The schedule has been announced, my flight is booked, and my lodging decided! My preparations for the 18th Annual Asian Studies Conference Japan at Sophia University in Tokyo is (more or less) complete!
The panel is called “Landscape as Object and Frame in Japanese Literary and Visual Culture” (Sunday, 6/22, 10:00am, Room 209). The contrast between the papers should make for a good discussion, and the themes will allow us travel to a variety of locales over the course of the panel. Daniel C. O’Neill of UC Berkeley will be our discussant.
1. Molly Vallor, Kobe University: Zen Dialogues in the Pure Land: Landscaping the Line of Musō Soseki at Saihōji
2. David Gundry, University of California at Davis: Lake Biwa as a Site of Transformation in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku
3. Christina Spiker, University of California at Irvine: An Itinerary of Hokkaido: Photo Postcards, Tourism, and Erasing the Indigenous Body
4. Thomas O’Leary, Saddleback College (panel organizer): Reclaiming the Post-War Landscape in Japan: Tradition, Memory, and Nostalgia
If you are interested in early registration for the conference, I believe the online deadline is June 10th. It will be great to get back to Tokyo if even for the weekend!