Yenching Academy East Asian Studies

YCAEAS shares on behalf of Stand with "Comfort Women" at Yale:

STAND invites you to join us for a panel discussion on November 15, Monday at 7PM ET on Zoom. We have with us five historians — each with diverse specialisations in the history of Japan and its empire — to discuss and understand the intractability of the "comfort women" issue.

Professors Hannah Shepherd, Sayaka Chatani, Amy Stanley, David Ambaras and Chelsea Schieder are heavily involved in speaking out against Ramseyer's scholarship, and penned a strong Letter of Concern in the Asia-Pacific Journal (Japan Focus).

Reflecting on the controversy with Harvard Law School Professor Mark J. Ramseyer, we wonder: why does the "comfort women" issue remain so intractable? Three decades after the first survivors' testimonies about their experiences as a s*x slaves in the Imperial Japanese Army, what explains the persistent presence denialist history reproduced by the likes of Ramseyer? How do we move forward from here?

RSVP at the following link: tinyurl.com/standpanel

Click on our campaign link for an email containing more information: https://bit.ly/3bxKZAS

[LIVE] is back!

⏰ Time: 3PM China Standard Time, July 10 2021 (Sat)
🎙Topic: Exploring East Asia - Young Scholars' Stories

🍀 This week, YCAEAS welcomes Minwoong (Eric) Hwang and Hongda (Michael) Zhang from Yenching Academy of Peking University. We will be talking about their inspirations, motivations and journey of exploring East Asia as young academicians.

✍️ Scholars' bio:
1️⃣ Minwoong(Eric) Hwang holds a bachelor's degree in International Studies at Kyunghee University and has pursued a dual-degree in the field of international management at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences. He is now pursuing a master's degree in China Studies: Politics and International Relations at Yenching Academy of Peking University. Before Yenching, Minwoong served in the military as an English interpreter at the Korean Defense Intelligence Command, which became a catalyst for his interest in international affairs. He has also taken part in the 2019 China-Japan-Korea Student Peace Dialogue in Shanghai.
2️⃣ Originally from Hangzhou, China, Hongda(Michael) Zhang graduated from Harbin Institute of Technology with a B.A. in Economics. He was fascinated by the multicultural history of Harbin and became interested in East Asian studies. He is now a master student of economics at Yenching Academy Peking University. Hongda likes jogging, public transportation and learning about random knowledge.

⬇️🔥[July 7 Event “] ⬇️- feel free to tag yourselves and share!
🍀We had a wonderful panel discussion with Director Miki Dezaki, Professor Eika Tai, and Peace Nabi on the comfort women documentary film Shusenjo and the issue in general.
🍀We had the honor to have had 108 participants from all over the world. The event wouldn't be possible without their brilliant input and thought-provoking discussion/debates. We would like to thank our four distinguished panelists for shedding light on the comfort women issue. It is a difficult topic, which concerns gender, race, the idea of apology, regional power politics, history, memory studies etc. Director Dezaki’s documentary, Shusenjo, has done an excellent job in both raising our awareness about the gendered history and highlighting the complexity of the issue; It has also facilitated the public understanding of how that past seeps into the present in the contemporary forms of misogyny and gender discriminations.
🍀We, as moderators, certainly learned so much from everyone, and hope that everyone enjoyed it too. We are looking forward to seeing you again in our future events.

Co-host with
Wapeko -Campus Asia Alumni of Waseda, Peking & Korea Universities

Greetings from the 3 moderators of the event! See you on July 7, 8pm GMT+9! For more info on the event, please kindly refer to the previous posts.

[ #2 UPCOMING TALK! SIGN UP TO JOIN by June 29th]
✍️On 7 July, 8-9pm (GMT+9), a talk with Miki Dezaki, director of comfort women documentary film “Shusenjo”.

✍️Register through the QR code on the poster, or the link here: https://bit.ly/2TQis3I

✍️This talk will be also joined by other distinguished panelists: (1) Professor Eika Tai, who just recently published a book on “Comfort Women Activism: Critical Voices from the Perpetrator State”; (2) Peace nabi [평화나비- “peace butterfly”], a network of Korean university students formed to raise the awareness of the “comfort women” history.

✍️We hope to:
1. ✍️provide audiences a platform to discuss the “comfort women” issue. It is a gendered history that has been overlooked in the dominant discourse and still remains one of the most heated issues in East Asia today.
2. ✍️provide audiences an opportunity to discuss the comfort women issue with the documentary film director.
3. ✍️contribute to peaceful cooperation, and generate harmonious dialogue among different players in the region in the long term.

[UPCOMING TALK! REGISTER BY June 29th]
✍️On 7 July, 8-9pm (GMT+9), YCAEAS (Yenching Academy East Asian Studies), WAPEKO (Alumni Association for CAMPUS Asia ENGAGE), and Alex Chou will be co-hosting a talk with Miki Dezaki, director of comfort women documentary film “Shusenjo”.

✍️Register through the QR code on the poster, or the link here: https://bit.ly/2TQis3I

✍️This talk will be also joined by other distinguished panelists: (1) Professor Eika Tai from North Carolina State University, who just recently published a book on “Comfort Women Activism: Critical Voices from the Perpetrator State”; (2) Peace nabi [평화나비- “peace butterfly”], a network of Korean university students formed to raise the awareness of the “comfort women” history.

✍️We hope to:
1. ✍️provide audiences a platform to discuss the “comfort women” issue. It is a gendered history that has been overlooked in the dominant discourse and still remains one of the most heated issues in East Asia today.
2. ✍️provide audiences an opportunity to discuss the comfort women issue with the documentary film director.
3. ✍️contribute to peaceful cooperation, and generate harmonious dialogue among different players in the region in the long term.

Join us on Facebook LIVE @ 4pm KST/JST on June 13th for a book talk about "Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women".

Available in English for the first time, Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women brings together twenty-five essays by seven critically acclaimed writers, whose fiction and poetry have become classics in modern Chinese literature. Poetic, metaphoric, and sometimes playful and satiric, the essays discuss the material reality wherein Chinese women live and function. Reflecting on their experiences under Mao and in post-Maoist China, these essays vividly demonstrate that, despite equality of the s*xes being the official position and women working equally demanding jobs as men, women are still considered servile to their male counterparts.

Taken together, the collection shows Chinese women struggling for identity by discussing the issues that are important in their lives. Unlike Western feminists, they do not want to be seen as different from their male counterparts. Nor do they want to fall into Chinese terminology of being the same as men. Rather, these essays show that women want to be seen first and foremost as human and then as female. By showcasing the politics and poetics of Chinese women's essays to an English audience, Hui Wu's translations uncover the philosophy and purpose behind the literature of a unique generation of Chinese women, whose life experience finds no parallel in China and certainly not in the West.

Book Talk on "Friend: A Novel from North Korea"

LOVE IN THE TOTALITARIAN STATE: A MERGE OF THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPHERES
BOOK TALK FB LIVE ON "Friend: A Novel From North Korea".

Synopsis: Paek Nam-nyong's Friend is a tale of marital intrigue, abuse, and divorce in North Korea. A woman in her thirties comes to a courthouse petitioning for a divorce. As the judge who hears her statement begins to investigate the case, the story unfolds into a broader consideration of love and marriage. The novel delves into its protagonists' past, describing how the couple first fell in love and then how their marriage deteriorated over the years. It chronicles the toll their acrimony takes on their son and their careers alongside the story of the judge's own marital troubles.

A best-seller in North Korea, where Paek continues to live and write, Friend illuminates a side of life in the DPRK that Western readers have never before encountered. Far from being a propagandistic screed in praise of the Great Leader, Friend describes the lives of people who struggle with everyday problems such as marital woes and workplace conflicts. Instead of socialist-realist stock figures, Paek depicts complex characters who wrestle with universal questions of individual identity, the split between public and private selves, the unpredictability of existence, and the never-ending labor of maintaining a relationship. This groundbreaking translation of one of North Korea's most popular writers offers English-language readers a page-turner full of psychological tension as well as a revealing portrait of a society that is typically seen as closed to the outside world.

Join us on Facebook LIVE @ 10am KST/JST on Mar. 16th for a book talk about "The Astonishing Color of After" by Emily X. R. Pan.

Book Synopsis:
Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by su***de, she turned into a bird.

Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush, Axel, her mother was taking her own life.

Alternating between real and magic, past and present, friendship and romance, hope and despair, The Astonishing Color of After is a novel about finding oneself through family history, art, grief, and love.

THEMES TO BE DISCUSSED:
- Grief
- Love
- Multiculturalism
- Identity
- Gender
- Family

Join us on Facebook LIVE @ 4pm KST/JST on Jan. 23rd for a book talk about "The Vegetarian" by Han Kang.

Plot Summary:
"Before the nightmare, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life. But when splintering, blood-soaked images start haunting her thoughts, Yeong-hye decides to purge her mind and renounce eating meat. In a country where societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye's decision to embrace a more “plant-like” existence is a shocking act of subversion. And as her passive rebellion manifests in ever more extreme and frightening forms, scandal, abuse, and estrangement begin to send Yeong-hye spiraling deep into the spaces of her fantasy. In a complete metamorphosis of both mind and body, her now dangerous endeavor will take Yeong-hye—impossibly, ecstatically, tragically—far from her once-known self altogether."

Themes to be discussed:
1. Female Body
2. Sanity
3. Authenticity
4. Male Fantasy
5. Anthropocentrism & Self-Neutrality