Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University

TOMORROW: CEAS Spring Reception 2026

Friday, April 24 | 4:00 - 6:00pm | Luce Lawn

We cordially invite you to the Council on East Asian Studies' Spring Reception to celebrate the end of the 2025-26 academic year.

Location: Henry R. Luce Hall Lawn (34 Hillhouse Ave)
Date: Friday, April 24th
Time: 4pm - 6pm

TOMORROW: New Tales of Ise: Militarization, Modernization, and Marine Experimentation around the Bay, 1890-1945

Thursday, April 23 | 4:30 - 6:00pm | Luce 203

Ise Bay, located near the center of Japan and endowed with rich biodiversity within its 822 square miles, has served for millennia as an aquatic pantry for habitants along its shoreline. Beginning in the late 19th century, its shores also played host to the rapid industrial development of the modern Japanese state and, in particular, to its war-making capabilities. This talk examines the tensions that arose between 1890 and 1945 from the demands made on the bay (and its sub-bay, Mikawa Bay) by the twin imperatives of feeding local populations and equipping a burgeoning defense state.

Emer O’Dwyer specializes in 20th-century Japanese history with research interests in imperialism, industrialization, de-imperialization, and postwar economic high-growth. Her first book, entitled, Significant Soil: Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria was published by Harvard University’s Asia Center Press in 2015. She is currently at work on a modern history of Ise Bay that aims to connect prewar/wartime and post-imperial histories through focus on the tensions of modernization in a specific region. Structured around the entangled geographies of the military/naval industrial complex, the fishing industry, and the petrochemical industry in Japan’s central region, it covers the period from 1870 through 1970.

TOMORROW: Jade Artifacts and Social Dynamics in the Longshan Era: Cross-Regional Interactions and Cultural Integration during Late Neolithic China (2500-1800BCE)

Wednesday, April 22 | 4:30 - 6:00pm | Luce 202

Jade objects played important roles in regional interaction during the late Neolithic, Longshan period, an era when there was no formal writing system. It appears that the frequency and extent of social interactions involving particular jade forms were more significant than previously realized. For example, varieties of thin, flat dao knives, cong tubes, and bi discs are found throughout the Yellow River basin. Certain decorative motifs originate from the Xiaojiawuzi culture of the middle Yangtze River region. In this lecture I will discuss similarities in jade forms among regions during the Longshan period to discuss the different kinds of social connections they represent. I suggest that the degree of similarities across long distances reveal unprecedented distances and diversity with respect to the nature of the social interactions that took place. These represent significant cross-regional integration in early China, even before the emergence of bronze technology and the bronze ritual system of the early Bronze Age.

TOMORROW: War is Traffic Hell: Industrial Labor, Commuter Exhaustion, and the Limits of Mobilization in Wartime Tokyo

Thursday, April 16 | 4:30 - 6:00pm | Luce 202

Wartime mobilization during Japan’s Asia-Pacific War (1937–1945) transformed Tokyo’s suburban landscape and thrust factory workers into the center of a growing urban transport crisis. Focusing on the case of Nakajima Aircraft Company’s Musashino Factory in Tokyo’s western suburbs, this talk examines the dynamics of wartime urbanization. As Nakajima’s workforce expanded faster than the local housing supply, workers faced long and arduous daily commutes aboard packed railway cars. I argue that the commuting factory worker’s emergence after 1937 represents a pivotal moment in the history of commuting in modern Japan. For the first time, the fatigue long associated with white-collar commuters became an urgent concern for industrial labor and national productivity alike. Drawing on understudied government surveys, mass media sources, and railway ministry records, this talk traces how officials struggled to manage a transport system that demanded extraordinary physical exertion from workers before they even reached the factory floor. Although the white-collar salaryman reclaimed center stage in Tokyo's rush hour drama during Japan's postwar economic growth, I contend that the massification of long-distance commuting cannot be understood without first accounting for the spatial dislocations of total war.

TODAY: "What is the self?" Special Talk by Author Keiichiro Hirano

Tuesday, April 14 | 4:30 - 6:00pm | Luce 203

This lecture will introduce my work as a novelist while examining one of its central themes: the multiplicity of identity. Challenging the conventional notion of the “individual” as a unified and stable entity, I will present the concept of the “dividual,” a term I have coined to describe the plural and relational nature of the self.

Through this framework, I will explore how our identities are formed and transformed through relationships with others, and consider its implications for how we understand the self, engage with others, and design more flexible and inclusive social systems.

TOMORROW: The Great Global Transformation: Its Origin and Its Meaning

Saturday, April 11 | 3:50 - 5:40pm | HQ 276

The world’s two great economic powers are on opposite trajectories. In the United States, decades of neoliberal policies produced a small class of rich elites and gutted the middle class. In China, the same global forces have created a massive new upper class. The result is the greatest reshuffling of global incomes since the Industrial Revolution—a dramatic shakeup of each country’s political order. As the two powers retreat from one another, the implications for their futures, and for the world economy, are uncertain.

This is a keynote presentation by Professor Branko Milanović as part of the workshop, The Specter of Market: The World Before and After Post-Socialism. Please find more on the workshop at ceas.yale.edu

TOMORROW: Forever a Woman
Film Screening

Tuesday, April 7th | 7:30pm - 9:30pm | HQ Alice Cinema

Widely considered Kinuyo Tanaka’s first personal film, FOREVER A WOMAN tells the story of a recent divorcée (Yumeji Tsukioka) who is diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer. In adapting the real-life story of the poet Fumiko Nakajo, Tanaka and screenwriter Sumie Tanaka (a longtime collaborator of Mikio Naruse’s, though of no familial relation to Kinuyo) investigate issues of mortality, sexuality, and female independence with a frankness and audacity unprecedented in postwar Japanese cinema.

TOMORROW: From Side Streets to Center Stage: Reframing Street Food in South Korea
7th Annual Park Memorial Lecture in Korean Studies

Tuesday, April 7th | 4:30pm - 6pm | Luce Hall Auditorium

Hyaeweol Choi - Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies at the University of Iowa

Street food in contemporary South Korea is vibrant, fiercely competitive, innovative, and performative, attracting both domestic and international audiences. Once undervalued and stigmatized as urban eyesores—and largely operated by women—street food has been transformed into fashionable cultural icons and trendy multisensory experiences. How did this transformation occur? This lecture examines the gendered history of street food, tracing its evolution through war, poverty, industrialization, and nation-branding within a neoliberal economy and a global media landscape. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and media analysis, it foregrounds the life histories of street food vendors to offer new insights into enduring and emerging gender dynamics amid shifting geopolitical, economic, and cultural conditions. By historicizing both continuity and change in the politics of gendered culinary labor, the lecture positions street food as a critical lens through which to examine the intersections of the private, the public, and the global.

TOMORROW: Black Box Diaries
Screening and Filmmaker Q&A

Monday, April 6th | 3:30pm - 6pm | HQ Alice Cinema

Journalist Shiori Ito embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country’s outdated judicial and societal systems.

Film distributed by Grasshopper Films.

TOMORROW: The Future is Foreign: Women and Immigrants in Corporate Japan

Monday, March 30th | 12:00pm - 1:30pm | Luce 202

Hilary J. Holbrow - Assistant Professor of Japanese Politics and Society at Indiana University

Japan's foreign population has grown exponentially since the liberalization of its border control policy in 1989. But, because political discourse paints the foreign population as temporary, research on non-citizens' experiences and outcomes relative to comparable Japanese is in its infancy. In this talk, I discuss how white-collar migrants from Asia and the West fare after finding employment in elite Japanese firms, exploring the extent to which they evade, or remain constrained by, existing patterns of inequality. I find that women, regardless of national origin, fall to the bottom of the stratification hierarchy, while immigrant men experience little or no disadvantage. The study demonstrates that, despite Japan’s reputation for xenophobia, in contemporary white-collar workplaces gender is a far sharper axis of inequality than is foreign origin.