Year: 2010

Nara, City of East Asia
Cosmopolitanism and Localism in Eighth-Century Japan

Symposium Program

Friday, April 30 – Pape Reception Hall, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

9:00-11:30 am: Panel 1 – Urbanisms

Michael Como, Columbia University, “Urbanization and Purification in Ancient Japan”

Ellen van Goethem, Hosei University, “Where is the Tiger?: Capital Site Selection in Classical Japan”

Inoue Kazuto, Independent Administration Institution, National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, “The Path to Heijo: International Relations in 7th- and 8th-Century East Asia and the Construction of a Capital” (in Japanese)

Discussant: Jeffrey Hanes, University of Oregon

1:00-3:30 pm: Panel 2 – Figurations

Akiko Walley, University of Oregon, “Lost or Just Misplaced?: Possibilities for Reconstructing the Original Location of the Horyuji Five-story Pagoda Clay Figurines”

Yui Suzuki, University of Maryland, “The Resplendent Hall of Healing: Shomu and Komyo’s Shin Yakushiji”

Cynthea Bogel, University of Washington, “The Long Eighth Century: When Eighth-Century Chinese Icons Become Ninth-Century Japanese Icons”

Discussant: Junghee Lee, Portland State University

3:45-4:30 pm: Conclusions for Day 1/Open Discussion

Discussant: William Wayne Farris, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

5:00-6:30 pm: Public Lecture

“Why So Blue?: Mandala Transmission and the Transformation of Eighth-Century Representational Modes”
Cynthea Bogel, University of Washington

Discussant: Mark Unno, University of Oregon

6:30-7:30 pm: Public Reception – Lobby, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

Greetings from Consul-General of Japan in Portland, Okabe Takamichi, and UO President Richard Lariviere

Saturday, May 1 – Pape Reception Hall, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

9:00-11:30 am: Panel 3 – Regionalisms

Mori Kimiyuki, Toyo University, “Diplomatic Missions to Tang and the Introduction of Tang Culture” (in Japanese)

Tanaka Fumio, Kanto Gakuin University, “Center and Periphery in the International Affairs of Ancient Japan: The Ritsuryo State’s Cosmopolitanism, Marginality, and Plurality” (in Japanese)

Joan Piggott, University of Southern California, “Tracing the Wa-Kan Dialectic at Nara”

Discussant: Andrew Goble, University of Oregon

12:30-3:00 pm: Panel 4 – Articulations

Wesley Jacobsen, Harvard University, “What the Nara Period Documents Tell Us about the Prehistory and History of Japanese: The View from the Linguistic Sciences”

Jason Webb, University of Oregon, “Odes to an Exile: Heijo Remembrances of Miwa no Takechimaro”

Mack Horton, University of California, Berkeley, “Princess Nukata and the Birth of Man’yo Poetry”

Discussant: Glynne Walley, University of Oregon

3:15-4:00 pm: Concluding Remarks/Open Discussion

Discussants: Akiko Walley and Jason Webb

This event is free and open to the public; no registration is required.

For more info, please call (541) 346-1521.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, the Oregon Humanities Center, and the Departments of Art History and East Asian Languages and Literatures.   It is also made possible by generous contributions from the Maude I. Kerns Endowment and the Yoko McClain Fund, and a grant from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies.

Conference Organizers: Akiko Walley and Jason Webb

Image credit:
Ichiyûsai (Utagawa) Kuniyoshi (1797-1861)
Japanese

Hyakunin isshu no uchi: Abe no Nakamaro (From the Collection of Single Poems by a Hundred Poets: Abe no Nakamaro) [detail], c. 1844-1854
Woodblock print
15 x 10-1/8 inches
Murray Warner Collection of Oriental Art
Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon
MWJ51:K79

Modern Girls on the Go:
Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan

January 7-9, 2010
University of Oregon

These events are free and open to the public.
For more info, please call 346-1521.

This international conference, involving scholars from the fields of history, anthropology, visual studies, and literature, will investigate the lived experiences and cultural depictions of women who worked in jobs related to ideas of mobility in twentieth and twenty-first century Japan, including flight attendants, tour bus guides, beauty queens, professional athletes, educators, and soldiers. These women, often conspicuous in their uniforms, have influenced gender norms, patterns of daily life, and Japan’s international image. They have been an integral and highly visual part of the national workforce but have been overlooked by scholars. They performed jobs that were considered fashionable in their first inception and therefore represented ideas of modernity at different historical moments. These laborers show the important relationship between gender, modernity, and technology.

**PLEASE NOTE THE RECENT SCHEDULES CHANGES TO CHRIS HOOD AND JAN BARDSLEY’S PRESENTATIONS.

Thursday, January 7, 2010
2:30 pm – Knight Library Browsing Room
Keynote Presentation: “Kitty on the Go: Japanese Cute as Transborder Fetish”
Christine Yano, University of Hawaii

7:00 pm -Lillis Hall, Room 282
Public Screening: “Even So, I Just Didn’t Do It” (Sore demo, boku wa yattenai, Suo Masayuki, dir., 2006).

Friday, January 8, 2010
9:30 am – 5:00 pm
Lecture Hall, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

9:30-9:45 am – Opening Remarks

9:45 am – 11:00 am
Panel 1: Department Stores as Sites of Mobility

“Moving Up and Out: The ‘Shop Girl’ in Interwar Japan”
Elise K. Tipton, University of Sydney

“Elevator Girls Moving In and Out of the Box”
Laura Miller, Loyola University Chicago

11:00 am – 11:15 am – Coffee break

11:15 am – 12:30 pm
Panel 2: Beauty Work and Japan’s Global Appearance

“Shiseidô and the Mobile Modern Girl”
Vera Mackie, University of Melbourne (presented in absentia)

“Fast Women: The Shinkansen and Changing Japanese Gender Roles”
Christopher Hood, University of Cardiff (presented in absentia) – new time

12:30 pm – 2:30 pm – Lunch break

2:30 pm – 4:00 pm
Panel 3: Models and Modes of Transportation

“’Flying Geisha’: Japanese Stewardesses as Postwar Modern Girls”
Christine Yano, University of Hawaii

“Bus Guides Tour National Landscapes, Pop Culture, and Youth Fantasies”
Alisa Freedman, University of Oregon

4:00 pm – 4:15 pm – Coffee break

4:15 pm – 5:00 pm – Day’s Closing Remarks and Discussion
Jeff Hanes, University of Oregon

Saturday, January 9, 2010
10:00 am – 4:00 pm
Alumni Lounge, Gerlinger Hall

10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Panel 4: Overturning Gender and Class

“Girl Power: Female Soldiers in the Self-Defense Forces”
Sabine Frühstück, University of California, Santa Barbara

“The Ladies League and Corporate Futures: Envisioning an ‘Epoch Change’ Through Female Soccer Success”
Elise Edwards, Butler University

“Beauty Queens on the Go: Miss Japan and the Somatic Uniform”
Jan Bardsley, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – – new day and time

12:00 pm – 1:30 pm – Lunch break

1:30 pm – 3:00 pm
Panel 5: Japanese Educators and Students in the United States

“Traveling to Learn: Tsuda University Students in the United States, 1900-1941”
Sally A. Hastings, Purdue University

“A Personal Journey Across the Pacific”
Yoko McClain, University of Oregon

3:00 pm – 3:15 pm – Coffee break

3:15 pm – 4:00 pm – Day’s Closing Remarks and Discussion
Carol Stabile, University of Oregon

Please click here to view the paper abstracts.

These events are co-sponsored by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, Oregon Humanities Center, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, the Asian Studies Program, the Department of History, the Center for the Study of Women and Society, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. It was made possible by generous contributions from the Yoko McClain Fund, the CAS Deans Discretionary Fund, the Jeremiah Speaker Fund and a grant from the Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asia Council. It is free and open to the public.

Info on Keynote Event

Hello Kitty, that ubiquitous mouthless icon of Japanese Cute, provides a good case study of the methodological and interpretive issues of globalization. The semantic slate of Hello Kitty is both blank and filled with national-cultural meaning. It is this particular kind of straddling of non-meaning and meaning that allows her interpretation as what I call a “transborder fetish.” Here, I borrow the notion of border fetishism from the field of religious studies to reference the hyper-spectacle both within and of the border. However, I push the notion of border fetish further to examine ways in which this product transcends category specificity through the multiple meanings bestowed by consumers globally. With the intensity of the global gaze pushed to new arenas of high-ticket consumption, Hello Kitty becomes the site of ubiquity that crosses borders: cheap and luxurious, innocent and sexy, child and adult, Japan and mukokuseki (no nationality). It is this very transborder quality of the product that makes Hello Kitty not only a marketer’s dream, but also an anthropologist’s challenge.

Okanoue Toshiko’s Collages, Gilkey Center, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

In conjunction with the conference “Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility and Labor in Japan,” the JSMA is exhibiting a couple of Toshiko Okanoue’s original collages and a selection of photo-lithographs from The Miracle of Silence, a 2007 Nazraeli Press publication. Toshiko Okanoue’s youth was seized by war and a consequence of destruction was reconstruction during the 1950s that included cultural centers and institutions and new museums and galleries. Innovative musicians, writers, and visual artists paved the way for a new era of avant-garde artists. After graduating from the Ogawa Fashion Institute in 1949, Okanoue began studying fashion illustration at Bunka Gakuin College. Lacking confidence in her drawing skills, she started cutting and pasting images from American magazines, such as Vogue and Life. In 1953 these early collages were exhibited at Takemiya Gallery, Tokyo. Art critic Shuzo Takiguchi’s gallery introduction to her work notes, “Miss Okanoue is not a painter; she is a young lady. Working by herself she cuts up illustrated magazines to make collages that depict her very dreams. The resulting album is a contemporary version of Alice in Wonderland.” Please come and see for yourself.

Paper Abstracts

Jan Bardsley, “Beauty Queens on the Go: Miss Japan and the Somatic Uniform”
For many in 1950s Japan, the sight of young women confidently striding the runways of American-style beauty contests signaled the arrival of democratic, postwar modernity. When Itô Kinuko placed third in the Miss Universe pageant in 1953 and Kojima Akiko captured the title in 1959, headlines hailed their victories as evidence of Japanese women’s liberation. Miss Japan’s iconic beauty queen uniform—swimsuit, heels, sash, and tiara—symbolized a “modern girl on the go” in more ways than one. The international beauty contest offered a unique way, albeit a highly competitive one, for pretty young women, even those without much education or family status, to enjoy instant fame in Japan and to fly to California to compete in the Miss Universe contest. Once back home, Miss Japan could become a well-paid model with a chance for a glamorous career in entertainment.

This presentation focuses on Miss Japan’s swimsuit-clad, shapely body as, in effect, the somatic uniform that guaranteed her transnational mobility. Discussing how critics and fans alike interpreted Miss Japan’s physique as a literal embodiment of democracy and American intervention, I take up the attendant popularity of technologies for improving the body—diet regimes, exercise programs, and cosmetic surgery. I show how such attention to the idea of making a female Japanese body competitive in the international beauty pageant ultimately led to discussions of race and gender, inciting criticism that such contests were remaking Japanese women into Anglo-like models who were “too good” for Japanese men.

Elise Edwards, “The Ladies League and Corporate Futures: Envisioning an ‘Epoch Change’ Through Female Soccer Success”
Women’s soccer fits [our company’s] bright, tough, and healthy image perfectly. Men’s soccer still has a long way to go, but women’s soccer has a real future.” With these words to reporters, the CEO of one of Japan’s largest securities firms endorsed his company’s new team in Japan’s burgeoning “Ladies’ League” (L-League) and echoed several other corporate heads who chose to support new women’s teams in the League in the early 1990s. At that time, at the tail end of Japan’s heady “bubble economy,” the country experienced a “soccer boom,” with the number of women and men’s teams from the amateur to the professional ranks growing at unprecedented rates. Soccer was on the rise at the same time that a serious economic decline and what was seen as related societal decay gripped the public consciousness. This rather odd and seemingly unimportant coincidence resulted in soccer quickly becoming a central site for public debates about Japan’s postwar economic and social successes, and reasons for its current decline. Soccer and its star players became centerpieces in discussions of changing business practices, corporate responsibility, and company-worker relations in a time of considerable economic uncertainty. For many, however, it was women’s soccer in particular that signified change—what many characterized as an “epoch change”—and a necessarily new orientation to the world. L-League teams were deployed by corporations in public relations campaigns and internal company promotions as signifiers of change in the forms of new technologies, progressive management policies, and a forward-looking, “twenty-first century” perspective. An examination of corporate investments in women’s soccer —financial and otherwise— and Japanese women’s experiences on corporate teams sheds light on linkages constructed between female athleticism, technology, creativity, innovation, transnational mobility, and rising neoliberalism in Japan in the waning years of the twentieth century.

Alisa Freedman, “Bus Guides Tour National Landscapes, Pop Culture, and Youth Fantasies”
In Japan, it is taken for granted that every tour or charter bus is staffed with a uniformed female worker, who assists the male driver, explains sites en route, and leads tours from designated stops. Given the Japanese-English title “bus guide” (basu gaido), the job derived from the more arduous occupation of bus conductor, known by the diminutive “bus girl” (basu gâru) by the postwar period. The jobs of bus girl and bus guide influenced each other in practice and intersected in literature and popular culture.

Being a bus guide was most desirable during the High-Growth Era of the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, a time when bus girls reached their greatest numbers and taking vacations became a middle-class luxury. As vehicles associated with travel represented Japan’s advance in the jet age, the women who worked on them symbolized national development and pride. Bus guides appeared as model service workers in narratives advancing the idea that hard work will always be rewarded, a notion propelling postwar Japanese society. Yet they were endued with a potentially dangerous sensuality that could be tamed by becoming good wives and wise mothers, roles for women reinforced at the time. Like the more prestigious flight attendants and more ubiquitous bus conductors, bus guides were conceptualized as both ideal employees and erotic icons, thus exposing contradictions inherent in women’s roles in the workforce.

I survey an array of sources, including films adopted from middlebrow fiction serialized in newspapers, popular songs, memorabilia, and toys, to present a composite portrait of bus guides, disclose disparities between their images and lived realities, and show how the job has impacted upon views of Japanese women. As a case study, I analyze a pair of films by director Naruse Mikio made when bus guides were seen as especially “modern” and modes of looking at the homeland were mobilized to promote nationalism – the 1941 Hideko the Bus Conductress (Hideko no shashô-san) based on a novella by Ibuse Masuji and 1952 Lightning (Inazuma) adapted from a Hayashi Fumiko novel. These films foreshadow later depictions of workingwomen. Representations of transport workers demonstrate how women’s mobility shaped notions of service labor and of home and comment on different values associated with Tokyo and the rest of the nation.

Sabine Frühstück, “Girl Power: Female Soldiers in the Self-Defense Forces”
Prominent historian Kano Mikiyo recently warned women against joining the Self-Defense Forces, remarking that the military would militarize women before they could possibly feminize the military. In a 2002 project, feminist artist Shimada Yoshiko, by contrast, urged young women to join the military in order to change the masculine culture of the Self-Defense Forces from within. Popular weekly and monthly magazines suggest that under their uniforms female service members are just like other young women – hip, pretty, and marriageable. At the same time, the personnel and public relations apparatuses of the Self-Defense Forces employ representations of female service members to bridge the anxieties about the gendered order of all things military and to connect the military with wider society and mass culture.

This chapter examines the ways by which female service members deal with these contradictions and how they position themselves vis-à-vis the military establishment and civilian society. Marginal as service members within the ranks but important to the formation of the Self-Defense Forces’ public image, I argue that many of these women emerge as “feminist militarists.”

Sally A. Hastings, “Traveling to Learn: Tsuda University Students in the United States, 1900-1941”
This chapter analyzes the transnational mobility of female students and educators in early twentieth century Japan. I first examine Tokyo women’s schools as sites of cross-cultural communication and then investigate experiences of Japanese exchange students at American universities whose education was financed by scholarships established by Tsuda Umeko, who had attended Bryn Mawr College in the nineteenth century. Although largely excluded from the network of publicly-funded universities, women were able to attend private institutions in Japan, some of them mission-sponsored. Women came from the United States and Canada to be teachers. In particular, the school that Tsuda founded in Tokyo in 1901 served not only as an institution for educating Japanese women in English but also as a space in which students encountered American women and could observe their ways of life. The school was also a point from which Japanese women could embark on studies in distant destinations. Thanks to a strong network of international friendships, a select number of graduates traveled to the United States to study at women’s colleges, including Wellesley and Bryn Mawr. Many of these women became educators and writers, and continued to promote international exchange. The facility in English that Tsuda students acquired allowed them to serve as interpreters and translators and to produce what Mary Louise Pratt has termed “autoethnographies,” constructions of subordinate Japan for consumption in the cultural metropole.

I analyze memoirs of such Tsuda graduates as Sumie Seo Mishima, Hoshino Ai, and Kamiya Mieko in order to explore how their education in Japan prepared them for study abroad and enabled their admission to American institutions. The ways their American education was financed affected their understanding of both international relations and personal relationships. Several of these students stated that they decided to study in the United States in order to return to Japan more self-reliant and independent of their families. While at American universities, these women had to adjust to new kinds of dress, behavior, and diet. For example, they were asked to look “Japanese” at university ceremonies and faced challenges in physical education classes. These women can be viewed as prototypes for later workingwomen and have had a lasting effect on the ways women participated and were viewed as part of Japan’s international relations.

Christopher Hood, “Fast Women: The Shinkansen and Changing Japanese Gender Roles”
The shinkansen (‘bullet train’) has become one of the most potent symbols of Japan’s modernization. The image of it passing in front of Mount Fuji can be found in most travel books and websites relating to the country. For most Japanese, the shinkansen has become a part of normal everyday life, after its triumphant opening in 1964, whether they use it themselves or not. This slide into normality means that it has become a wonderful tool by which to study different aspects of Japanese society. This paper will specifically look at the position of women in Japanese society and what can be learnt by through studying their varying roles on the shinkansen over past four decades.

The paper will begin by providing a brief history of the shinkansen. It will then move on to discuss some of the issues relating to studying symbolism. The main focus of the paper will be on the interaction between women and the shinkansen. This will include discussion of issues as varied as the changing nature of the work done by women on the shinkansen. In particular it considers the work of the pursers, as discussed in a book and popular TV drama Shinkansen Girl, and the impact of having female shinkansen drivers employed in recent years.

Vera Mackie, “Shiseidô and the Mobile Modern Girl”
The modern girl (modan gâru or moga) is a ubiquitous figure in the visual culture of 1920s and 1930s Japan, appearing in cartoons, photography, painting, woodblock prints, graphic design and cinema. She was identified with new urban spaces, including pavements, buses, and cafés, and with the importation of American consumer culture. She was envisioned wearing make-up and daring Western fashions, while smoking cigarettes and eating such new luxury foods as caramels and chocolates. The appearance of the modern girl in popular discourse was made possible by developments in print technologies and photography for mass producing and circulating images. Visuality was an essential component in the construction of the modern girl as an archetypal figure of Interwar urban modernity. It was also a key factor in linking her to Japanese colonialism in other parts of Asia.

In 1935, Shiseidô cosmetics, a company that represented the allure of the Tokyo modern, produced a series of advertisement postcards showing women dressed in the styles characteristic of modern girls, applying make-up and posed in situations of travel. They stand near automobiles, trains, airplanes, or cruise ships. These postcards reference the mobility of the modern girl. Importantly, the Shiseidô postcards address women as subjects of the metropolis who might enjoy the experience of traveling to Japan’s peripheries. Shiseidô thus positioned the Japanese modern girl against colonial subjects. I argue that Shiseidô mobilized the modern girl, the representations of whom had produced a taxonomy of women according to gender, class, ethnicity and racialized positioning, to create a taxonomy of consumers. Representations of the Japanese modern girl in motion provide another way to understand the mobility of capital, products, individuals, and urban images under the conditions of colonial modernity in early twentieth century East Asia.

Yoko McClain, “A Personal Journey Across the Pacific”
True feudalism was long gone while I was growing up in Japan in the 1920s and 30s, but society was still far from democratic. Our family always had three or four maids, and I thought that a mother did not do any housework.

When the War came, however, those maids went off one by one to work in the factories, leaving my mother to learn housework in her early 40s. Feeling sorry for her, I learned how to do domestic chores right alongside her. Far from resenting this, I consider myself lucky to have avoided becoming a domestically inept woman like my mother and her middle-class contemporaries.

The War would change the course of my life in a more profound way, where again opportunity came out of hardship. English was my favorite subject in high school, so I entered Tsuda College in April 1942, a few months after Pearl Harbor. (At the time, many narrow-minded Japanese thought it was of no use to study the enemy’s language.)

In the ensuing two years, the state of affairs in Japan then deteriorated so much that instead of studying, we were put to work in a makeshift factory in the Tsuda gym, running into shelters whenever we heard the ominous sirens of air raids.

When the war ended in August 1945, the school charitably gave us graduation certificates even though we had studied only two years instead of four. And because relatively few Japanese spoke English, we could easily find jobs with only limited English skills, and I began working in an office of the United States military.

A friend of mine then suggested that we take the test for a GARIOA (Government Aid and Relief in Occupied Areas) scholarship, the predecessor of the Fulbright. I expected to fail, but when I somehow passed I was granted a one-year scholarship to the University of Oregon.

Now, after one serendipitous turn after another, I have been here for 57 years, first as a student and then as a teacher. While I still have my roots in semi-feudal Tokyo, I am now proud to consider myself a bona fide American, fully enjoying the remaining years of my life as a writer and lecturer, as well as a traveler whenever chances arise.

Laura Miller, “Elevator Girls Moving In and Out of the Box”
When the Ueno branch of the Matsuzakaya department store re-opened in 1929, it had many new features: heating and air conditioning, a hair salon, its own post office, and eight elevators operated by women. These young female employees were referred to with various titles, including shôkôki gâru (up-down controller girl), hakojô (box girl), and erebêtâ no onna untenshu (woman elevator driver). The name that stuck, however, was erebêtâ gâru (elevator girl) and its abbreviation, erega. The first elevator girls claimed that the hardest part of their job was pulling the handles to make the elevator stop.

The repetitive, standardized work done by uniform-wearing elevator girls occurs in a circumscribed space. Her physical mobility is of a special type: up and down through the elevator shaft for hours and hours throughout the day. It is partly the regularity and constraint of her job, however, that makes her such an appealing object of the popular imagination. Her professional role provokes questions about what she is really like behind the scripted veneer, an almost mannequin-like façade viewed as repressive in the Elevator Girl series by photographer Yanagi Miwa.

This chapter will survey the way popular culture plays with the contrast between the elevator girl’s unvarying work world and her private life or “true self.” News reports in the 1930s latched onto the suicide of an elevator girl involved with a married man as an especially notable scandal. In the 1992 television drama series Tokyo Elevator Girls, the cute and perky workers have tawdry, complex lives behind the scenes. An episode from the anime series Crayon Shin-chan features a crisp and professional elevator girl who turns into a blubbering crybaby once trapped in a broken elevator. The demure elevator girl who is really a wild sex maniac once out of her uniform is a favorite theme in adult videos. The persona of the elevator girl allows us to track the way women in this occupation have been seen not only as an exemplary type of female service worker, but also as a fertile example of the disparity between the crafted public image of a trained employee and her private life. When young women from diverse regional and class backgrounds move into the elevator girl slot, they are trained in uniform ways of speaking and performing the role, highlighting awareness of the gap between their “authentic” selves and the new occupational expectations.

Elise K. Tipton, “Moving Up and Out: The ‘Shop Girl’ in Interwar Japan”
The increasing number of middle-class women in the paid workforce, known as “professional working women,” was a striking new social phenomenon in Japan during the decades after the First World War. Among the many new occupations available for educated middle-class women, the department store sales clerk or “shop girl” (shoppu gâru) proved to be most attractive to girls’ higher school graduates. This chapter will begin by examining the reasons for the popularity of department store employment, which will suggest the social significance of young middle-class women moving from country to city (especially “up” to the capital Tokyo) and out of the home into the workplace. Expectations about department store work also involved social and personal mobility as the women prepared to move to the next stage in their lives – marriage. The chapter will go on to explore how many of these employees found the reality of department store work to be much less glamorous than they had envisioned it would be.

Included in this chapter will be commentaries by Japanese journalists, intellectuals, and government officials about the department store shop girl and the historical changes that this figure represented. Commentators expressed fascination with the beauty and other allures of the shop girl, while voicing concerns about the deleterious effects of the work on women’s moral and physical health. Such contradictions reveal complex considerations of class as well as gender toward social changes of the Interwar decades.

Christine Yano, “‘Flying Geisha’: Japanese Stewardesses as Postwar Modern Girls”
In 1964, the Japanese government officially lifted international travel restrictions imposed since the American Occupation, thereby opening the floodgates of international travel for Japanese citizens. By May 1967, Life magazine proclaimed, “Newest Stewardess Fad: A Japanese in Every Jet,” featuring Japanese stewardesses on eleven international carriers. This paper examines the “Japanese-in-every-jet” phenomenon through the experiences of Japanese stewardesses who flew for the premier carrier – Pan American World Airways. Flying for Pan Am meant adopting the prestigious glamour of the American airline. But it also meant working in a service industry and traveling far from home. These were unwelcome aspects for many of the upper-middle-class families from which the women came. Furthermore, Pan Am’s executive, Najeeb Halaby (CEO from 1969-1972), commented that the ideal for stewardesses lay in the figure of the geisha (or his interpretation of it), placing the model of service directly on Japanese women’s shoulders.

In this chapter, I juxtapose Halaby’s “flying geisha” model to the experiences of Pan Am’s Japanese stewardesses, focusing on issues of gender, nation, race, and class. I contend that the stewardess job – based in mobility, modernity, and cutting-edge technology – often relied on the women’s performance of old-fashioned femininity, particularly racialized within the Japanese context. In the end, the job took elite Japanese women out of the national home and into the corporate sphere of Pan Am’s global cabin and foreign ports of call.

Christine Yano, “Kitty on the Go: Japanese Cute as Transborder Fetish”
Hello Kitty, that ubiquitous mouthless icon of Japanese Cute, provides a good case study of the methodological and interpretive issues of globalization. The semantic slate of Hello Kitty is both blank and filled with national-cultural meaning. It is this particular kind of straddling of non-meaning and meaning that allows her interpretation as what I call a “transborder fetish.” Here, I borrow the notion of border fetishism from the field of religious studies to reference the hyper-spectacle both within and of the border. However, I push the notion of border fetish further to examine ways in which this product transcends category specificity through the multiple meanings bestowed by consumers globally. With the intensity of the global gaze pushed to new arenas of high-ticket consumption, Hello Kitty becomes the site of ubiquity that crosses borders: cheap and luxurious, innocent and sexy, child and adult, Japan and mukokuseki (no nationality). It is this very transborder quality of the product that makes Hello Kitty not only a marketer’s dream, but also an anthropologist’s challenge.

Workshop

Social Complexity
in the Centers and Frontiers in Northern China

Recent discoveries from ruins along the Yellow River have reshaped our understanding of the Early Chinese civilizations, commonly known as the Xia, Shang, and Zhou Dynasties over 2000 years before the Common Era. Three visiting scholars from China have been actively involved with field projects from the birthplace of the Han people to the Eurasian Steppes of western China. This workshop will discuss issues still relevant to modern China, including the development of social complexity and inequality, political economy, and ethnic identities in frontiers through a prism of dusty relics.

Friday, February 20, 2009
Education Room, Museum of Natural and Cultural History

9:00 – 9:20 am
Workshop Introduction
Gyoung-Ah Lee (Anthropology, University of Oregon)

9:30 – 10:10 am
“Changes of settlement patterns and development of social complexity in the eastern Yuncheng Basin, north-central China”
Dr. Xingming DAI (National Museum of China)

10:20 – 11:00 am
“Understanding the pre-dynastic capital, Zhouyuan: new archaeological
discoveries and research”
Dr. Zhouyong SUN (Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology)

11:10 – 11: 50 am
“The Development of the early pasturage-nomadic societies and its historical
significance in the Eastern regions of Eurasian Steppes and the beyond”
Dr. Wu GUO (Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)

1:00 – 1:40 pm
“Political economy of agriculture in the Central Plains at the dawn
of civilizations”
Rory Walsh and Gyoung-Ah Lee (Anthropology, University of Oregon)

1:50 – 3:00 pm
Commentary and Panel Discussion
Dr. Melvin AIKENS (Anthropology, Museum of Natural and Cultural History, University of Oregon) and Dr. Ina ASIM (History, Asian Studies Program, University of Oregon)

3:10 – 3:50 pm
Guided Museum tour of the permanent exhibition and a special exhibition, “Earth” at the Musuem of Natural and Cultural History

This event is free and open to the public and is cosponsored by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, the Museum of Natural and Cultural History, the Department of Anthropology, the Asian Studies Program, and the Office of International Affairs. For more info, please visit http://caps.uoregon.edu or call 346-1521.

Presentation Abstracts:

Changes of Settlement Patterns and Development of Social Complexity in the Eastern
Yuncheng Basin, North-central China
Xiangming Dai

The Yuncheng Basin, which is located at north-central China, just at the northern bank of the Yellow River, occupies an important position in exploring the origins of early states and civilizations of ancient China. We carried out the full-coverage surveys from 2003 to 2006 in the eastern Yuncheng Basin, and reconstructed the process of the changes of settlement patterns from the Neolithic to the early Bronze Age (ca. 5000-1300 B.C.). This process can clearly reflect the changes of social organizations and the development of social complexity through time. There were several settlement clusters for each of seven cultural periods. During the Early Yangshao period (ca.5000-4100), some relatively simple and independent local groups existed in the villages of these clusters, and there was no settlement hierarchy for this time. The supra-local communities firstly formed in the settlement clusters during the Middle Yangshao period (ca. 4100-3500 B.C.). At this time some large central places had appeared in the clusters, and there were two or three levels of settlement hierarchy for each cluster, most of them were well integrated. This situation kept on going until the Late Yangshao (ca. 3500-2900) and Miaodigou II period (ca. 2900-2400) with some fluctuations of settlement patterns. During the Longshan period (ca. 2400-1900 B.C.), it is the first time that a super-large settlement (Zhoujiazhuang, measuring nearly 500 ha.) appeared at the north of the Basin, which might have integrated all settlement clusters into a single regional polity. From the Erlitou to Erligang period (ca. 1900-1300 B.C.), however, the number of settlements and the scale of central places in the Basin tended to decline, and the social organizations in this region may have been incorporated into the two successive early states—-Xia and Shang dynasties which sprang up in the Central Plains. In general, the eastern Yuncheng Basin may have witnessed a long-term social evolutionary process, from simple and egalitarian societies to hierarchical complex societies. It should have represented a typical trajectory of social development in central China. From 2007 to 2008, we conducted the excavations at Zhoujiazhuang, the largest Longshan site. So far we have found a tremendous fortification (measuring over 200 ha.) with nearly encircled trench at this site. We are concerning with the potential value of this site in investigating the high-level pattern of complex societies.

Exploring the Capital site Zhouyuan in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046-771BC), China
New Discoveries and Perspectives
Zhouyong Sun

The Zhou people established the third dynasty in Chinese history—the Western Zhou (1046-771BC), following the Xia Dynasty (2070-1600 BC) and the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046BC). As one of the pre-dynastic capital sites of the Zhou, Zhouyuan shows the evolution of the Zhou from a minor state, subordinate to the Shang, to a powerful dynasty. Although various locations for Zhouyuan were proposed in later historical texts, no agreement had been reached until the mid-twentieth century when archaeological surveys were initiated. From the 1950s to 1976, many Western Zhou tombs, bronze hoards and residential remains were excavated. These discoveries eventually resulted in the archaeological identification of Zhouyuan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Archaeological work on Zhouyuan was suspended in the early 1980s. From 1999 to 2004, the Archaeological Team has excavated the architectural foundations at Yuntang and Qizheng, the eastern Qijia cemetery, Qijia jue-earring workshop, Licun, Hejia, and Zhuangbai bronze foundry. These discoveries during the fifty years make archaeologists believe that the previously identified area is the legendary capital site Zhouyuan of the Zhou people before the Great Conquest of the Shang (1046BC). A recent discovery at the Zhougongmiao site, 30 km west of Zhouyuan, has resulted in reconsideration of the location of capital Zhouyuan (previously identified at the Zhouyuan site). Some scholars have proposed that the real core district of Zhouyuan might be located at Zhougongmiao or in its immediate vicinity, an argument supported by the presence of four-ramp tombs, the bronze foundry, the palatial complex, and the unique utilisation of flooring bricks, especially as a majority of these remains date to the period before the establishment of the Western Zhou Dynasty. However, three years of intensive excavation and investigation have not yet provided sufficient evidence to confidently contradict the previous identification. In this talk, firstly I will present a full-covered review of archaeological discoveries in the Zhouyuan area (including in the Zhouyuan and Zhougongmiao sites) during the past fifty years, and then particularly focused on the discoveries in recent five years. The conclusion will focus on the long-lasting dispute on the nature of the Zhouyuan and the implications of the Zhouyuan urban centre in the process of urbanism in Early China, from an archaeological point view.

Early Pastoral-Nomadic Societies in the Eastern Regions of Eurasian Steppes and the
interactions with the Early China
Guo, Wu

The point of departure of this lecture is the Sanhaizi rubble mound in Qinhe county in Xinjiang (China), the largest Khereksur in the Eurasian steppes. It has given its name to the Sanhaizi culture, of which it may have been the most important ritual center. The Shanhaizi culture inherited some of its cultural traits from the Andronovo period. It grew through multiple and various cultural interactions with the archaeological cultures distributed the eastern Eurasian steppes and with the civilizations of Shang and Zhou dynasties. Its favorable geopolitical conditions – abundant natural resources, the coexistence of multiple ecological systems, the protection from invasion afforded by mountains and deserts, and relative political calm – further facilitated the Sanhaizi culture’s development into a hegemonial power in the eastern Eurasian steppes. To a large degree, the development of the Sanhaizi culture is one of the earliest representative formations of the nomadic Social Complexity in the Eurasian steppes. Its florescence might have triggered the first wave of large-scale East-to-West migrations in the Eurasian steppes about the 8th century BC. Simultaneous with the rise of the Sanhaizi culture, the cultures distributed in the Great Wall Region played very important mediating roles between the Steppe region and the Central Plains of China between the late Shang and the Eastern Zhou periods. It should be pointed that the Chinese early civilizations, especially in the Erlitou period and the early Shang dynasty, rised in a relative peaceful and isolated environment, the fatal expanding powers of those who have mastered the new martial techniques in the middle regions of Eurasian steppes, such as the spoked chariot and the bronze weapons,were weakened by the large land of the Gobi, the desert, the high mountains, and the dry cold wether in the Central Asia. While the new techniques could be spreaded to the central plain of China. When the Sanhaizi culture grew up from the late Shang Dynasty and thrived in the late Western Zhou dynasty, the Chinese civilization had devoloped as strong as being capable of dealing with the threats from the Eurasian steppes by absorbing their advantages, such as the wheat, the sheep,the horse,and the chariot, etc. On the orther hand, the late Western Zhou dynasty had been influenced deeply both in the politics and the culture by the expanding of the Sanhaizi culture through the intermediate pastoral societies around the northwest frontier of the Western Zhou dynasty.

Political Economy of Agriculture in the Central Plains at the Dawn of Civilizations
Rory Walsh and Gyoung-Ah Lee

The China’s Central Plains experienced the dramatic increase of thein social and settlement complexity from the Middle Neolithic to the early state periods over 2000 years (3500 – 1900 BC). Particularly, the Yiluo valley, just south of the Yellow River in Henan province, went through the critical moment of the political and social changes, archaeologically known as the Erlitou phase (ca. 1900 – 1500 BC) and historically as the Xia Dynasty according to some scholars. A key to success in maintaining the states is to controling the mobilization of economic resources. Regional centers like the Huizui site that we are investigating may have channeled material goods from the producers in hinterlands to the consumers in the primary political capitals in the Yiluo valley. Food production has supported the political economy of the state, but the research on the role of agriculture in political economy has been rare, compared to that on the role of prestigious craft production in the region. To fill the gap, we will examine the diachronic changes in agricultural practice at the regional center at Huizui before and after the establishment of the Erlitou state-level society. We hope to contribute to the knowledge of how agriculture changed over the 2000 years leading up to the establishment of the Chinese civilization.