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	  <em> Shinzo Abe, Japan's longest serving Prime Minister, addressed guests at a special reception at Japan Society during the 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2013. © Alan Klein.</em>
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<h3>In Memoriam: Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe</h3>
<p>July 8, 2022</p>

<p>We are shocked and saddened by the tragic loss of former Prime Minister Abe. His passing has already been deeply felt by the international community. He was a true friend of the United States and a leader in the global community.</p>

<p>Shinzo Abe’s leadership and his service to Japan as its longest serving Prime Minister was deeply consequential. He will be greatly missed at Japan Society which he generously visited a number of times during his long public life. </p>

<p>On behalf of Japan Society our thoughts are with the Abe family and the Japanese people at this moment of profound loss.</p>
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<p style="font-family: 'Noto Sans JP';">2022年7月8日</p>

<p style="font-family: 'Noto Sans JP';">安倍晋三元総理大臣のご逝去を悼み、謹んでお悔やみ申し上げます。</p>

<p style="font-family: 'Noto Sans JP';">この悲報に衝撃を受け、深い悲しみを感じています。安倍元総理大臣のご逝去により国際社会からもすでに哀悼痛惜の思いが寄せられています。元総理は米国の真の友人であり、国際社会におけるリーダーでした。</p>

<p style="font-family: 'Noto Sans JP';">安倍元総理は、在任期間が史上最長の日本の首相として、多大なる功績を残されました。
その長い公職生活の間、何度も弊会をご訪問くださった元総理なき今、喪失感をぬぐえません。</p>

<p style="font-family: 'Noto Sans JP';">ジャパン・ソサエティーを代表し、ご家族の皆様、日本国民の皆様にお悔みを申し上げるとともに、安倍元総理のご冥福を重ねて心よりお祈り申し上げます。</p>

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<p style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><strong>Merit Janow</strong><br>
<em>Chair</em><br>
会長<br>
メリット・ジェイノー</p>
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    <img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/zwqohdz2e0fx/2drWJ47NNnBZ4sOSpUnA4k/7e63f6d7248dc917bade21e37ab61026/jwsignature.png" style="border: 0px;" alt="Joshua Walker Signature" width="60%"/>
<p style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><strong>Joshua W. Walker, Ph.D.</strong><br>
<em>President and CEO</em><br>
理事長<br>
ジョシュア・W・ウォーカー</p>
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We are shocked and saddened by the tragic loss of former Prime Minister Abe. His passing has already been deeply felt by the international community. He was a true friend of the United States and a leader in the global community.

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In Memoriam: Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe 


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<h3>Merit E. Janow Named Japan Society Board Chair</h3>
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<p><strong>NEW YORK, NY (June 22, 2022) — Merit E. Janow</strong>, Dean Emerita, School of International and Public Affairs, and Professor of Practice, International Economic Law and International Affairs, Columbia University, will be the new Chair of the Board of Japan Society. Following a unanimous vote, the Society’s Board of Directors announced that Janow will step into her role as Chair effective July 1, 2022. Janow, an internationally recognized expert in international trade and investment, will be the first female Board Chair since the organization's founding. She has extensive experience in business, academia, and government that spans her life-long involvement with Japan and the Asia-Pacific region.</p> 

<p>“I am truly honored to serve as Chair of the Board at Japan Society,” says Janow. “Japan, and more specifically Japan Society, offer Americans sophisticated, topical, and broad-ranging experiences that facilitate the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and innovation.”</p> 

<p>Janow succeeds Joseph R. Perella, who will step down as Chairman after five years of exemplary service.</p>

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<h5>About Merit E. Janow</h5> 

<p>Janow has been on the faculty of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and Columbia Law School since 1994 and served as Dean of SIPA from 2013 through 2021. In 2003, Janow was elected for a four-year term as one of the seven Members of the World Trade Organization's Appellate Body. From 1997-2000, she served as Executive Director of the first international antitrust advisory committee to the Attorney General and Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust of the U.S. Justice Department. Prior to joining Columbia University, from 1989-93, she was Deputy Assistant USTR for Japan and China in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.</p> 

<p>Janow currently serves as independent Chair of Mastercard, as well as a Board member of funds within the American Funds/Capital group, and Aptiv. She is a trustee of the National Committee on US-China Relations and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is on the global advisory council of MUFG and was an inaugural member of the international advisory council of China’s sovereign fund, the China Investment Corporation. She has a JD from Columbia Law School and a BA in Asian Studies with honors from the University of Michigan.</p> 
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Merit E. Janow, Dean Emerita, School of International and Public Affairs, and Professor of Practice, International Economic Law and International Affairs, Columbia University, will be the new Chair of the Board of Japan Society. 

merit

Merit E. Janow Named Japan Society Board Chair


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	  <em>2002 Japan Society Award recipient Norman Y. Mineta (second from left). With Mr. Mineta are (from left to right): William Clark, Jr., President, Japan Society; Annual Dinner Vice Chairman Nobuo Kuroyanagi, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer for the Americas, The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Ltd.; and Annual Dinner Chairman James E. Copeland, Jr., Chief Executive Officer, Deloitte & Touche, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. Photo © Ken Levinson.</em>
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<h3>In Memoriam: Norman Y. Mineta</h3>

<p>Japan Society notes with deep sadness the passing of Norman Y. Mineta (1931-2022). A trailblazer in American politics, Mr. Mineta was among the 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry forced into internment camps during WWII. While in Congress, he was a driving force in passing the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which officially apologized for and redressed the injustices endured by Japanese Americans during the war.</p>

<p>Mr. Mineta’s extraordinary legacy was one of many firsts. The San Jose native made history when he became the first Asian American to hold a mayoral seat in a major American city. After nearly 21 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, he was the first Asian American to be named a federal Cabinet secretary, serving as Secretary of Commerce under President Bill Clinton and then as Secretary of Transportation under President George W. Bush.</p>

<p>In 2002, Mr. Mineta received the Japan Society Award for his outstanding contributions to better U.S.-Japan understanding. We honor Mr. Mineta’s rich life and legacy as we pay tribute to the generations of Asian American and Pacific Islanders who have enriched America’s history and culture this #AAPIHeritageMonth.</p>


Japan Society notes with deep sadness the passing of Norman Y. Mineta (1931-2022). A trailblazer in American politics, Mr. Mineta was among the 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry forced into internment camps during WWII. 

In Memoriam: Norman Y. Mineta

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<h3>What's the Matter with Saying 'The Orient'?</h3>

<p>Over the last twenty years most foreign scholars of Japanese history and society have stopped using phrases such as &quot;the Orient,&quot; &quot;the Far East,&quot; and &quot;the East&quot; in their classes and writing.  Phrases like these have also largely disappeared from political discourse:  it would be unusual, these days, to hear a diplomat talk about a country's &quot;Far Eastern alliances&quot; or a trade negotiator refer to &quot;economic relations with the Orient.&quot;  Nonetheless, it is still common to encounter these phrases in daily life.  A restaurant may say that its cooking has &quot;a touch of the Orient&quot;; a bookstore may have a section called Eastern philosophy.  When I conduct teacher workshops participants will occasionally say that they want to help their students understand the Far East.  Many whose careers are devoted to teaching about East Asia share the goal, but would resist describing it that way.  So what is the problem with calling East Asia &quot;the Orient&quot;?  There are several reasons scholars now avoid using phrases like &quot;the East,&quot; &quot;the Far East,&quot; and &quot;the Orient,&quot; including the exoticism they convey, their association with modern empires, the skewed view of world geography they present, and their tendency to homogenize large, diverse parts of the world as if they shared a single cultural identity.  In place of these &quot;big&quot; phrases I would suggest the simple solution of being specific:  If one means Japan, say so; if one means East Asia, use that phrase.  They may not sound as grand, but they probably convey what one means better.</p>
<p>In American English, &quot;the Far East&quot; and &quot;the Orient&quot; often conjure up images of the China trade&mdash;tea, silk, and porcelain carried across the world by clipper ships&mdash;or perhaps of a Zen sage dispensing wisdom in a mountain temple.  Whether it is the intention of the speaker or not, these phrases tend to exoticize what they are attached to.  (Even if one uses a phrase with such strong associations carefully, one cannot control how others understand it.)  In some cases exoticism may be the main attraction of the terms themselves.  Certainly some travel-guide publishers and makers of herbal tea are happy to turn a dollar by dealing in images of a mysterious East.  The idea of great distance&mdash;the <em>Far </em>East&mdash;compounds the sense of fascination:  things must be really different so far away.  A quick glance around popular culture shows that this kind of exoticism allows &quot;the East&quot; and &quot;the Orient&quot; to accommodate all sorts of contradictory meanings.  &quot;The Orient&quot; can suggest deep spirituality (Japan the land of monks), cunning ruthlessness (Japan the economic conqueror), a martial ethic (Japan the land of modern samurai), a place where the human merges with technology (Japan the land of cyborgs), and so on.  Behind the contradictory meanings is an assumption that there is some unifying principle, some essence, that makes &quot;the East&quot; what it is&mdash;and if one could only grasp that principle, one could understand the place and its people.  Popular books that promise to explain East Asia or one of its countries by revealing its secret principles are fairly common.</p>

<p>The habit of explaining distant places in terms of a cultural essence was a common feature of European empires from the eighteenth to mid twentieth century.  The association of phrases such as &quot;the East&quot; and &quot;the Orient&quot; with modern imperialism is one reason that some people find them offensive and others avoid them.  Critics of &quot;Orientalism&quot; such as Edward Said have traced the close connections between scholarly writing about &quot;the Orient&quot; and the administration of European empires in the Middle East and Asia.<sup><font size="1">1</font></sup>   Colonial administrators took scholars' analyses of &quot;Oriental society&quot; and the &quot;Oriental mind&quot; as guides for managing colonized peoples.  Sometimes the connection between administration and scholarship was even more direct:  some colonial administrators such as Sir William &quot;India&quot; Jones were well regarded scholars themselves.  Pronouncements about &quot;the East&quot; thus were closely associated with the history of European imperialism.  The historical association of phrases like &quot;the Orient&quot; and &quot;the Far East&quot; with geopolitics can also be found in North America and even East Asia itself.  Ruth Benedict wrote her famous analysis of Japanese society, <em>The Chrysanthemum and the Sword</em>, to aid the United States' war against Japan in the 1940s.  (At the time Benedict had never been to Japan.)  Around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, Stefan Tanaka and Kang Sangjung have argued, scholars in Japan applied the pejorative term &quot;the Orient&quot; (Tōyō) to other East Asian countries to justify Japan's colonization of the region, on the grounds that rule by &quot;civilized&quot; Japan would benefit the backward parts of Asia.<sup><font size="1">2</font></sup>   The association of phrases such as &quot;the Orient&quot; and &quot;the East&quot; with empires, contemporary scholars like Said and Tanaka would say, is so close that it is impossible to use them to simply mean a geographical area.</p>

  <p>Even if one does not accept the argument that these phrases are politically loaded, there are practical reasons for avoiding them.  One is the skewed view of world geography that a phrase like &quot;the Far East&quot; creates.  Far from what?  From Europe, of course&mdash;if Europe is the point from which all distances are measured.  (Why someone would say that Japan is far east of California is harder to explain.)  Historically, however, China was the economic, political, and cultural center of East Asia, as the self-aggrandizing name &quot;Middle Kingdom&quot; (<em>zhongguo</em>, <em>chūgoku</em>) indicates.  For many centuries, Europe was a scarcely known place of little importance to people living in East Asia.  It is hard to imagine that people in the region thought of themselves as &quot;far&quot; from there&mdash;and the idea really is as odd now as it was in the past.  Whether one argues, as Thomas Friedman does, that the world is now economically &quot;flat,&quot; or follows the view of economic historians such as Andre Gunder Frank that East and South Asia were the center of the world economy for most of history, and soon will be again, describing East Asia as &quot;far&quot; does little to explain its place in the world.</p>

<p>Simply because of their vagueness, &quot;the Orient,&quot; &quot;the East,&quot; and &quot;the Far East&quot; hinder one's understanding of the world in other ways.  In Europe, &quot;the Orient&quot; classically began at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean.  Yet do Lebanon and Korea have that much in common?  Perhaps they do (both places have experienced domination by more powerful neighbors), but lumping them together as &quot;the East&quot; does not help one understand <em>how </em>they do.  A phrase like &quot;the East&quot; evokes a vast geographic area, without quite saying where it begins and ends, and implies that the whole swath is homogeneous.  That is precisely why it is so easy to make sweeping statements about &quot;the Orient,&quot; &quot;the Far East,&quot; and so forth.  But the more sweeping the statement the less one actually learns from it:  using these umbrella terms makes it harder, not easier, to understand the world.  From this point of view it may help to consider that many generalizations about &quot;the East&quot; convey an opposite generalization about &quot;the West,&quot; typically taken to mean Western and Central Europe and North America.  The commonly heard contrast between &quot;Eastern spirituality&quot; and &quot;Western rationality&quot; is one example.  But no part of the world is so simple.  In this case, neither generalization can really stand on its own; rather, they support each other.  By describing Japan or another East Asian country as &quot;Oriental,&quot; one risks becoming entangled in a whole series of ambiguous ideas about the societies of the world.</p>

<p>The exoticism of phrases like &quot;the East&quot; and &quot;the Orient,&quot; their loaded politics, the odd geography they create, the way they homogenize&mdash;each of these are reasons to resist using them.  So what should one do?  As I suggested earlier, the simplest response may be the best:  be specific.  &quot;Japan&quot; and &quot;East Asia&quot; are not absolutely neutral names (each has a history), but they escape many of the stereotypes associated with a name like &quot;the Orient&quot; and &quot;the Far East.&quot;  Be specific, too, about what countries have in common&mdash;and how they differ.  China, Japan, and the kingdoms of Korean peninsula share a history of Confucianism, which had a deep impact on governmental institutions across the region (and in Vietnam, typically considered part of Southeast Asia).  Their responses to the penetration of East Asia by European explorers and missionaries beginning in the sixteenth century, however, were quite different.  So too were the histories of religion in the countries of the region, where an enormous range of beliefs flourished, including Buddhism, Daoism, popular millenarian movements such as the Taiping Rebellion in China and &quot;syncretic&quot; blendings of Buddhism and Shintō in Japan.  Keeping in mind the varied history of the region makes it easy to avoid suggesting that some ineffable essence, some unseen principle, unites Asia.  Societies in East Asia indeed differ in many ways from societies elsewhere in the world&mdash;including Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, in addition to Europe and North America&mdash;but one can build a richer understanding of such differences by setting aside misleading phrases like &quot;the Orient,&quot; &quot;the East,&quot; and &quot;the Far East.&quot;</p>

<p><strong>Notes</strong><br />
<font size="1"><sup>1 </sup></font>Edward W. Said, <em>Orientalism </em>(New York: Vintage, 1978).<br />
<font size="1"><sup>2</sup></font> Stefan Tanaka, <em>Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History</em> (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Kang Sangjung, &quot;In Range of the Critique of Orientalism,&quot; <em>Deconstructing Nationality</em>, ed. Naoki Sakai, Brett de Bary, and Iyotani Toshio (Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series, 2005).</p>

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<p><strong>Christopher Hill</strong> is Associate Professor of Japanese literature at Yale University. He is the author of <a href="http://www.dukeupress.edu/cgibin/forwardsql/search.cgi?template0=nomatch.htm&amp;template2=books/book_detail_page.htm&amp;user_id=12290&amp;Bmain.item_option=1&amp;Bmain.item=16348" target="_blank"><em>National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States</em></a>.</p>

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About Japan: What's the Matter with Saying 'The Orient'?

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What's the Matter with Saying 'The Orient'?

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    <h4>大晦日(Ōmisoka)—New Year’s Eve</h4>
     <p> Of all the festivals in the Japanese calendar, New Year’s is by far the most important and elaborate. Traditionally, preparations for the New Year began in the middle of December with a thorough house cleaning (susubarai) from top to bottom. These and other preparations were made in anticipation of the all-important visit from Toshigami-sama, the ancestral deity of the New Year. If Toshigami-sama was pleased with the preparations a household had done for the New Year, it was believed that he would bestow good fortune, energy and spirit, on all the members of the household for the year ahead. On Ōmisoka (New Year’s Eve), people would stay up all night to greet this ancestral deity, who in some stories, much like Santa Claus, would go from house to house with a sack on his back to add a year to everyone’s life. That meant that in the old days in Japan, everyone turned one year older at the same time on New Year’s!*</p>
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<p>The custom of placing decorations with pine branches outside the front of the door (kadomatsu) comes from the notion that the Shinto gods (kamisama) prefer to manifest in pine trees so these decorations were believed to entice the ancestral deity into people’s homes. Placing decorations made of rope and paper and often various auspicious symbols (shimenawa), over doorways was also meant to welcome Toshigami-sama into the house. And perhaps most importantly of all, the offering of two large round rice-cakes (kagami-mochi), placed one on top of the other, was meant to contain the spirit of Toshigami-sama, who was also considered to be a deity of the harvest. Rice cakes play such an important role in the New Year’s festivities that people would traditionally do a large-scale mochi-tsuki (rice-pounding to make mochi rice cakes) in preparation. In the days leading up to New Year’s, people would also make an assortment of special New Year’s foods (collectively called osechi-ryōri) that all have symbolic meaning to ensure good fortune for the year to come. Preparing this food in advance also allows families to relax without having to worry about cooking during the holiday itself.</p>
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<p>At temples and shrines, cleansing and purification are the focus of New Year’s eve, when all around Japan temple bells are rung 108 times to cleanse the world of what, in Buddhist terms, are the 108 worldly desires and afflictions. As the old year crosses over into the new, people eat buckwheat noodles called toshikoshi-soba (literally, crossing-into-the-Year soba) to ensure that, like the long noodles, they will also have long life.</p>
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    <h4>お正月(Oshōgatsu)—New Year’s Day</h4>

<p>In honor of Toshigami-sama’s visit and to celebrate the harvest, people in Japan eat a special soup on New Year’s called ozōni, as well as osechi-ryōri, or auspicious foods prepared in advance.  Each region of Japan has a different recipe for ozōni, depending on what they typically harvest in that area, but the one thing they all have in common is mochi, or rice cakes. These rice cakes were originally called toshidama (年魂—meaning, the spirit of Toshigami-sama), but today toshidama (年玉—meaning “year’s treasure”) refers to the much anticipated envelopes containing money that grownups give to children for New Year’s.</p>
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<p>Decorations and festivities relating to Toshigami-sama continue for the duration of his visit, which was traditionally believed to last until January 7th  (matsu no uchi). Also on January 7th, people celebrate the first sekku of the year (nanakusa no sekku) by eating a seven-herb rice gruel (nanakusa-gayu), which is meant to keep one healthy in the coming year. By January 7th, certain rituals have to be accomplished, like receiving New Year’s cards (nengajo, which would have been sent out in mid-December), making ones first visit to a shrine (hatsumōde), and congratulating all ones friends and neighbors on the successful start of a New Year with the greeting, “Akemashite omedetō gozaimasu” (literally, “Congratulations on the opening [of the New Year]”.)  Every first (hatsu) of the New Year—the first dream (hatsu yume) and first sunrise (hatsu hi no de)—is celebrated and carefully noted. In schools, the first writing of the New Year (kakizome) is still treated as a special event, often involving competitions where children write their goals for the coming year in their best calligraphy.</p>
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<p>After the 7th of January, the kagami-mochi rice cakes—where Toshigami-sama’s spirit is believed to reside during his visit—are smashed into little pieces for the whole family to eat. Each little piece is believed to retain the spirit of Toshigami-sama, and, by sharing the kagami-mochi with every member of the family, everyone receives the spirit of Toshigami-sama and the strength they will need to last them through the year ahead. A popular way to eat the kagami-mochi and mark the end of the New Year is to roast it and put it in a sweet red-bean soup called oshiruko.</p>
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<p>Another important element of the transition into a New Year in Japan and other parts of Asia is the change from one animal in the Chinese zodiac to the next in the following order: mouse, bull, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, ram, monkey, rooster, dog, boar. Long after the switch to the Gregorian calendar in the Meiji period (1868-1912), Japanese continue to use the Chinese zodiac as an important organizing principle behind how they calculate, for example, their own or other people’s age and year of birth. New Year’s cards (nengajo) in Japan almost invariably are decorated with the zodiac animal for the New Year.</p>
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<p>As outlined above, Oshōgatsu (New Year’s) is really a series of festivals wrapped into one, lasting in some regions of Japan until at least the 15th (or 20th) of January, which is called Little New Year’s (Ko-shōgatsu). This is the time when all the New Year’s decorations are ritually burned so that Toshigami-sama’s spirit can be welcomed in afresh the following year.
-Tara McGowan, PhD. Literacy, Language and Education. Costen Children’s Library, Princeton University</p>
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<p>* By the old reckoning (kazoe-doshi), babies were thought to be one year’s old at birth. Then they would turn two at the New Year’s, even if they were just recently born, and they would turn three by the next New Year’s. In other words, a child as young as one year’s old by modern reckoning, would have been considered to already be three!</p>

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Of all the festivals in the Japanese calendar, New Year’s is by far the most important and elaborate. Learn more.

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