UBC Japanese Library Resources Blog

Professor Gregory Levine from the Department of History of Art at University of California, Berkeley will be presenting the following lecture:

Captured Buddha: Kawabata Ryūshi’s “Rakuyō Captured Buddha: Kawabata Ryūshi’s “Rakuyō Kōryaku”
November 19 (Monday)
Lasserre 105, 12-2 p.m.

This lecture considers Kawabata Ryūshi’s (1885-1966) monumental painting, The Capture of Luoyang (Rakuyō kōryaku; 1944), part of the important and controversial corpus of Japanese War Painting (Sensō kiryokuga ), noting its formal features, relationship to Japanese colonial control of and scholarship on Chinese Buddhist sites, and brief but significant exhibition in 1945.

Haruo Shirane, Shinchō Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Columbia University, will be coming to UBC to deliver the inaugural John Howes Lecture in Japanese Studies.

Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts

November 22 (Thursday)
6:30pm Registration; 7:00 pm Lecture
Asian Centre Auditorium, 1871 West Mall

Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media—from poetry and screen paintings to tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and annual observances. Dr. Haruo Shirane will show how, when, and why this practice developed and explicate the richly encoded social, religious, and literary meanings of this imagery.

Please join us for a lecture and reception honouring Professor Emeritus John Howes. Dr. Howes is an intellectual historian and leading authority on Japan’s Christian and pacifist thinkers, who dedicated three decades to mentoring students and expanding Japanese Studies in the Department of Asian Studies at UBC.

For more information and to register, click here.