Archive of Japan Endowment Funded Projects

 2017-2018 Academic Year

"From Madness to Medicine in Japanese Culture" September 27-29, 2017.

This academic conference was concerned with contextualizing ideas about madness and mental health in the fields of literature and art as well as anthropology and medicine, particularly the history of medicine. The goal was to more clearly articulate what the boundaries of “health” and “illness” are and how those definitions have fluctuated through Japan’s experience of modernity and post-modernity. The symposium brought together a group of scholars from across the disciplines of anthropology, film, history, literature, the performing arts, and religious studies to interrogate the meanings of mental illness as they have been defined and transformed throughout Japanese history.

Funded by the Toshiba International Foundation.