{"id":16935,"date":"2026-01-07T01:31:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T05:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/?p=16935"},"modified":"2026-04-01T02:45:58","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T06:45:58","slug":"03-31-2026-why-ghosts-matter-an-underground-history-of-japan-with-haruo-shirane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/2026\/01\/07\/03-31-2026-why-ghosts-matter-an-underground-history-of-japan-with-haruo-shirane\/","title":{"rendered":"03-31-2026 Why Ghosts Matter: An Underground History of Japan with Haruo Shirane"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Tuesday, March 31, 6PM<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

The Allen & Shirley Leventhal Center<\/span>
\n233 Bay State Road, Boston MA<\/span><\/h4>\n

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Ghosts are a key to understanding anxieties about family, social injustice, and political violence in Japan. Unpacking four types of ghosts in Japan: political ghosts, ancestral ghosts, social ghosts, and non-human ghosts, the talk shows how these “ghost lineages” interlink, how they transform over time, and what they tell us about notions of personhood, community, power, and the non-human in Japanese history. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Haruo Shirane,<\/strong> Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Columbia University, is the author of Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts<\/em> (2012), Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho<\/em> (1997), The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of The Tale of Genji<\/em> (1987), and other books. He is an honorary member of the Japan Academy. The Allen & Shirley Leventhal Center 233 Bay State Road March 31 – 6 PM<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Tuesday, March 31, 6PM The Allen & Shirley Leventhal Center 233 Bay State Road, Boston MA   Ghosts are a key to understanding anxieties about family, social injustice, and political violence in Japan. Unpacking four types of ghosts in Japan: political ghosts, ancestral ghosts, social ghosts, and non-human ghosts, the talk shows how these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21756,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7613,7617],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16935"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21756"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16935"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16940,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16935\/revisions\/16940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/asian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}