Albert Welter, Head of the Department of East Asian Studies and a core faculty of the Center for Buddhist Studies, was invited as the representative of the US scholars in the Buddhist studies to attend the 2019 China-US-Canada Buddhist Forum, held at UN headquarters in New York on October 12, 2019.

    The theme of this year’s forum is Enlightenment in the Human Realm: The Spirit and Practice of Chan Buddhism. The religious and spiritual leaders from China, US, and Canada, together with the academic representatives, call for world peace and discuss efforts to establish a human community of a shared future for humankind.

    Dr. Welter presented the New Perspectives in the Study of Chan Buddhism at the 2019 China-US-Canada Buddhist Forum.

In his new book, Takashi Miura, Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, analyzes a category of Japanese divinities known as “yonaoshi gods” and their place in early modern Japan.

The expression yonaoshi is often translated as “world renewal,” and starting in the late 18^th century, deified humans and supernatural entities came to be worshipped as “gods of world renewal” in Japanese society. These yonaoshi gods were invested with religious authority to rectify a variety of economic injustices in local communities, including exorbitant taxes, high prices of goods, and wealth inequality.

Miura’s book, Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan, published by the University of Hawai'i Press, offers a unique perspective in the study of Japanese religion in that it does not rely on institutional categories such as Buddhism and Shinto but rather delivers a focused analysis on the reality of religious practices “on the ground.”

“This study does not prioritize the perspective of religious institutions and seeks to shed light on localized religious practices,” Miura says. “I look at different instances in early modern Japan in which people used the concept of world renewal in pursuit of economic justice.”

Miura presents a series of discrete case studies spanning from the 1780s to 1920s, including a samurai who sacrificed his life in order to kill a corrupt ruler, disgruntled peasants who demanded that the government repeal unfair taxation, and a giant catfish believed to live beneath the Japanese archipelago and to cause earthquakes to punish the hoarding rich.

“These are not transcendental gods high above, but those who would intervene in people’s lives. This complicates our notion of what the divine is,” Miura says. “These gods are right there with you, able to address immediate economic imperatives.”

Traditionally, historians have approached the subject of yonaoshi more in line with explanations about Japan’s transformation from a feudal society to a modern nation state in the mid-nineteenth century, connecting the concept of “world renewal” to Japan’s transition, usually in Marxist terms about class struggle.

“Scholars have co-opted the world renewal deities to fit their overarching narrative of Japan moving from a closed and feudal society to one industrializing and open to the Western world,” Miura says. “Actually, the documents don’t support that. I argue that perspective alone is not enough and this book takes the concept of world renewal on its own terms.”

Nathaniel Smith, assistant professor of East Asian Studies, has received competitive grant funding from the Japan Foundation to spend a year in Tokyo researching the transforming Kabukicho neighborhood.

Smith is one of only five U.S. scholars to receive the long-term research fellowship for 2019-2020.

He will be based at Waseda University, where he will research Tokyo’s most infamous postwar red-light district, Kabukicho in Shinjuku Ward. The project will focus on multiculturalism, marginality, and urban renewal in Tokyo as the Japanese capital prepares to host the 2020 Summer Olympics.

“What’s fascinating about this neighborhood is it’s at the crux of so many different constituencies,” Smith says. “It’s long been a place where immigrants can get a foothold, but also a place that was considered dangerous, even to the extent that it’s the setting for the Sega  Yakuza video game series. For decades after WWII, Kabukicho was symbolic of how the ‘other half’ lives and what it’s like to struggle in the under-belly of Tokyo. But now, at a moment of changing equilibrium between a future of gentrification and a past of marginality, there are efforts to reflect on Kabukicho’s diverse culture and unique characteristics.”

Kabukicho is a vibrant and diverse neighborhood home to bohemian hangouts, nightlife, new immigrant populations, an active sex industry, organized crime groups, and an array of political activism. Located in Shinjuku Ward, the most diverse district of Tokyo, Kabukicho is in many ways at the heart of Tokyo but it is maligned in others. In the early 2000s, the Tokyo government embarked on an aggressive and controversial “clean up” campaign, installing surveillance cameras and cracking down on a wide range of enterprises.

Smith’s prior research on far-right activism in Japan brought him to Kabukicho often, both as it became a political target as well as a place to relax and drink for activists. During his first visit, as an undergraduate exchange student to Sophia University in Tokyo in the late 1990s, foreign visitors were encouraged to avoid the area altogether. Now, two decades later, with Japan experiencing a boom in tourism, Kabukicho has become the site of large hotels, tourist attractions, and restaurants with menus in English, Chinese and Korean translations.

“Japan is at a turning point demographically but also rapidly opening up to tourist interest from around the world,” Smith says. “Kabukicho has always been seen as a wilder place within the city, but in fact Kabukicho and Shinjuku more generally can serve as an excellent model for other wards in the city and Japan itself for how to integrate different ethnic populations and ways of life into the fabric of society.”

An anthropologist by training, Smith’s research will center on mixed-method ethnographic data collection, including archival research, media analysis, interviews, and long-term participant-observation fieldwork with residents, business owners, policy makers, and visitors to the area. The work will culminate in his second book project, Kabukicho Renaissance: Multiculturalism, Marginality, and Urban Renewal in Tokyo.

“I’m very glad to be able to return to Tokyo at such an important juncture, generously supported by the Japan Foundation,” Smith says. “I look forward to engaging UA students about these issues and others when I return.”

UA alumna Michelle Yang, a writer focusing on mental health and wellness whose work has appeared in HuffPost, HelloGiggles and Mochi Magazine, has published a new article for InStyle about Asian stereotypes. She says the piece drew on what she learned in a course about Asian-American film and literature, taught by Dian Li, Professor of East Asian Studies. Read the article here.