Nov. 15, 2004
Contact: Cal Poly History Department
(805) 756-2543
UCSB Professor to Talk on Current Japanese Armed Forces
at Cal Poly Dec. 1
SAN LUIS OBISPO -- Sabine Frühstück, associate professor of modern Japanese cultural studies at UC Santa Barbara, will give a talk on "Embattled Memories/Ersatzhistories: The Japanese Armed Forces Today" from 3 to 4 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 1, in Room B-5 in the Science Building at Cal Poly.
"In few other countries of the democratic world does a military career seem more unattractive and burdened by the legacy of a defeated predecessor than in Japan," Frühstück said. "There, the Self-Defense Forces are attempting, with perhaps a greater and more willful intensity than in the period of empire-building of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to build a military tradition that will raise troop morale and, at the same time, to shed the legacy of the Imperial Army."
In her talk, she will analyze the various contradictory versions of the history of ambivalent symbols, such as the dove and cherry blossoms. She will also explore the transformations of soldiers' identities "in the context of how highly militarized symbols are now being recuperated in a concerted effort to create a new, positive and uncompromised 'collective, military memory.'"
Frühstück teaches in UCSB's Department of East Asian
Languages and Cultural Studies.
She is the author of "Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control
in Modern Japan," and is co-editor of "The Culture of
Japan as Seen Through its Leisure."
She is working on a new book titled "Avant-garde: The Army
of the Future," which
examines the historical and ethnographic dimensions of military-societal
relations in Japan.
The talk is sponsored by the Cal Poly History Department and College of Liberal Arts Lyceum Speaker Series. For more information on the free, public talk, call the Cal Poly History Department at 756-2543.
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