Tenko: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan

Irena Hayter is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Leeds. Her research brings together domains normally kept apart: literature, visual studies, consumer culture. The overarching concern is with the perceptual changes of the interwar years in Japan and their urban and technological contexts. Articles in positions: asia critique, Japanese Language and Literature and Japan Forum, amongst others, have explored the effects of these changes not only on cultural practices, but also on the politico-ideological domain. Her current monograph project is a media-historical investigation of urban spectacle, technologies of image commodification and literary modernism in interwar Japan. George T. Sipos is Associate Professor at the West University of Timisoara, in Romania, where he teaches Japanese literature, language and culture. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Japanese society and literature from a transcultural perspective, in particular on comparative perspectives on Japan's modernity, modern nation state, activism, and resistance against state oppression. His recent publications include 'Journeys of Political Self-Discovery: The Writings of Miyamoto Yuriko and Panait Istrati from late 1920s Soviet Russia' (Human and Social Studies, 2018), and book chapters on the works of Mishima Yukio (in Mishima Monogatari: Un samurai delle arti, 2020), Kawabata Yasunari and Akutagawa Ryunosuke (in Critical Insights: Modern Japanese Literature, 2017). He is currently preparing his first single authored book on Japan's tenko and tenko literature, due to be published in 2021 by Routledge. Mark Williams is Vice President for International Academic Exchange at International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. Until 2017, he was Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. He received his PhD in Japanese Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. He has published widely in both English and Japanese - on themes such as Christianity and Japan, the literature of Endo Shusaku and literary representations of the Asia Pacific War.