This interdisciplinary project examines how major sociohistorical changes have been experienced and mediated in and beyond Japan from the 1960s through the 2000s. It explores how cultural expression, media, infrastructure, urban space, and the environment have shaped the ways people perceive and live through periods of change and crisis. Rather than treating Japan as an isolated national space, the project situates it within wider transnational currents across Asia and the world, tracing how images, ideas, technologies, goods, and everyday practices move across borders. At the center of the project is the idea of “embodied realities”: the ways larger historical forces are experienced and represented in everyday life. By bringing together scholars from different fields, the project seeks to develop new methodologies for understanding how reality is mediated through ordinary everyday experience, bodily sensation, affect, mobilities, and the changing relationships among human and nonhuman bodies. This project brings close readings of literary and media works into dialogue with approaches from history, media history, sociology, cultural anthropology, and related fields. It also situates Japan within the circulation and reception of images, ideas, and cultural commodities across Asia and the world. In addition, project members will conduct archival research using digital archives such as the Tohoku University Digital Archives for Comprehensive Knowledge (ToUDA), the National Diet Library Digital Collections, the digital archives of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), and J-DAC (Japan Digital Archive Center).

Summary slide of the research overview. (Click to view larger image)