[japan@ihj] The Crooked Timber of Cherry: Japanese Cherry Blossoms in Peace and War

  • Date: Wednesday, March 31, 7:00 pm
  • Speaker: Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  • Moderator: Ota Yoshinobu, Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate School
  • of Social and Cultural Studies, Kyushu University
  • Admission: Free
  • Language: English (no Japanese translation provided)

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney

Emiko Ohnuki-TierneyProfessor Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Ph.D., is William F. Vilas Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and occupied the Kluge Distinguished Chair of Modern Culture at the Library of Congress in 2009. Her work is focused on various symbols of the Japanese identity in historical and comparative perspective, such as rice, the monkey, and cherry blossoms, taken in a broader socio-political context. Her publications include The Monkey as Mirror (Princeton University Press); Rice as Self: Japanese Identities Through Time (Princeton University Press, 1993); Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections on Japanese Student Soldiers (University of Chicago Press, 2006). In this lecture, she will discuss the processes of the state manipulation of the meaning and aesthetics of cherry blossoms since the beginning of Meiji to the end of World War II.