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[PAST EVENT] Bellini Colloquium
March 20, 2014
3:30pm
You are all invited to attend the next Bellini Colloquium. Professor Cronin examines Makime Manabu's 2009 best selling novel "Princess Toyotomi" and considers how the novel represents a queering of urban and national discourses in contemporary Japan.
What if Osaka were an independent state under a secret agreement made at the time of the Meiji Restoration? What if, during the siege of Osaka in 1614, daimy? Toyotomi Hideyoshi?s grandson had survived, and his line been concealed down to the present? This is the premise of "Princess Toyotomi", Makime Manabu?s 2009 best-selling novel and the 2011 film adaptation. In the Da Vinci Code-style mystery, three federal investigators, dispatched from Tokyo to investigate a discrepancy in city accounts, unravel the counter-history of ?Osaka Nation.?
The notion of a rebellious Osaka has surfaced repeatedly as the city has been subordinated within and impoverished by Tokyo-centric state systems. Fantasies of rebelling and restaging Meiji are understandable in a prefecture with Japan?s second-highest unemployment rate, ranked as the nation?s ?unhappiest.? Princess Toyotomi seems to queer those fantasies. The secret of Osaka Nation is passed from father to son, its sovereignty defended exclusively by men; but Hideyoshi?s heir is a tomboy ?princess,? and her best friend is the cross-dressing son of Osaka?s prime minister. This paper considers how Princess Toyotomi maps urban and ?national? possibilities to gender.
What if Osaka were an independent state under a secret agreement made at the time of the Meiji Restoration? What if, during the siege of Osaka in 1614, daimy? Toyotomi Hideyoshi?s grandson had survived, and his line been concealed down to the present? This is the premise of "Princess Toyotomi", Makime Manabu?s 2009 best-selling novel and the 2011 film adaptation. In the Da Vinci Code-style mystery, three federal investigators, dispatched from Tokyo to investigate a discrepancy in city accounts, unravel the counter-history of ?Osaka Nation.?
The notion of a rebellious Osaka has surfaced repeatedly as the city has been subordinated within and impoverished by Tokyo-centric state systems. Fantasies of rebelling and restaging Meiji are understandable in a prefecture with Japan?s second-highest unemployment rate, ranked as the nation?s ?unhappiest.? Princess Toyotomi seems to queer those fantasies. The secret of Osaka Nation is passed from father to son, its sovereignty defended exclusively by men; but Hideyoshi?s heir is a tomboy ?princess,? and her best friend is the cross-dressing son of Osaka?s prime minister. This paper considers how Princess Toyotomi maps urban and ?national? possibilities to gender.