For a complete list of past Washin Kai events, visit Archive.
Following are some of our most recent events.
Following are some of our most recent events.
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Ryukyuan Landscapes and Identity in the Omoro Sōshi
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The Omoro Sōshi is an indigenous compilation of 1500 songs, poems, and prayers that extoll the golden age of the Ryukyu Islands. It offers insights absent from official histories that focus on great heroes. The collection sheds light on the Ryukyu's semitropical flora and fauna, and by extension, the everyday life of the common people.
This presentation will introduce the main features of the Omoro Sōshi and pay particular attention to key aspects of the landscape that shaped traditional communal formations. Its aim is to consider whether the compilation reflects a history of the region as top down (Yamato) or bottom up (Ryukyu).
Davinder Bhowmik is Associate Professor of Japanese in the Department of Asian Languages & Literature at the University of Washington. She teaches on and researches modern Japanese literature, with a specialization in prose fiction from Okinawa, where she was born and lived until the age of 18. Other scholarly interests include regional fiction, the atomic bombings, and Japanese film. Her publications include Islands of Protest: Japanese Literature from Okinawa (co-edited with Steve Rabson, 2016); Writing Okinawa: Narratives of Identity and Resistance (2008); and “Temporal Discontinuity in the Atomic Bomb Fiction of Hayashi Kyōko" (in Ōe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan, 1999). She is currently writing a manuscript on military basetown fiction in Japan.
Sponsored by Washin Kai - Friends of Classical Japanese with support from the Department of Asian Languages & Literature and the Language Learning Center at UW. Nominal support by the Consulate-General of Japan in Seattle.
This presentation will introduce the main features of the Omoro Sōshi and pay particular attention to key aspects of the landscape that shaped traditional communal formations. Its aim is to consider whether the compilation reflects a history of the region as top down (Yamato) or bottom up (Ryukyu).
Davinder Bhowmik is Associate Professor of Japanese in the Department of Asian Languages & Literature at the University of Washington. She teaches on and researches modern Japanese literature, with a specialization in prose fiction from Okinawa, where she was born and lived until the age of 18. Other scholarly interests include regional fiction, the atomic bombings, and Japanese film. Her publications include Islands of Protest: Japanese Literature from Okinawa (co-edited with Steve Rabson, 2016); Writing Okinawa: Narratives of Identity and Resistance (2008); and “Temporal Discontinuity in the Atomic Bomb Fiction of Hayashi Kyōko" (in Ōe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan, 1999). She is currently writing a manuscript on military basetown fiction in Japan.
Sponsored by Washin Kai - Friends of Classical Japanese with support from the Department of Asian Languages & Literature and the Language Learning Center at UW. Nominal support by the Consulate-General of Japan in Seattle.
Fall 2024 Washin Kai Lecture
The Popularization of the Hundred Poets in Edo-Period Japan
Speaker: Prof. Joshua Mostow, Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia
Join us on a journey exploring how knowledge of the Hyakunin isshu (One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each) collection spread among the commoner class in Japan’s early modern Edo period (1600-1868) to become the foundation of popular literary literacy through the booming print culture, especially by means of illustrated commentaries in books and popular prints. A distinctly vernacular interpretative tradition will be revealed, one that heavily influenced the earliest English translations of these poems.
Co-sponsored by the UW Japan Studies Program with support from the Department of Asian Languages & Literature and the Language Learning Center at UW. Nominal support by the Consulate-General of Japan in Seattle.
Spring 2024 Washin Kai Lecture
Chinese Characters Across Asia: Continuity and Transformation in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese
Speaker: Prof. Zev Handel, Department of Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington
Chinese characters originated in China over 3,000 years ago. Prior to their creation, East Asia was completely devoid of writing. By the time of the Han Dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), China already had a long literary tradition, a flourishing culture, and a sophisticated government bureaucracy. Chinese writing exerted an enormous influence on surrounding peoples and places, including the areas of modern-day Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Eventually, the Chinese-character script was adapted to write the languages spoken in these three places. At one time, the spoken languages of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam were all written entirely in Chinese characters — yet these languages are as different from Chinese as is spoken English. In this talk, Zev Handel explains how the building blocks of the Chinese script were adapted to represent the words and sounds of Japanese via their transformation into the scripts known as kanji and kana. This transformation made possible the rich and varied literary inheritance of Japanese, from the poetry of Man’yōshū to the modern science fiction novel. Along the way, you’ll learn in what ways Chinese writing is similar to and different from alphabetic writing, what happened to Chinese-character writing in Korea and Vietnam, and why today Japanese is the only one of these languages that still uses Chinese characters in its writing.