It is a great honour to have been asked to give the WG Beasley Memorial Lecture at SOAS on 13 March 2019. The title of my talk is “On the Trail of Shiba Ryotaro and Jane Austen: Novels, Heritage, and Contents Tourism in Japan and the UK”. For further details and information on how to register for the event, please see the SOAS event page.
Review of “Media Theory in Japan” published
My review of Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten, Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017), has just been published in Asian Studies Review (online 16 September 2018).
Keynote Lecture: International Conference on New Frontiers in Japanese Studies
In September I will be giving the keynote lecture at the International Conference on New Frontiers in Japanese Studies: see the conference homepage. Details of the keynote lecture are here: Inagaki Seminar on Japan: “Japan Studies in the 21st Century”
Interview in English Journal July 2018 Edition
There is an interview with me about contents tourism in the July Edition of English Journal (on sale 6 June). Click here for more information.
Italian translation of a paper
The Italian translation of my article “Japanese War Memories and Commemoration after the Great East Japan Earthquake” (originally published in the Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies) has been published in Sociologie della memoria, edited by Anna Lisa Tota, Lia Luchetti and Trever Hagen.
Journal of War & Culture Studies Special Edition Published
In March we completed online publication of the article series “War, Popular Culture, and Contents Tourism in East Asia”. This is a special edition of the impact factor Journal of War & Culture Studies (for which I was guest editor). The print edition will come out in Volume 12 (2019). There are six articles in the series, which forms the main output for our contents tourism project in academic year 2017:
Philip Seaton: “War, Popular Culture, and Contents Tourism in East Asia”
Takayoshi Yamamura: “Cooperation Between Anime Producers and the Japan Self-Defense Force: Creating Fantasy and/or Propaganda?”
Kyungjae Jang: “Between Soft Power and Propaganda: the Korean Military Drama Descendants of the Sun”
Aleksandra Jaworowicz-Zimny: “Nazi Cosplay in Japan”
Akiko Sugawa-Shimada: “Playing with Militarism in/with Arpeggio and Kantai Collection: Effects of shojo images in War-related Contents Tourism in Japan”
Philip Seaton: “Kamikaze Museums and Contents Tourism”
Joining Japan Forum
I am honoured to have been asked to join the International Editorial Board of the journal Japan Forum. For more details about the board’s activities, see their website here.
Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan Talk
On 20 February I will be giving a talk about our contents tourism book at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. For information about the event, see this link.