On Ideology and Ideologues: The Issue of 'Japanism' in the Study of Wartime Japan - UCLA Faculty CenterNEW

A colloquium with the 2012-2013 UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies Postdoctoral Fellow, John Person, University of Chicago.

Date
Monday, October 08, 2012

Time
4:00 PM - 7:00 PM

Location
UCLA Faculty Center, Sequoia Room
480 Charles E. Young Drive

Speaker
Dr. Person received his Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His specialize in the intellectual history of modern Japan, with particular interests in the intersections between philosophy and politics during the first half of the 20th century. Dr. Person's dissertation, "Philosophizing 'Japan': the Genri Nippon Society and the Question of Japaneseness," is a study of one of the most notorious activist/scholars of Japan's wartime era, Minoda Muneki, whose efforts to purge the Imperial University system of liberal and Marxist professors led many to call him the "Joseph McCarthy of Japan." One of the first studies to take the so-called "rightwing" seriously, "Philosophizing 'Japan'" is an attempt to re-write the history of the "rightwing" without relying on the convention of rightwing/leftwing, instead opting to focus on what Japanists like Minoda owed to their Marxist and liberalist rivals in their own articulations as well as their often volatile relationship with the state.

Dr. Person also enjoys translating works of critical thought from Japanese to English. His translation of two chapters from Tosaka Jun's Japanese Ideology will appear in the forthcoming volume Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader (Cornell East Asia Series). General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, Google by the Japanese critic Hiroki Azuma, which he is co-translating with Naoki Matsuyama, will be published by Vertical Inc. next year.

Dr. Person was selected as the 2012-2013 Terasaki Postdoctoral Fellow for the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. During his fellowship year at UCLA, he will continue to read and think about Minoda and the so-called Japanist movement with an eye towards placing them in a more global context, not only in terms of the worldwide nationalist theoretical activities that people like Minoda were drawing from, but also in terms of historiographical issues related to the study of "extremists." Additionally, Dr. Person will offer a course on the intellectual history of Japan during the Spring quarter.