As a sociologist who works on the conjunction and conflicts between political, economic and cultural-cognitive networks, Eiko Ikegami has been conducting research on long-term social processes that underlie and perpetuate modern Japanese social
relations with a number of different topics. It is from this long-term view point, that Ikegami offers a distinctive angle to articulate the grave difficulties that contemporary Japanese capitalism is facing. She expresses the social significance of the current radical transformation of Japanese capitalism as a historic turning point in redirecting institutions of Japanese trust and justification. For example, she investigates developments in popular consciousness of egalitarian views that clung to the myth that "we all are in the middle strata" and of distinctive gender roles closely linked to the particular style of Japanese capitalism. Ikegami considers these institutional transformations not only as a postwar product, but in a critical way as the result of path dependent developments of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization for more than a century. Using keywords such as uncertainty, networks, trust, and justification, her talk will present a bold synthesis that outlines the long-term process of institutionalization that produces mutually connected socio-cultural-cognitive systems in which the distinctive Japanese style of capitalism has been embedded.

Born and raised in Japan, Eiko Ikegami was a journalist for the Japan Economic Journal (Nikkei or Nihonkeizai Shinbun) before she moved to the US. Ikegami is currently Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at the New School for Social Research in New York. Ikegami's book, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 1995), has been translated into Spanish, Korean, and Japanese, and is widely considered the definitive statement on the subject. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2005), won five book awards in various fields including the Distinguished Contribution Book award in Political Sociology from the American Sociological Association, and the John Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, which cited the work as "the most important book on Japan to have appeared in recent years." In 2003, Ikegami was elected Chair of the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the ASA.

Her core research interest has been related to the question: How did a non-Western society such as Japan achieve its own version of modernity without traveling the route taken by Western countries? More recently, Ikegami has been working on three distinct areas of research: a project on trust and uncertainty in Japanese capitalism; the completion of a book project on the Gion Festival, Community, Gender, and Shrine in Kyoto; and, funded by the National Science Foundation, Ikegami currently leads a team of one dozen graduate students in conducting ethnographic research of online communities using 3-D virtual worlds in Japan and in the U.S. Ikegami’s theoretical interests uniquely combine culture and network concepts with the literature of civil society, which has prompted an initiative in the form of a series of workshops in Paris (Sciences Po) and New York, to study the trajectories of civil societies in non-western settings.

Professor Chong Wook Chung will discuss Sino-Korean relations based on his experience working for the Korean government in Seoul and in Beijing. He will also interpret current developments in the trianglular relationship between Pyongyang, Seoul, and Beijing.

Professor Chung, a former ambassador to the People's Republic of China, is a distinguished professor at Dong-A University in Korea, and is currently teaching a course on Korea and East Asia in the Department of Government at Harvard University as the inaugural Kim Koo Visiting Professor. He has taught at many universities including American University, Claremont McKenna College, George Washington University, and Seoul National University. His book-length English publications include the book Maoism and Development (Seoul National University Press, 1980), and the co-edited volume Korea's Options in a Changing World (UC Berkeley Press, 1992).

Professor Chung holds a B.A. in International Relations from Seoul National University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. He was awarded the Yale Alumni Award in 2007.

This seminar is made possible by the generous support from the Koret Foundation.

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Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series

In March 2000, the release of Sony's new PlayStation2 hit a snag. The Japanese government classified the game console as a "general purpose product related to conventional weapons" on the grounds that it was powerful enough to be used as an actual missile guidance system. Accordingly, the government applied export controls on PlayStation2 requiring that distributors obtain a special license. Illustrating the coinage of such terms as "military-industrial-entertainment complex," the incident marked one of numerous collusions between military and commercial uses of video games in Japan and elsewhere.

It is against this backdrop that Frühstück traces the rules and conventions of war games from the fields of rural Japan in the nineteenth century to cyberspace in the twenty-first century. Her examination of the varying configurations of militarism and infantilism, the production of "child soldiers," and the competing roles of state agencies and entertainment industries suggest that war has been leaving its mark on the social body, and on children in particular, not only in the form of injury or death. Rather, through military institutions, pedagogy, technology, popular culture, and other intermediaries, war continues to have general effects on Japanese society and the global order as a whole.

Sabine Frühstück is a professor of modern Japanese cultural studies and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Employing historical and sociocultural methodologies, Frühstück's research focuses on militarization and war, gender and sexuality, and Japan in a global context from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Her book Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (2007) was translated into Japanese as Fuan na heishitachi: Nippon Jieitai Kenkyû (2008). She is also the author of Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (2003) and Die Politik der Sexualwissenschaft, 1908-1941 (1997), and co-editor of the volumes The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure (1998), Neue Geschichten der Sexualität in Zentraleuropa und Ostasien (1999), and Recreating Japanese Men (in press, 2011). Committed to engaging the humanities and the social sciences, she has written essays in English, Japanese and German that have been published in the Journal of Japanese Studies, the Journal of Asian Studies, the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, American Ethnologist, Jinbun Gakuho, and Zeitschrift für angewandte Sozialforschung, among other scholarly journals.

Since joining the faculty at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Frühstück has been serving as the executive board director of the UC-wide Pacific Rim Research Program and as a member of the editorial boards of the University of California Press and the Journal of Japanese Studies. She also has been a member of the American Advisory Committee for Japanese Studies of the Japan Foundation, the executive board of the German Association for Social Science Research on Japan, and the Board of Trustees of the Society for Japanese Studies. At UCSB, she has dry appointments with the departments of history, anthropology, and feminist studies, and the Cold War Center.

Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series

The prevalence of single-mother families in Japan has increased markedly as a result of rising divorce rates. Unlike in the U.S, where the well-being of single mothers and their children is a central research and policy focus, we know very little about single-mother families in Japan. The most widely-discussed characteristic of these families is their economic deprivation. Over half of Japanese single mothers live in poverty despite the fact that nearly all are employed. In the context of limited public income transfers and low earnings, intergenerational coresidence is a potentially important source of support that may buffer the impact of single-parenthood for the nearly one-in-three single mothers who live with their parents.

In this talk, Professor Raymo will present results from the first two studies to examine the role of living arrangements in moderating relationships between single parenthood and well-being in Japan. In the first study, he uses data from a survey of single mothers to examine differences in the self-rated health and subjective economic well-being of those living with parents and those living alone. In the second study, he uses data from two rounds of a nationally-representative survey to compare time spent with children in single-mother families and two-parent families, paying attention to the ways in which the presence of coresident grandparents may moderate relationships between family structure and parent-child interactions. In both studies, I find that single mothers living alone are characterized by relatively poor outcomes, net of theoretically relevant controls. In the second study, he also finds that single mothers living with parents are no different than their married counterparts in terms of the time spent playing with, instructing, and eating dinner with children. He discusses the potential implications of these findings for inequality and the reproduction of disadvantage in Japan.

Jim Raymo is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he is also an affiliate of the Center for Demography and Ecology, the Center for Demography of Health and Aging, and the Center for East Asian Studies. Raymo's research focuses primarily on evaluating patterns and potential consequences of demographic changes associated with rapid population aging in Japan. He has published widely on key features of recent family change in Japan, including delayed marriage, extended coresidence with parents, and increases in premarital cohabitation, shotgun marriages, and divorce. In two other lines of research, he has examined relationships between work, family characteristics, and health outcomes at older ages in Japan and patterns of retirement and well-being at older ages in the U.S. He is currently involved in the early stages of a project that will examine family change and inequality in Japan in cross-national comparative perspective. His research has been published in top U.S. journals such as American Sociological Review, Demography, and Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences as well as in Japanese journals.

Raymo teaches classes on Family and Household Demography, Demographic Techniques, and Research Methods. He is currently the Associate Director of Training at the Center for Demography and Ecology and the faculty director of the Sociology Department's Concentration in Analysis and Research. He also serves on the editorial boards of Demography and Journal of Marriage and Family. Raymo received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan after completing his M.A. in Economics at Osaka City University in Japan.