Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Confronting Cultural Difference In The Establishment Of A Global Zen Community, Joshua A. Irizarry

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

As a commercial phenomenon, Zen is recognizable throughout the world as a lucrative brand name that communicates harmony, simplicity, and cosmopolitan elegance. In contrast, the Japanese Zen institution’s attempts to develop Zen into a successful global religion have proven more problematic. Despite initial successes by Japanese clergy in establishing centers of Zen practice throughout Europe and the Americas, the past fifty years have seen the dream of a global Zen community descend into a legacy of controversy, scandals, and schisms over conflicting claims of authority.

Looking specifically at the internationalization efforts of the Japanese Sōtō Zen sect, this paper will …

Maneuvering Modernity: Family Law As A Battle Field In Colonial Taiwan (1895-1945), Yun-Ru Chen

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Twenty five years after launching its own legal modernization in response to Western imperialism, Japan imposed a modern legal system upon its first colony, Taiwan. In accordance with the “respecting old custom” colonial policy, the Japanese created a system called Taiwanese customary law, a mixture of imperial Chinese laws, local customs and European legal concepts, and gradually implemented its newly adopted European-style Meiji Civil Code (1898). However, even since the late 1910s when the colonial policy changed into “full-flag assimilation,” family law remained an exception to the transplantation of Japanese laws. That did not, however, mean that family law was …

Design English Collaboration And Presentation: Developing International Designers At A Japanese University, Mark D. Sheehan, Jack Ryan, Yasuko Takayama, Ikuro Mine, Satoshi Kose

Learn X Design Conference Series

This study reports on a long-term project to improve the English presentation skills of students in the Faculty of Design at a Japanese university. The first two years of a collaborative effort to pair Industrial Design majors with advanced students in the Department of International Culture to collaborate on a product or product concept and present their work in English will be described. Recent measures to improve English education in Japan include the introduction of English study in elementary school, and adopting communicative-based learning in high schools. At the university level, content-based English education, or English for Specific Purposes (ESP), …

Dialectic Of/Or Agitation? Rethinking Argumentative Virtues In Proletarian Elocution, Satoru Aonuma

OSSA Conference Archive

This paper explores the possible rapprochement between Marxism and argumentation attempted in Proletarian Elocution, a 1930 Japanese publication. Against a Western Marxist commonplace that “[a]s far as rhetoric is concerned,… a Marxist must be in a certain sense a Platonist” (Eagleton, 1981), the paper discusses how this work seeks to takes advantage of the inquiry and advocacy dimensions of argumentation for the Marxian strategy of “agitprop” and rearticulate it as part of civic virtues.