East Asian Studies

The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs program on Global History presents Victor Seow and “Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia.”

In this talk, Benjamin will discuss how an early love of Japanese popular culture led him to study Japanese, move to Japan, and eventually publish a manga with the major Japanese publishing house, Shogakukan. He will describe his journey along the way including competing in international mahjong championships, turning his research on the Japanese gaming world into a Fulbright Fellowship and being appointed the official tourism ambassador for Tokyo’s Nakano Ward.

In the 1960s the media situation in Japan changed profoundly; suddenly everything and everyone seemed connected, and the circulating information grew exponentially. It put everyone caught up in these changes under intense pressure to make sense of this new world of media connectivity. In popular culture the so-called occult boom, that manifested across media and stretched from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, tried to do exactly that.