The French Research Institute on Japan at the Maison franco-japonaise is pleased to invite you to its next webinar:

Japan’s Productivity Puzzle
Friday 21th April / 12:30 – 14:00 JST
Lunch Webinar on Japanese Economy and Society / 
Online / In English, without translation

Speaker: Franz Waldenberger (Director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies)

To sustain income levels in face of a rapidly aging society, Japan will need to increase labor productivity. Value added per hour worked has been increasing over the last 30 years, but it remains very low in comparison to other OECD countries. In 2021, it was below 60% the US level. This is surprising given Japan’s excellent resource conditions: a high education level of its workforce, high investment in research and development and relative abundance of capital. The presentation will try to resolve Japan’s productivity puzzle and discuss possible ways on how productivity could be increased. 

Moderator: Sébastien LECHEVALIER (FRIJ-MFJ)
Organization: FRIJ-MFJ
Co-organization: CCI France Japon
Support: French Embassy in Japan

Registration: https://www.mfj.gr.jp/agenda/2023/04/21/2023-04-21_ls/

La prochaine séance du cycle de conférences “Productions et pratiques culturelles du Japon contemporain”, du groupe Populations japonaises (IFRAE/CRCAO) aura lieu le 28 avril 2023, de 10h à 12h (heure française) sur Zoom.

Discutante: Raphaëlle Yokota (Postdoctorante, Inalco/ATER, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3) 

(Lien d’enregistrement pour Zoom:  https://forms.gle/b2CT5fKfjd8A4xfn8)  

1. Iris Haukamp (Maître de conférences, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)  

Supermarket Woman (1996): Bubble shadows and burst premonitions in Itami Jūzō’s film 

Like his father, Itami Mansaku, Itami Jūzō in his work displays a true talent for sharp social observation and sometimes gentle and humorous, sometimes more direct and biting social criticism. During his relatively brief career as a filmmaker, the younger Itami took on several issues of concern of his contemporary surroundings. Reconsidered from the vanguard of today, even such a seemingly inconspicuous film as his 1996 comedy about a housewife being hired to turn around the fortunes of a failing supermarket can be seen as expressive of the zeitgeist of the mid-1990s. In this talk, I will discuss how Supermarket Woman simultaneously reflects shadows of the bubble economy era while also foreshadowing its burst and the impact of both developments on the daily lives of very ordinary people. 

2. Marie Pruvost-Delaspre (Maître de conférences, Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis) 

Reading Miyazaki Hayao’s films through an economic lens 

Miyazaki’s filmography as a filmmaker can be approached through a variety of entry points, one of them being an analysis of the diverse topics and patterns appearing in his own discourse. The notion of crisis, and more specifically the economic crisis, has been a recurring theme in his interviews since the late 2000s. This talk aims at exploring the questions at stake in Miyazaki’s use of the notion of economic crisis, by intertwining a discursive study of a corpus of interviews and a formal analysis of several key sequences in his films from Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001) to Kaze tachinu (2013). 

Cycle de conférences soutenu par Cultural Typhoon.

Nous accueillons le 17 avril 2023, de 18h à 20h, Mme Watanabe Mina, directrice du musée Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM) à l’Inalco, 65 rue des Grands Moulins (Auditorium), pour une conférence intitulée :

日本軍「慰安婦」を記憶するー日本の女性ミュージアムの取り組み
“Remembering “comfort women” – Initiatives of a women’s museum in Japan”

La conférence sera en japonais avec interprétation simultanée, et elle sera suivie d’une intervention de Christine Lévy, spécialiste du féminisme au Japon.

L’inscription est obligatoire sur le lien suivant :

http://www.inalco.fr/evenement/remembering-comfort-women-initiatives-women-museum-japan

N’hésitez pas à diffuser l’information autour de vous, la conférence pourra être suivie en visio (uniquement en japonais).

Dans le cadre de son 50e anniversaire, le Centre de recherches sur le Japon a le plaisir de vous inviter à la conférence :

“Beings of Sound: Ghosts on the Kabuki Stage”
Satoko Shimazaki
(Université de Californie à Los Angeles)

Discutante : Aleksandra Kobiljski; jeudi 6 avril 2023,16h30-18h; salle A302, EHESS – Campus Condorcet, 2 cours des humanités 93300 Aubervilliers

Contact : crj@ehess.fr; lien vers le site Internet.

“From magic lantern and the camera obscura to writing about phantasmagoria and ghosts, supernatural beings have been given extensive treatment in the area of visuality and visual representation. In the case of Japan, the thriving early modern print industry established visual forms for strange creatures that had not originally been subject to visual demarcation: perhaps most famously, the iconic image of the female ghost without feet came to characterize popular representations of ghosts in fiction. In an attempt to supplement the ocular orientation of existing research, this presentation will focus on dimensions of sound and voice that became integral to the representation of ghosts in nineteenth-century theater. Bringing the auditory and other senses, in addition to the visual and the semantic, to bear on our understanding of kabuki plays and rakugo or oral storytelling, I show how the synergies of different senses such as sound and smell generated affective registers and made representation of ghostly bodies credible on stage. This presentation also teases out the importance of the auditory to Japanese theatrical arts, in which many guilds of blind performers participated in the chanting of history and war tales or performed narratives of hell, suggesting a connection between the absence of sight and the ability to experience extraordinary encounters.”