EASC Lecture

EAST ASIAN SPECIAL LECTURE (Presented by the East Asian Studies Center)
PRESENTER: Richi Sakakibara (School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University)
TOPIC: “Rethinking the ‘Post-Defeat’ Discursive Space: Censorship during the Occupation Period”
DATE: Thursday, March 10
TIME: 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
LOCATION: Hoagy Carmichael Room, Morrison Hall 006

The occupation period was a time of ambivalence for writers of Japanese literature.  It was undoubtedly a time of freedom, as they were liberated from the wartime regulations on writing.  Yet, at the same time, it was a time of oppression, as they were forced to negotiate with the very power that granted that freedom, the General Headquarters/Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP).  This ambivalence manifests itself most clearly in their silence on censorship issues.   Re-examining this silence is particularly important as recent research examining materials in the University of Maryland’s Gordon W. Prange Collection, an archive of Japanese censored publications, has begun to reveal the actual operations of censorship.  My talk seeks to address this space of ambivalence while introducing recent scholarly developments on occupation censorship in literature.

Richi Sakakibara is an Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature in the School of International Liberal Studies at Waseda University.  She has published a number of articles on novels written during the occupation period, namely those by Dazai Osamu and Takeda Taijun.   Professor Sakakibara has recently contributed a chapter, “For the Creative Reading of the ‘Post-Defeat’ Era,” to the book Representations of War and Occupation (Volume II of Resources in Occupation Period Series, Iwanami, 2010). 

For more information about any upcoming event, please contact:

East Asian Studies Center
Indiana University
Memorial Hall West 207
1021 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47405-7005
(812) 855-3765easc@indiana.edu