wonderfully accomplished film that manages to inspire a contagious sense of optimism despite its brushes with life’s tragedies and suffering.

— synopsis by Eric Cazdyn and Peter Kuplowsky

SABU was born in 1964 as Hiroyuki Tanaka. He began his film career as an actor. His performance in Katsuhiro Otomo’s WORLD APARTMENT HORROR (1991) won him an award at the Yokohama Film Festival 1991, and he went on to appear in several other films, working under Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hideo Nakata and Takeshi Miike. In 1996, he debuted as both a writer and director with D.A.N.G.A.N. RUNNER. Celebrated for his inventive style and humorous storytelling, Sabu quickly became a highly regarded director in both Japan and overseas, particularly in Europe.

FILM CO-PRESENTERS
CinemAsia [Asian Institute at the University of Toronto]
Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

SPONSORS
Dr. David Chu Distinguished Leaders Program
Toronto After Dark
Donderdag
Photographer Joyce Wong
Holiday Inn Midtown

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A must-attend session with Oscar-nominated filmmaker and chair of NYU’s graduate film and TV department Christine Choy (WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN?) in conversation with Yung Chang, director of the acclaimed film UP THE YANGTZE.

Moderator: TBA

PANEL CO-PRESENTERS
CinemAsia [Asian Institute at the University of Toronto]
Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

SPONSORS
Dr. David Chu Distinguished Leaders Program
Toronto After Dark
Donderdag
Photographer Joyce Wong
Holiday Inn Midtown

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In recent years there has been increasing emphasis on environmental sustainability as a key component of urban development strategies in Chinese cities. This shift to greener forms of urban development is occurring against the backdrop of intense interurban competition and is guided by government programs that track the progress of cities towards more sustainable forms of economic growth. These regulatory initiatives resemble target-setting regimes and other technologies of performance often associated with neoliberal governance. However, in the case of China, the function, and ultimately effects, of indicator-based approaches cannot be understood without reference to governing practices of the earlier socialist period. In this paper, I trace the history of environmental assessment programs directed at improving environmental performance at the city level, and examine some of the economic and political factors that have facilitated the development of these programs, and at times, constrained them.

Alana Boland is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Program in Planning at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on environmental governance and green developmentalism in China. Current projects include a study of state regulatory initiatives aimed at improving environmental conditions in cities and communities, as well as an archival-based study of water management in Chinese cities during the 1950s and 60s.

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While the ethnic Chinese in many Asian countries have achieved economic and other forms of success, those in Korea have a very different story. Though most of them were born in Korea, very few have local citizenship. Moreover their nationality belongs to Taiwan, although they originally came from the mainland China. Compared to the numbers of ethnic chinese population of over seven millions in Indonesia and Thailand, there are ONLY twenty thousands of them left in Korea now. What happened to them over the last 100 years, and what does the rapid multiculturalization of Korean society mean to them?

Kyung Tae Park is a professor of Sociology at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul, Korea. He has been working on the issues related to ethnic and racial minorities in Korea. In particular, his research interests focus on migrant workers, ethnic chinese, and biracial people in Korea. He is the author of several books and articles including the followings: Becoming Korean: The Experiences of Migrant Workers, Ethnic Chinese, and Biracial People (2008), Stories of The Others: Minorities and Human Rights in Korea (2007), “Social Causes of Minority Discrimination in Korea: Focusing on Ethnic and Racial Minorities” (2001).

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Indonesia’s Islamic revival has coincided with democratization, an expanding middle class, and the growing involvement of women in many aspects of public life. Recently, divisive debates about issues like pornography, abortion, and polygamy have become distinct features of Indonesia’s still-emerging public sphere. While women are often positioned as symbols in debates about moral behavior, pious Muslim women in Indonesia are increasingly active participants in these struggles over the future of the Indonesian nation-state. Their activism begs the question: how is it that just a decade after the fall of a secular military dictatorship Muslim women have gone from being politically marginalized to becoming legitimate actors in the public sphere? My research shows that global processes, including the Islamic revival, have helped to empower women in the Indonesian public sphere. Women activists draw on global discourses of Islam, as well as feminism, to construct and deploy their own moral visions of modernity and Indonesia’s future. In this way,the global Islamic revival provides new possibilities for women’s agency in the public sphere, including the opportunity for women to produce themselves as modern political subjects.

Dr. Rachel Rinaldo is a Kiriyama Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Pacific Rim, University of San Francisco. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2007. She is currently working on a book about women, Islam, and the public sphere in Indonesia.

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Many scholars have analyzed pathways to mobilization for myriad challengers confronting all types of governments. Fewer have examined the decisions of states to repress, accommodate, or ignore protesters – even though the importance of state response is universally recognized, particularly in authoritarian settings. When challenges come from groups who had benefited from the pursuit of one vision of modernity and progress, but who have lost out after the state changed direction ideologically, the influence of regime reactions to citizen activism is further heightened. In both contemporary China and New Order Indonesia, responses to contention have varied significantly over time and across place. Why do governments – even the most authoritarian and autonomous ones – fail to respond consistently to similar challenges? Drawing on a comparative analysis of contention by Chinese laid-off workers and Indonesian Islamic student groups, I argue that states with high capacity seek to accommodate protesters, while those with weaker capacity usually seek to repress unrest, and those lacking sufficient capacity to repress or accommodate implore outside entities to buy off resisters, enlist third party violent actors to repress them, or fail to mount any meaningful response at all.

Professor William Hurst, assistant professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, received his PhD from the University of California-Berkeley in 2005. His prior work has centered on contemporary Chinese labor, particularly the social and political impacts of mass lay-offs from state-owned enterprises in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He is the author of The Chinese Worker after Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 forthcoming) and an editor of Laid-off Workers in a Workers’ State: Unemployment with Chinese Characteristics (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009 forthcoming). He is currently working on articles comparing state repression of contentious challengers in China and Indonesia, and analyzing the social roots of contention and quiescence in rural China. His ongoing research focuses on the institutional workings of the Chinese legal system, as well as on labor markets, working class politics, and the legal system in Indonesia.

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The topic social capital which is the seminar series topic has been closely intertwined with migration studies and theory. We have heard
of migration chains, ethnic enclaves, ethnic entrepreneurship, transnationalism, all these turn on forms of social relations in which social capital is embedded , related to migration. But is there an accepted relationship between forms of social relations, and migration? What about push and pulls in migration? Our image of the uprooted and anomic migrant. The lure of the Orient ; the dynamic Chinese economy is a more recent layer of imagery. These are alternative or competing images with social relations. Our discussion traces the comings and goings of concepts of social capital in migration with reference to Chinese migrations.

Janet W. Salaff, Professor of Sociology, Emerita, University of Toronto, Visiting Scholar, Centre of Asian Studies, Hong Kong University
Arent Greve, Professor, Department of Strategy and Management, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration

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China’s post-Mao reforms provide a great opportunity to explore a number of important historical, political, and theoretical issues with respect to postsocialist transitions. Focusing on the late 1970s, this talk situates the inaugural moment of China’s liberalizing turn in the context of the organic crisis of the party-state and its ideological apparatus in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. The early post-Mao years of the late 1970s is extremely important, as it was the time when ideological possibilities contrasting sharply from what was to become the new hegemonic formation of the 1980s and 1990s flourished briefly in what was a spontaneous movement of popular activism and criticism, cultural renaissance, and social mobilization. I examine the state’s maneuver as tactics of crisis management aiming to contain and neutralize the emergent opposition from below. As the combined results of political repression, ideological appropriation, and socioeconomic incorporation, a new “reform” model emerged to rearticulate popular demands and initiatives to a vulgar, official vision of “socialism” centering on market liberalization and economic modernization. In scrutinizing a key historical juncture in Chinese postsocialism, this paper interrogates the political and ideological meanings of the “post-Mao reforms” that have led to the Chinese present.

Dr. Yiching Wu is a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows, and Assistant Professor in Anthropology and history at the University of Michigan. An anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, where he specialized in contemporary Chinese politics and culture, he is interested in popular social movements, class formation and consciousness, socialism and postsocialist transitions, and politics of hegemony and resistance. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the popular transgressions and radicalization within the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s.

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Stanley Kwan, the architect of one of the world’s leading economic indicators, the Hang Seng Index, will help launch his memoirs, The Dragon and the Crown, at the Charles Lee Hong Kong Library, University of Toronto on Thursday, December 11, 2008.

The Dragon and the Crown – Hong Kong Memoirs is the personal story of Stanley Kwan and a fascinating account of 20th century Hong Kong: from entrepot to international financial centre; from a British colony to become part of 21st century China.

“Stanley Kwan is the master of the telling detail as he recounts the saga of his extended family, torn between capitalist, colonial Hong Kong and the Chinese Communist revolution,” writes Jan Wong, author of Red China Blues and Beijing Confidential. .

“Kwan’s own odyssey is gripping as a survivor of the Japanese attack on Hong Kong, wartime interpreter for US troops, creator of the influential Hang Seng Index and, ultimately, target of Communist China’s velvet-gloved attempt to recruit sympathizers among Hong Kong’s rich and famous.”

The book launch will feature a panel discussion on periods of Hong Kong history in which Kwan was an eyewitness to. Joining Kwan will be Senator Vivienne Poy, Professor Bernardl Luk, and Jan Wong. The event is co-sponsored by Asian Institute at the University of Toronto, Richard Charles Lee Canada Hong Kong Library, and the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office.

Stanley Kwan emigrated to Canada in 1984 and now lives in Toronto. The book is co-authored with his niece Nicole Kwan, a former banking executive in Hong Kong. The Dragon and the Crown is published by Hong Kong University Press www.hkupress.org and distributed in Canada by University of British Columbia Press www.ubcpress.ubc.ca.