2023/10/20 (FRI)
Nov 17, 2023 Open Lecture “Gas Mask Nation: Wartime Civil Air Defense, Aviation, and Japan’s Aerial Imaginary”
OBJECTIVE.
We are pleased to invite Professor Weisenfeld to give an open lecture,“Gas Mask Nation: Wartime Civil Air Defense, Aviation, and Japan’s Aerial Imaginary”
This presentation will address material from Professor Weisenfeld’s new book Gas Mask Nation, specifically the relationship between air defense, aviation, and the aerial imagination in Japan.
Outline of Lecture
Open Lecture:
Gas Mask Nation: Wartime Civil Air Defense, Aviation, and Japan’s Aerial Imaginary
◆Speaker：Prof. Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University (USA)
This presentation will address material from Professor Weisenfeld’s new book Gas Mask Nation, specifically the relationship between air defense, aviation, and the aerial imagination in Japan. By the war years, fascination with aviation was deeply ingrained. It was also a family affair that permeated all generations, especially the nation’s youth, inculcated through education as well as popular entertainment. Japanese visualizations of aviation had long been aesthetically implicated in the nation’s militarized modernity. State-sponsored air-mindedness and mobilization for air defense fortified this connection. Nevertheless, airplanes still retained their cachet as mesmerizing spectacle. They were simultaneously military weapons and titillating entertainment. Even in Japan’s austere cultural climate of national defense, aeriality, what has been defined as “a process of aerial seeing, picturing and thinking,” provided visual pleasure. Civil air defense fused the scopic joys of aeriality with existential fear, producing a kind of technological sublime whose beauty was both awesome and awful. A visual stroll through the cultural landscape of aeronautic imagery reveals a creative investment among the “air-minded” in Japan that traveled through the 1930s all the way to the end of the war. This paper explores that landscape of visual pleasure.
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November 17th 2023(Fri) 18:30-20:30, Hybrid (In-person and Virtual).
3rd Floor, Conference room, Tachikawa Memorial Hall, Ikebukuro Campus, Rikkyo University
(the Zoom URL will be sent to you by email the day before the event)
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Social Design Studies and the Rikkyo Institute for Social Design Studies.
The lecture will be conducted in English and Japanese. (simultaneous translation provided in person only)
Capacity 100 (in-person)
For Rikkyo's students, faculty and staff members, alumni, and open to the public
Free, Registration required
Gas Mask Nation: Wartime Civil Air Defense, Aviation, and Japan’s Aerial Imaginary
◆Speaker：Prof. Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University (USA)
This presentation will address material from Professor Weisenfeld’s new book Gas Mask Nation, specifically the relationship between air defense, aviation, and the aerial imagination in Japan. By the war years, fascination with aviation was deeply ingrained. It was also a family affair that permeated all generations, especially the nation’s youth, inculcated through education as well as popular entertainment. Japanese visualizations of aviation had long been aesthetically implicated in the nation’s militarized modernity. State-sponsored air-mindedness and mobilization for air defense fortified this connection. Nevertheless, airplanes still retained their cachet as mesmerizing spectacle. They were simultaneously military weapons and titillating entertainment. Even in Japan’s austere cultural climate of national defense, aeriality, what has been defined as “a process of aerial seeing, picturing and thinking,” provided visual pleasure. Civil air defense fused the scopic joys of aeriality with existential fear, producing a kind of technological sublime whose beauty was both awesome and awful. A visual stroll through the cultural landscape of aeronautic imagery reveals a creative investment among the “air-minded” in Japan that traveled through the 1930s all the way to the end of the war. This paper explores that landscape of visual pleasure.
＝＝＝＝＝＝
November 17th 2023(Fri) 18:30-20:30, Hybrid (In-person and Virtual).
3rd Floor, Conference room, Tachikawa Memorial Hall, Ikebukuro Campus, Rikkyo University
(the Zoom URL will be sent to you by email the day before the event)
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Social Design Studies and the Rikkyo Institute for Social Design Studies.
The lecture will be conducted in English and Japanese. (simultaneous translation provided in person only)
Capacity 100 (in-person)
For Rikkyo's students, faculty and staff members, alumni, and open to the public
Free, Registration required
Profile
GENNIFER WEISENFELD, invited visiting scholar, Rikkyo University, is Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in Japanese Art History. Her field of research is modern and contemporary Japanese art history, design, and visual culture. Her first book, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (University of California Press, 2002) addresses the relationship between high art and mass culture in the aesthetic politics of the avant-garde in 1920s Japan. Her second book, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012, Japanese edition Seidosha, 2014) examines how visual culture has mediated the historical understanding of Japan’s worst national disaster of the twentieth century. Her third book, Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2023) explores the anxious pleasures of Japanese visual culture during World War II. She has published extensively on the history of Japanese design, including a core essay for MIT’s award-winning website Visualizing Cultures on the Shiseido cosmetic company’s advertising design.
＊Moderator
Yukie OSA, Professor of the Graduate School of Social Design Studies at Rikkyo University
＊Moderator
Yukie OSA, Professor of the Graduate School of Social Design Studies at Rikkyo University
