Skip to the content | Change text size

JSC Conferences and Seminars 2002

Tuesday 12 November

Two presentations on Japanese gender issues

Changes in Representations of the Postwar Japanese Family (in Japanese)

Postwar Japanese society changed radically in response to rapid economic growth. In this process, the nature of the family and of gender relations also changed. This paper will analyze various representations of these changes, by introducing and analyzing a number of newspaper reports of abortion, child abandonment, child murder, which are attributed to "failure of maternal love". It will look at depictions of the relationships between father, mother and children, and will use quantitative and qualitative data to reveal the rhetoric and politics of these accounts. The paper concludes that:

  1. Although childraising was seen as the principal responsibility of the natural mother in the immediate postwar period, in the 1970s this assumption started to break down, signifying at the same time a breakdown in family relationships in general.
  2. The background to this change is the absence of the father (or of the father's responsibility) from the child's world.
  3. These representations of maternal love and mother-child relations, as well as the absence of the father, actually conform to the norms of the Japanese family system and to population and economic policies. This point will be argued in relation to discourse surrounding abortion.

The paper will also briefly touch on the close relationship between changes in representations of social change, with economic, political and religious elements in Japanese society.

Becoming adults, negotiating identities in Japan: Ten years from high school

This paper reports on work in progress involving a 13-year longitudinal study. It examines how working class girls experience entry into a larger social world after secondary school and become young adults in Japan, and how they undergo socialisation that is specific to their class, gender and ethnicity. Initially originating from a one-year ethnographic study of two high schools in working class suburbs, and later tracing a group of these students, the study also explores methodological questions.

Dr Kaori Okano is the author of School to Work Transition: An Ethnographic Study (Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters, 1993), and co-author of Education in Contemporary Japan: Inequality and Diversity (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Friday 1 November

PhD Kenkyu-kai - Making Deadlines: Aspects of Publishing

Publication is the lifeline of academics. Whilst many PhD students might think that publishing comes later, it may not
be a good strategy to postpone this crucial aspect of academic life. We should endeavour to become knowledgeable about publishing opportunities and the various related issues, such as format and length, criteria for book reviewing, and targeting major publications. Come along and discuss these issues.

Friday 25 October

Professor Shuya Kushida - Osaka Kyoiku University - JSC Visiting Researcher

On My-Case-Telling Series: A Device for Doing Co-Membership in Japanese Casual Conversation (in Japanese)

In this seminar, one practice in Japanese casual conversation will be examined, from the perspective of conversation analysis. In examining the practice of telling one's own experience after another has told his/hers ("my-case-telling series") an attempt will be made to answer two questions. First, how can we "share" someone's experience when the act of telling one's experience has a specific difficulty because the experience cannot be "owned" by the hearer in the way the speaker has "owned" it? Second, experience "sharing" can be facilitated through interaction between people who share some co-membership. How do such activities constitute doing co-membership in interaction? An analysis of several Japanese conversation materials will attempt to explicate the following four points. First, telling the same kind of experience as the other proves that one has understood the preceding case-telling. Second, the series of my-case-tellings constitutes doing co-membership even if the experiences told are not similar. Third, the series of my-case-tellings constitutes a special exploitation of standard topic generating sequence. Finally, when this exploitation is at its strongest, it can be used to propose renewed co-membership in interaction.

Friday 18 October

Internet in Asia Research Group

Friday 11 October

Professor Tokihiro Noda - Chuo University, Tokyo - JSC Visiting Researcher

Thorny Issues in Japanese Grammar: the particles WA and GA (in Japanese)

In this report, Professor Noda will examine the uses of the Japanese particles WA and GA in relation to various types of sentence. Japanese sentences have been classified in various ways by many scholars. The following classifications will be discussed:

according to the part of the speech predicate as proposed by Mio Isago as proposed by Sakuma Kanae nominal sentences as proposed by Mikami Akira according to the existence/non-existence of the Sentence Topic.The uses of WA and GA in complex sentences will also be discussed briefly.

Monash Asia Institute

JSC