Events

Time: Saturday, July 30, 2022, from 9:00AM to 10:30AM (JST)
Place: Conference Room A, 2nd floor of Main Bld. (Let. Law. Econ.), Osaka University Toyonaka Campus (and online via Zoom)
Languages: Opening talk in English. Discussion will be held in both English and Japanese.
The registration period for this event has ended.

Abstract:
Morisaki Kazue’s biography of the nihon buyō dancer and Saga niwaka comedienne Chikushi Misuko (1921–2013), titled Kanashisugite warau: onna zachō Chikushi Misuko no hanshō (1985), situates the performer’s individual trajectory in reference to larger social frames: labor identity, regional identity, gender identity, and nation. As someone of Russian and Japanese heritage who did not always present her audiences with the expected visual markers of Japaneseness, Chikushi’s perceived difference inflected her reception as a dancer in her youth and catalyzed her later specialization in nihon buyō, a dance genre with claims to Japaneseness and Japanese tradition. Like Morisaki’s earlier Makkura: Onna kōfu kara no kikigaki (1961), a collection of oral histories of women coal miners, the biography of Chikushi privileges the subject’s own voice and shines a spotlight on women active in Chikuhō and other mining towns in twentieth-century Kyūshū. It is also written by Morisaki from her home in the former miners’ residences (tanjū) in Chikuhō. We can understand the biography as part of Morisaki’s larger activist project for women and regional workers that questions historical modes of social formation in Japan: gendered, ethnic, and class-based.