Collaboration in the Japanese Empire: The Stakes of Moral Judgment
The Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to present the 26th John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies
Introduction
Collaboration among subject peoples in the Japanese Empire (1895-1945), especially in Taiwan, Korea, occupied China and the Philippines, has been studied from the perspective of history, political science and economics, but never from the point of view of ethical theorists. This lecture proposes that moral philosophy from Immanuel Kant to Hannah Arendt has much to say about the conundrum that collaborators—especially writers—under occupation faced, and with lessons for us today.
About the Speaker
John Treat earned his doctorate in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale in 1983. His book Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and The Atomic Bomb, won the John Whitney Hall Prize in 1996. Treat edited the Journal of Japanese Studies for ten years, during which time he held positions at Washington, Berkeley, Stanford, Texas and Yale; and taught at Seoul National University, Ewha Woman’s University, and the University of Oslo. Since retiring in 2014, Treat completed a literary history, The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature; produced the film documentary Edo Avant-Garde; and published two novels, The Yellow House in 2015 and First Consonants in 2022. A third novel, The Seventh City of Refuge, will be published this fall; and his short-story collection, Remembering Our Own: The AIDS Stories, in 2027.