PR Help with Events

Hello…I am writing to ask for everyone’s help in promoting Friday’s film screening. It is great that all of us have the opportunity to meet and hear insight from the guests who have been invited to UofC this quarter, but as Outreach Coordinator, I really want to reach out to people who might not know that much about Japan. This is a great opportunity to expand our knowledge of Japan. So, if you have any friends who might be interested, please pass on the info. I have included a description below and attached the poster. Let’s get the word out about this event!!!

Class presentation: Election campaign and Shinjuku Ni-chōme

Class presentation for April 10, 2007

The Tokyo Gubernatorial Election Campaign and Shinjuku Ni-chōme

-Tomoko Seto

The voting day for the Tokyo Gubernatorial Election was on April 8, 2007, and the incumbent, Ishihara Shintarō, was elected for his third term, with his votes far outnumbering those of others (Tokyo Shimbun, April 9, 2007). Recently, there has been a significant backlash from “Shinjuku Ni-chōme,” the world famous LGBT district in Tokyo, against Ishihara, who has been campaigning to host the 2016 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Presumably intending to “beautify” Tokyo landscape for the Olympic, the conservative Tokyo Governor commented last year that he would “regulate” the landscape of Shinjuku Ni-chōme with a local ordinance (条例). Although he did not specify the detail of the “regulation,” his comment triggered a strong anti-Ishihara sentiment among Ni-chōme localities. During the Gubernatorial Election campaign, many of them began supporting Ishihara’s opponent Asano Shirō, a college professor and former Governor of Miyagi prefecture. Although Asano could not win, his overt sympathy for sexual minorities during the campaign helped further strengthen anti-Ishihara sentiment and politicization among the Ni-chōme LGBT community. The Ni-chōme “regulation” became more realistic because of Ishihara’s victory, yet the visible reaction from Ni-chōme localities and their supporters during the Gubernatorial Election can be viewed as a starting point of their activism to protect their community.

Identity, or Japanese “lesbians”

From our presentation last week:

In the James Welker piece, he asks the question, “But if radio and rajio refer to the same thing, can this be said of lesbian and rezubian?” (15) To me, that seems like the question. On our class Chalk site, one post about questions of sexual identity and disclosure of that identity spawned an intense discussion, with over 11 responses. Not only is this issue personally important to everyone, it is also theoretically important. In a seminal moment (for gender and sexuality studies) Foucault argued that the birth of homosexuality as an identity, a type of person (rather than a type of behavior), is a historical development in the West. The crucial distinction he makes is that, “The sodomite had been a temporary abberration, the homosexual was now a species.” James Welker argues that the situation was similar in Japan until medicalized identities from the West arrived, and he references G.M. Pflugfelder to show that homosexuality was category of acts, historically in Japan. (2)