Japan and the Sensorium of Modernity (1800–present)

Start date: 1 November 2026
End date: 31 March 2028
Funder: Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation
Primary investigator: Dr Irena Hayter
Postgraduate students: Shiyi Zha

Value

£2500

Description

Recent work in Japanese studies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives has moved away from a preoccupation with the visual to consider the other senses: their cultural representations and their role in aesthetic practices, as well as their relationships to technological and medico-scientific developments. There are scholarly publications (Haukamp 2023; Hosokawa 2021; Hayter 2017; Innami 2021; Nakagawa 2009; Nishi 2000; Sakaki 2025, 2022; Tanhan 2014, to cite but a few) and newly created research fora such as the Sonic Japan Research Association. Most of this work focuses on a single isolated sense (or on the combination of the audio-visual at most), articulating a gap in which the other senses are absent. Academic discourse can be somewhat unreflective about its own historicity and mirror the carving of the sensorium by the sciences and technologies of modernity and its privatization under capitalism. Japanese sensory studies remain an exciting, underexplored terrain marked by asymmetry and unevenness: a lot more attention has been devoted to sight and the visual, followed by the auditory, compared to the more corporeal senses.

This project proposes an exploration of the sensorium in early modern and modern Japan. The sensorium is conceived here as an entire sensory apparatus shaped by its enculturation and environmental embeddedness; dynamic, shifting and alive at any historical moment (Ong 2005, Jones 2006). The sensorium is not a linear sum of organs and neural pathways; it is the interrelation, interaction and complex simultaneity of broad fields and sensory modalities that are difficult to isolate (Paterson 2011, Rodaway 1994).

The aim of the project is to bring together scholars from different disciplines working on Japan (literature, history, science and technology studies, media studies, anthropology, religion) and stage a productive encounter between medico-scientific histories and aesthetic practices, between textual and ethnographic approaches, between empirical evidence and the interpretation of cultural texts.