A living past in Kyoto
KYOTO, JAPAN—When you pick up a travel book on Japan, one of the first sentences you’ll read is: “If you go to only one place in Japan, Kyoto should be it.”
What makes this place so special?
Spared of the bombing attacks on Japan in World War II, Kyoto has retained its old charm and quaintness as Japan’s imperial capital for more than 1,000 years, from 794 to the Meiji Restoration in 1868.
The 2014 Philippine Studies Conference in Japan is being held in Kyoto, away from the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, but more about this later.
You could spend a whole month in Kyoto and you would not have seen it all. There are about 1,700 Buddhist temples and 300 Shinto shrines graced by rock and moss gardens and endless narrow canals and alleyways. You’ll never see more wooden structures in any other modern city as in Kyoto, which embody the glorious history of this great center of culture in the Heian Period (794-1192). Destroyed by civil wars and disasters such as fires and earthquakes through the centuries, the wooden temples and shrines have been rebuilt countless times to recreate a living past as the grandest seat of power and culture in premodern Japan.
It was a time when emperors reigned in a feudal atmosphere of palaces, castles, temples, villas, gardens and institutions for artists and scholars versed in both Japanese and Chinese. Children of the aristocratic elites were educated in these intellectual centers in poetry, among other fields. Culture and the arts blossomed and, as the travel books further note, “if you have fantasies about old Japan, perhaps they fit in the Heian period.”
Despite intermittent civil wars that rocked the country in the 15th and 16th centuries, Kyoto’s culture flourished. The Noh drama, tea ceremony, flower arranging, and landscape gardening were some of the major popular arts that gradually
developed. Today, you can still see these magnificent constructions, such as the Ryoanji rock garden, which is considered the most famous in Japan. Architecture also reached a golden age, as seen in the vast Kyoto Imperial Palace and the Nijo Castle, the quintessence of such unique architecture.
Eventually, however, with the decline of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and the restoration of power to the emperor in 1868, the once proud capital of Kyoto moved to Edo, today’s Tokyo. But Kyoto has managed to cling to its splendid history—a synthesis of everything that is Japan in modern times.
Philippine studies is a vibrant and productive academic activity in Japan. About 150 Japanese scholars, many of them young members of faculty, are engaged in research or teaching on various aspects of Philippine and Filipino society and culture.
Since 1985, conferences, workshops and seminars on diverse Philippine topics have been hosted by various national academic institutions.
Every year, many Japanese scholars travel to various parts of the Philippines to do field research for their theses and dissertations.
This year’s Philippine Studies Conference in Japan is hosted by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies of Kyoto University and the “Towards Sustainable Humansphere in Southeast Asia” Research Program of the Center. According to its convener, Prof. Shimizu Hiromu, the conference, which has 160 participants from Japan, the Philippines, Europe, the United States and other countries, highlights the diversity of perspectives, debates and practices aimed at thinking or rethinking Philippine politics, economy, society and culture along historical, contemporary, regional and transnational terms.
The cochair of the conference is Caroline Hau, the Center’s Filipino professor at Kyoto University. Hau is a summa cum laude graduate in English of the University of the Philippines and holds a PhD in English from Cornell University. She is also the editor of Southeast Asian Studies, an English-language journal, which is published three times a year along with its sister journal in Japanese, Tonan Ajia Kenkyu.
Ambeth Ocampo, a columnist of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and a professor of history at
Ateneo de Manila University, is one of the presenters in the conference. He is currently a visiting professor at Sophia University.
Resil Mojares, professor emeritus at San Carlos University and well-known Filipino interdisciplinary scholar, and Cayetano Paderanga, a UP professor of economics and former director general of the National Economic and Development Authority, are the keynote speakers in the conference.
The Philippine Studies Conference in Japan is held every four years and hosted by various universities in Japan. The last one was hosted by Tsukuba University, and the next one, in 2018, is now being planned. In the interim, a Graduate Forum, specifically aimed at promoting Philippine studies among graduate students, is held, again sponsored by host institutions which have an interest in promoting multidisciplinary and contemporary research on the Philippines.
Belinda A. Aquino, PhD, is professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where she was professor of political science and Asian studies and founding director of the Center for Philippine Studies. She was a visiting professor at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in 1997-1998.
