What can we learn from oral histories of Japanese Americans who came to Chicago after their release from wartime camps?
| A Visiting Fellowship will enable Japanese novelist Yu Miri to develop an archive of oral histories and a theatrical performance based on interviews with local Japanese Americans on their memories of the community that sprung up in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood after World War II. |
This project will bring Yu Miri, one of Japan’s most distinguished novelists and playwrights, to campus as a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow. During this stay she will work with local faculty to develop an archive of oral history interviews she will conduct with members of the local Japanese American community on their memories of daily life in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, which along with Hyde Park became a magnet for thousands of new Japanese American residents after their release from wartime concentration camps. That archive will in turn form the basis for a new theatrical performance piece that we hope to bring to a local stage at the conclusion of the project. Yu, herself born and raised in Japan’s Zainichi (ethnically Korean) immigrant community, brings a transnational perspective to this collaborative attempt to create a new vehicle for remembering a now largely dispersed local neighborhood community. This project grows out of Yu’s activism in Japan following the 3/11 tsunami and nuclear disasters: Yu moved to the Fukushima area and conducted hundreds of interviews with displaced residents about memories of their lost hometowns. She used these stories to craft a performance piece in which her interview subjects appeared together with actors portraying them in an experimental theatrical ritual of remembrance; the piece has been staged to acclaim in both Fukushima and Tokyo, including a documentary aired nationally on the NHK network.
Robert S. Ingersoll Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College
University of Chicago
Professor Michael Bourdaghs focuses on Japanese literature and cultural history, including Japanese popular music. He also explores the connection between literature and politics through the lens of critical theory. To learn more about his research and publications, please see his
Associate Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College
University of Chicago
Chelsea Foxwell’s scholarship ranges from the medieval through modern periods of Japanese art with special emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images (2015). In 2012 she co-curated the...
Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College
University of Chicago
Thomas Lamarre is a scholar of media, cinema and animation, intellectual history and material culture, with projects ranging from the communication networks of 9th century Japan (Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, 2000), to silent cinema and the global...
Associate Professor of Japanese Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Chicago
Hoyt Long's research centers on modern Japan, with specific interests in the history of media and communication, cultural analytics, sociology of literature, book history, and environmental history. Cultural analytics has been a primary area of interest since 2010. Long has written and...
Independent Scholar, Novelist, and Playwright
Yu Miri is a writer of plays, prose fiction, and essays, with over twenty books to her name. She received Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, and her bestselling memoir was made into a movie. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima, she began to visit the...
Assistant Professor of English
University of Chicago
Mee-Ju Ro's research focuses on Asian American literatures, more specifically transpacific women’s writings. She also works with Korean texts and their English translations. Both her research and teaching engage with women’s writing, race and gender studies, translation theory, performance, and...
Adjunct Faculty, Critical Ethnic Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
DePaul University
Ryan Yokota’s current research focus is on comparative transnational ethnic studies in both East Asia and in the U.S., with a focus on Uchinānchu (Okinawans) under Japanese and American colonialism, Asian Latin Americans and Asians in Latin America, and Japanese American/Asian American history....
