Monday, October 18, 2021

Calling all meizanologists


A conference on Japan’s alpine culture is due to convene on November 14 and 21, both Sundays. Entitled 
The Alpine Archipelago: Surveying Japan from the Timberline, this is probably the first meizanological conference ever to take place outside Japan.

The organisers, David Fedman and Jon Pitt, both of UC Irvine, outline the programme as follows:

Taking a timberline view of Japanese society, this conference explores the place of mountains in Japanese history, literature, film, religion, and popular culture. It does so in the same spirit as Fukada Kyūya's One Hundred Mountains of Japan (Nihon Hyakumeizan): by offering detailed portraits of individual mountain landscapes and the communities in which they are embedded. Each speaker will guide us to a particular peak, showcasing not just the wide range of alpine environments in Japan but the host of methodological approaches to studying the upland areas that make up the better part of the archipelago.

The presenters are David Fedman on Petari-dake; Shayne Dahl (Harvard University) on Gassan; Alison Miller (Sewanee: The University Of The South) on Tsurugidake; Aaron Jasny (University of Maryland, Global Campus) on Yarigatake; Eric Cunningham (Earlham College) on Ontakesan; Pedro Bassoe (Purdue University) on Hakusan; Andrew Bernstein (Lewis & Clark College) on Fujisan; Joanna Linzer (Harvard University) on Dōgo-yama; Komeie Taisaku (Kyoto University) on Ominesan; and Jon Pitt on Chibusayama.


2 comments:

David Lowe said...

PH thanks for calling to attention this conference. If you happen to know if these sessions will be later uploaded and shared on YouTube or alike I would be interested to know. Cheers.

Project Hyakumeizan said...

David, thanks for dropping by. I attended the first session yesterday, and it was mentioned that the proceedings wouldn't be recorded on video for later streaming. However, I think there is an intention to publish the presentations in book form later. So, one way or the other, the conference won't be lost to posterity.