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ARCHEOLOGIA, STORIA DELL'ARTE E FILOSOFIE DELL'ASIA ORIENTALE
UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI NAPOLI "L'ORIENTALE"
Dati Generali
Periodo di attività
Syllabus
Obiettivi Formativi
By the end of the course, students will have acquired:
• in-depth knowledge of how Japan's national identity has been systematically constructed through the aesthetic and material manipulation of its landscapes and environment;
• the critical capacity to deconstruct essentialist categories such as "tradition," "nature," and "authenticity" by analysing how they are spatially produced and anchored to the soil;
• advanced skills in interpreting primary sources in translation, visual media, and heritage policies through the lens of cultural concepts like fūdo (climate/environment), satoyama, and gastropolitics;
• an independent capacity to link historical discourses of land and resources (such as rice farming) to contemporary cultural debates surrounding food security and ecological crises;
• refined academic communication skills through seminar discussions and oral presentations, demonstrating the proper use of specialised historical-geographical terminology.
Prerequisiti
Knowledge of the Japanese language may be useful for students who wish to work with materials in the original language, but it is not a prerequisite. Primary sources in Japanese will be provided in translation and contextualised during the course.
Students are expected to have the linguistic competence required to read and discuss academic texts in English. Any materials in Japanese or in other languages will be indicated and explained in relation to the topics addressed.
Metodi didattici
A significant part of the course will be devoted to the analysis of concrete examples: texts in translation, images, films, documentaries, pseudohistorical narratives, folkloric materials, ritual practices, museums, landscapes, sites of memory, environments marked by ecological crisis, food products, popular media and forms of cultural heritage.
Students will be encouraged to participate actively through the discussion of materials, seminar exchange and the presentation of a short individual project. Particular attention will be paid to the ability to connect the bibliography to specific case studies and to critically interpret the ways in which modern and contemporary Japan has produced, represented, and renegotiated its cultural identity.
Teaching activities will be directed towards the acquisition of advanced knowledge, the application of tools of historical and cultural analysis, the development of critical autonomy, the strengthening of communication skills and the construction of an independent and methodologically aware research approach.
Verifica Apprendimento
For students who attend classes, the final project may be presented during the course as a short seminar and subsequently discussed during the examination. Active participation in classes, discussion of the proposed materials and the ability to connect case studies to the bibliography may be taken into account in the overall assessment.
The oral examination will assess students’ knowledge of the main topics of the course: the construction of the nation-state, the invention of tradition, folklore and ethnography, pseudohistory, the relationship between nature and identity, colonial memory, minorities, disasters, environmental crises, cultural heritage, food culture and popular media.
Students will be expected to demonstrate their ability to place the phenomena analysed within their historical and cultural contexts, to use appropriate terminology, and to critically discuss the processes through which society, environment, and national identity have been produced, contested, and reimagined in modern and contemporary Japan.
For non-attending students, the oral examination will be based on the examination programme available on the lecturer’s personal webpage or on a programme agreed directly with the lecturer. In this case too, an individual project may be required, defined according to the student’s course of study, research interests and the number of credits required by the degree programme.
Assessment criteria will include: knowledge of the course content; ability to provide historical and cultural contextualisation; independent judgement; ability to analyse concrete case studies; clarity of presentation; appropriate use of specialist terminology; ability to connect the bibliography, materials, and theoretical questions; and the originality and coherence of the final project.
Testi
Hein, Laura, ed. The New Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 3: The Modern Japanese Nation and Empire, c. 1868 to the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Kingston, Jeff. Contemporary Japan: History, Politics, and Social Change since the 1980s. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019.
Tipton, Elise K. Modern Japan: A Social and Political History. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.
Oguma, Eiji. A Genealogy of “Japanese” Self-Images. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2002.
Brownlee, John S. Japanese Historians and the National Myths, 1600–1945: The Age of the Gods and Emperor Jinmu. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997.
Hansen, Wilburn. “Japanese Nationalism and Cultural Memory: Creating Memories of a Native Japanese Writing System.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 42, no. 1, 2016.
Klautau, Orion. “Gishi and Occulture in Modern Japan.” In Chienhui Chuang, Sangyun Han and Julian Strube, eds. Esotericism in East Asia: Cultural Interpretation and Politics. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026.
Foster, Michael Dylan. The Book of Yōkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.
Knight, John. Waiting for Wolves in Japan: An Anthropological Study of People-Wildlife Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Avenell, Simon. Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017.
Holm, Fynn. The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c. 1600–2019. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Huebner, S., N. Heé, I. J. Miller and W.M. Tsutsui, eds. Oceanic Japan: The Archipelago in Pacific and Global History. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024.
Miller, Ian Jared. The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Stolz, Robert. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870–1950. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Walker, Brett L. Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010.
Wilson, Roderick I. Turbulent Streams: An Environmental History of Japan’s Rivers, 1600–1930. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021.
Gill, Tom, Brigitte Steger and David H. Slater, eds. Japan Copes with Calamity: Ethnographies of the Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disasters of March 2011. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013.
Mazereeuw, Miho. Design Before Disaster: Japan’s Culture of Preparedness. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2025.
Bestor, Theodore C. Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Cwiertka, Katarzyna J. Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.
Linton, Charlotte. Dyeing with the Earth: Textiles, Tradition, and Sustainability in Contemporary Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025.
Rots, Aike P. and Mark Teeuwen, eds. Sacred Heritage in Japan. London and New York: Routledge, 2020.
Nelson, Christopher T. When the Bones Speak: The Living, the Dead, and the Sacrifice of Contemporary Okinawa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025.
Uchida, Jun. Provincializing Empire: Ōmi Merchants in the Japanese Transpacific Diaspora. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023.
Weiner, Michael, ed. Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.
Yi, Christina, Andre Haag and Catherine Ryu, eds. Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan’s East Asian Empire. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024.
Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Atkins, E. Taylor. A History of Popular Culture in Japan: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
Iwabuchi, Koichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Tsutsui, William M. Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Hudson, Mark. “A Deep Genealogy of Japanese Green Nationalism from the Long Nineteenth Century to the Present.” Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 2025.
Contenuti
The course examines modern and contemporary Japan from the perspective of cultural history, focusing on how society, environment and national identity have been imagined, narrated, ritualised and contested from the late nineteenth century to the present. Rather than approaching Japan as a stable cultural entity, the course analyses how ideas of “Japan”, “tradition”, “nature”, “people”, “territory” and “authenticity” have been produced through texts, images, landscapes, rituals, museums, folklore, media, heritage practices and political discourse.
Particular attention will be paid to the cultural construction of national identity: the invention of traditions, the use of the past in modern nation-building, the role of folklore and ethnography, the political meanings of landscape and rurality, the relationship between nature and identity, and the circulation of myths of origin, pseudohistorical narratives and alternative histories. The course will also examine how environmental crises, disasters, food culture, popular media, and regional heritage have contributed to the reshaping of ideas of Japaneseness in the modern and contemporary periods.
The main topics of the course will be the following:
- The Cultural Production of National Space.
- Mythic Geographies, Pseudohistory, and the Centrality of the Periphery.
- Anthropologies of the Soil: Folklore, Nostalgia, and the Heritageisation of the Satoyama.
- The Food of the Nation: Gastropolitics, Rice, and Environmental Food Security.
- Violated Territories: Pollution, Disaster, and Ecological Trauma.
- Post-Growth Geographies: Popular Culture and Future Spatial Imaginaries.
Lingua Insegnamento
English
Altre informazioni
The individual project must be agreed with the lecturer and may be adapted to students’ course of study, research interests and language skills.Students with knowledge of Japanese may, where appropriate, work on materials in the original language. Students without specific language skills may instead focus on texts in translation, images, films, documentaries, digital materials, environmental case studies, cultural heritage, media or historical-cultural issues.
Further information on materials, project presentation methods and the examination programme will be provided during the course.