Life in the Floating World
A Gallery Tour and the Art of Appreciating and Dealing Fine Woodblock Prints
Featured speaker: Ken Caplan, Brown University Class of 1991 and Director of Mita Arts Gallery
Please join the Brown University Club of Japan as we enjoy an invitation from Ken Caplan to his Mita Arts Gallery, which has supplied the finest Japanese prints and paintings to collectors and museums worldwide since 1963.
Due to the size of the gallery, participants will be limited to 15 BUCJ members. Those who secure places will receive a personal tour of Mita Arts Gallery from Ken Caplan with the opportunity to enjoy the fine art displayed and sold there. Ken will help us to understand some of the criteria for better appreciating Japanese woodblock prints and share with us some of his stories of dealing fine art in Japan and internationally over the past 30+ years.
To secure your place at the event, please sign up using this Google Form:
https://forms.gle/dFoCNJxsSxqgvisHA
Due to the small size of the gallery, at first, only BUCJ members will be able to register. However, if you have a guest who would like to attend, kindly email Adam Komisarof at adam@komisarofa.com to get your guest on a waiting list in case we end up having space for them.
History and Description of Mita Arts Gallery:
Mita Arts Gallery was established in 1963 about a year after the founder David Caplan came to live in Japan and developed a passion for Japanese woodblock prints. David’s son Ken, returning to Japan in 1991 after graduating from Brown University, moved Mita into a gallery space in 1995 in Tokyo’s Jimbocho area and began to focus on offering the finest, high-quality prints.
Mita is a unique presence in the field of Japanese prints. Mita is the only ukiyo-e print gallery in Japan with a foreign director and a fully English-speaking staff. With over 50 years of history and experience, Mita offers the highest level of knowledge and expertise to their clients and fully guarantees the authenticity of all of our prints and paintings. Mita has been the single largest buyer at the Nihon Ukiyoe Dealers Association (of which it was one of the founding members over 40 years ago). Mita also serves as a director of the International Ukiyoe Society.
Intercollegiate Hanami
Update
Event cancelled.
Although it appears that the weather may hold for Sunday, we have the following concerns:
1. Looking at the rainfall expected today and tomorrow, the ground will be pretty muddy
(We were hoping it would just be light rain but the amount of rain we experienced this morning will make the grounds very wet and not enough time to dry off by Sunday)
2. Temperature will be fairly cold. Weather forecast expects a high of 12~15 degrees celsius and looks like it will hover around 10 degrees until noon.
3. Depending on the weather forecast, the chance of rain is 40%~80% on Sunday - it appears the weather is pretty unpredictable, especially in the afternoon.
Even if we did go forward with the Hanami, it may be pretty uncomfortable, which we don't want anyone to experience.
Unfortunately, by the following weekend, the cherry blossoms will be gone, so we have decided to cancel this year's Hanami.
We have updated the Notion website, and Facebook event page accordingly.
Hope we have better luck next year.
Original event details:
BUCJ is proud to be one of many participating universities in this year's Intercollegiate Hanami! Come out to have a wonderful day under the cherry blossoms with fellow BUCJ members, as well as representatives from other universities (Ivy League schools and other interested institutions).
Date
Sunday, March 30, 2025 - backup in case of rain on March 29.
People are free to come and go during the day but the park gates close at 4PM.
Place
Komaba Park - Round lawn in front of building
Notes
Be sure to wear your college gear and show school spirit! Please note the following, too:
We ask that participating groups assist with the following:
Bring picnic sheets to help secure space in the park. (The gathering keeps getting bigger as the years go on so we do need help in securing space where we can all hang out)
Bring food, drinks, utensils, etc. to share.
Clean up the area before leaving the venue.
Georgetown organizers will be at the location around 9AM to find and place tarps, etc. in areas of the park where we can all hang out.
Note on bicycles. There is a bicycle parking area in front of the park, so please leave your bicycles there. Please do not bring them inside the park.
Reference
Cherry Blossom Forecast
Weather Forecast
Winter Happy Hour at Hobgoblin Roppongi
We hope your year is off to a great start! We are organizing a casual happy hour on Thursday, February 13th for those interested in connecting with the community over drinks to brighten the winter. Guests are welcome to join!
Happy hour will be at Hobgoblin Roppongi from 6:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Please note that we will only be organizing the venue, so any food or drinks will be available for purchase from the bar.
No RSVP necessary. Please just show up and pay for what you order to eat and drink.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to our co-organizer, Naomi nsypkens@gmail.com. We are excited to see you there.
Brown Derbies
The Brown Derbies Are Coming to Tokyo for a Free Concert!
One of Brown’s most popular a cappella singing groups, The Brown Derbies, will be giving a free concert on Saturday, January 18th, at Atelier Fanfare East Shinjuku.
The concert will be held from 18:00 to 19:00, and all seats are entirely free, thanks to the generosity of the Fujii family. There will also be a reception for socializing, where light refreshments will be provided, from 16:30 to 18:00. All BUCJ members and their guests are welcome at both the reception and the concert.
Seating is limited, so you are encouraged to register as soon as possible using this GoogleForm.
BUCJ is looking forward to seeing you at this special event.
Bonenkai
The Brown University Club of Japan cordially invites Brown alumni and friends to the 2024 Bonenkai (“forget the year party”). Price (includes buffet-style dinner and all you can drink menu):
Free for current students
3,500 JPY for graduates of the class of 2021 or later
6,500 JPY for everyone else
Enjoy good food and drinks in celebration of another year! Feel free to bring non-Brown guests as well.
Date: Thursday, December 12, 2024, 7 - 9PM
Venue: Va-tout
Address: Axis Bldg 1F, 5-17-1 Roppongi, Tokyo
Kindly sign up on using this Google Form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12tZlWYTjiYNlxzzHvT4f_Eph0Ed6sdX8Lh1h-huV-O4/edit?ts=6718db20
If you have any questions, please direct them to Adam Komisarof: adam@komisarofa.com
An Evening with Mickey Mikitani
Please join the Brown University Club of Japan in welcoming a special guest, Mr. Mickey Mikitani, Chairman and CEO of Rakuten Group, in addressing the membership of the Ivy League Clubs of Japan, the Cambridge-Oxford Society, as well as the Stanford University, University of Chicago, and MIT alumni associations.
As not only one of Japan's leading businesspeople but also a thought leader, Mr. Mikitani will offer his insights on a range of topics, including workforce and organizational culture, his personal business philosophy, and his vision for the future of Japan’s business sector.
The event will be held at Rakuten Crimson House on the evening of December 4th. Mr. Mikitani's talk, as well as a fireside chat with Keio University Professor of Intercultural Communication Adam Komisarof followed by a short Q&A session, will occur from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. to be immediately followed by a lightly catered time for networking until 8:00 p.m.
Guest speaker profiles:
Mickey Mikitani, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Rakuten Group
Founded in Japan in 1997 with the mission to contribute to society by creating value through innovation and entrepreneurship, the Rakuten Group has grown to become one of the world's leading internet services companies.
Rakuten has a dynamic ecosystem of more than 70 services, spanning e-commerce, fintech, digital content and communications, bringing the joy of discovery to 1.8 billion members around the world. Rakuten also became Japan’s newest mobile network operator in 2019.
Born in Kobe, Mikitani was educated at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, began his career in investment banking, and earned his MBA at Harvard Business School. In 2012, he was awarded the HBS Alumni Achievement Award, one of the school’s highest honors.
Mikitani is also a recipient of the Legion of Honour, awarded by the French government in recognition of contributions to the economy and culture of France. In 2011, he was appointed Chairman of the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, which has the longest history and tradition of any orchestra in Japan, and serves as Representative Director of the Japan Association of New Economy (JANE).
He also serves as Vice Chairman and CEO of Rakuten Medical, Inc., a global biotechnology company developing and commercializing precision, cell-targeting investigational photoimmunotherapy on its Alluminox™ platform.
Adam Komisarof, Professor, Keio University
Adam Komisarof, PhD, is Professor in Keio University's Faculty of Letters in Tokyo. He has spent two sabbaticals at the University of Oxford. Adam has published 3 books, with a fourth forthcoming in January 2025: The Sage Handbook of Intercultural Communication. A widely sought public lecturer, he has given over 130 invited lectures and paper presentations in 16 different countries. Also, as an intercultural trainer, Adam has performed scores of workshops over the past 27 years for large companies and governmental organizations in the United States, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Adam is Past President and a Fellow of the International Academy for Intercultural Research, an academic organization dedicated to advancing research in intercultural studies and intergroup understanding in the world.
Please reach out to the Brown University Club of Japan (komisarof.adam@gmail.com) for questions about the event.
Thank you again for your interest in this evening’s event. We look forward to welcoming you in person.
The Enigma of Oedipus & Why We Read Literature
Please join us for a very special treat! Professor Arnold Weinstein will be giving the following online lecture on Saturday, November 9th at 10 am Japan Standard Time (until 11:15 am). All members are welcome, though advance registration is required (see below). Professor Weinstein will be giving this talk with people in mind who have read Oedipus the King as well as those who have not, as he will be tying the themes of this work to broader contemporary issues that are pertinent to all of us.
Lecture description:
Oedipus the King is the Pandora’s Box for Western civilization. It annihilates a host of certainties we take for granted in its view of knowledge and ignorance, and its ramifications go far beyond 5th century BC Athens. Not only Aristotle but Schiller, Nietzsche, Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and others have famously grappled with it. This mix of commentators, from Antiquity to the present, tells us that Sophocles’s play is shockingly relevant, not merely to scholars and thinkers, but to all of us.
Given its plot of an all-powerful ruler, a head of state, who is under investigation, and given its backdrop of Plague and mass death, it is eerily relevant to us in 2024, for we too know something about this mix of issues. Above all, it presents us with a tragic view of belated knowing, for it makes us sense the enormity of all that is hidden or dormant in our lives, biding its time. This was true for Sophocles, it is true for us. Yes, the Good Book tells us that ‘a man reaps what he sows,’ but the darker truth here is: all too often we do not know what we have sown until we reap it.
Yet, like prophecy itself, Sophocles’ play is also keyed to futurity. And it thereby enacts one of Literature’s cardinal requirements: to make us feel – now, as we read or see it - the sentient reality and power of its long-ago crises and transgressions.
If you read or reread Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, you will see these matters writ large. But my argument goes well beyond Sophocles and his play, for it seeks to illuminate the universal drama of ‘coming to know’: a drama most of us are obliged to negotiate, in our lives and in our histories, in our personal story and relationships, and in the fate of our country and our planet, right up to the end.
Lecturer Profile:
Arnold Weinstein is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, emeritus, at Brown University. He is the author of 9 books: Vision and Response in Modern Fiction [1974]; Fictions of the Self: 1550-1800 [1981], The Fiction of Relationship [1988]; Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo [1993]; A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Tells Us About Life [2003]; Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and Morrison [2006]; Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art from Ibsen to Bergman [2008]; Morning, Noon and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books [2011]; The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing [2021]. He has received several Fellowships for scholarship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and several Teaching Awards at Brown University. He has been a visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and a Fulbright professor at Stockholm University, in addition to giving media-based courses on literature at both The Teaching Company and on Coursera.
To register, please click on the following link:
https://keio-univ.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvc-mtrj4tEtEess0Jgt2JpYxj3ifuEc4k
Please note that you must have a Zoom account to register for this event. If you do not have one already, kindly download the software for free, establish your account, and then register.
Brown Club Tennis Gathering
We will be holding our first Brown Club Tennis Gathering in October (the last one was rained out)! All levels are welcome, as the emphasis will be on social tennis, rallying with each other, and having fun getting to know everyone. If enough people sign up, we can also organize people in groups based on experience/ability.
Date and time: Saturday, October 5, 11 am to 1 pm
Location: MUFG Park in western Tokyo
Access page:
https://www.mufgpark.mufg.jp/access/
MUFG Park is about 11 minutes by bus from Kichijoji station and a 15 minute walk from Seibuyagisawa station on the Seibu Shinjuku Line. Parking is also available.
The park is slightly off the beaten path, but getting court reservations on weekends is extremely challenging around Tokyo. Here, we should be able to get enough court space.
Cost: Another benefit of this park is that it is reasonably priced. We will need to cover 4,000 yen in total for each court that we reserve, so the cost will be calculated based on how many people we have and how many courts we reserve. Rest assured, it won't cost more than 2,000 yen per person, and possibly less. Other courts in central Tokyo can cost up to 18,000 yen per hour.
If you are interested in attending, please email Adam Komisarof at komisarof.adam@gmail.com.
The deadline to sign up is August 31st.
If the weather is bad on the 5th, then we will need to cancel. In that case, all participants will be notified as soon as a decision is made and the park allows us to cancel the reservation.
Joint Welcome back Happy Hour with Yale and Brown
Please RSVP from here.
Alumni Clubs in Japan (Yale, Brown, Columbia and more schools) cordially invite all of recent graduates and other alumni for “Welcome Back happy hour on September 4."
Here are the details:
Date: September 4, 2024 19:00PM – 21:00PM
Venue: 形式/Format：対面/In person
住所：AUX BACCHANALES KIOICHO 東京都千代田区紀尾井町4-1新紀尾井町ビル 1F
Address：AUX BACCHANALES KIOICHO： Kioicho Bldg. 1F, 4-1, Kioicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo
Fee:
Graduates between 2019-2024 (or after) graduates: 2,500 yen
Other graduates: 6,000 yen
Kindly note that all attendees are required to sign up and pay in advance.
If you are interested in joining, please sign up through Peatix website: https://sept4-intercol-welcome.peatix.com
This is an open event for Brown grads and friends. (Alumni from other schools and prospectives are also welcome). This is a great way for recent graduates to meet each other, and for younger and older graduates to make contact and network!
Details: https://japan.alumni.columbia.edu/0409031inter_college_welcome_back_party
Contact:
Amy Cordell (Brown): daveandamy2000@gmail.com
Critically Exploring Inner Space: Brown's Pioneering Program in Contemplative Studies
An online lecture by the world-renowned scholar of contemplative studies and East Asian religions, Brown University Professor Harold Roth
In a world that is fraught with all kinds of personal, societal and environmental challenges, how can we help to build psychological resilience in our students?
At Brown our answer is through the development of "Contemplative Intelligence;" this is the goal of the important new academic field we have pioneered at Brown: Contemplative Studies. In this lecture I will discuss the pedagogical structures of this new field, explain the intellectual rationale that is involved in our empirical exploration of "inner space," and present some of the results of cognitive scientific research on our students. I will also show the influence of our program in higher education and in the creation of a new society of scholars, the International Society for Contemplative Research. I will also point out how our pedagogical model draws deeply upon East Asian cultures and worldviews.
Harold D. Roth is professor of religious studies and founding director of the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University. He is a specialist in Chinese philosophy and textual analysis, the classical Daoist tradition, the comparative study of contemplative experiences, and a pioneer of the academic field of contemplative studies, in which he created the first Bachelor’s degree program at a major research university in North America. He has written and edited nine books and more than 50 scholarly articles in these areas including Original Tao (Columbia, 1999), a translation and analysis of the oldest text on breath meditation in China, “Against Cognitive Imperialism,” (Religion East and West, 2008), a critique of conceptual bias in Cognitive Sciences and Religious Studies. He led the team of four scholars who created the thousand-page magnum opus, The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China (2010). This 139 BCE Daoist compendium was long considered the last great untranslated work of classical Chinese thought. Many of his philosophical writings were compiled in The Contemplative Foundations of Classical Daoism (2021). In 2021 he also published Manifesting Zen: Master Dharma Talks from Mt. Baldy by Kyōzan Jōshū Sasaki Rōshi, the Rinzai Zen master with whom he did intensive study and practice for 40 years.
Intercollegiate Seated Dinner
On July 3rd, 2024, BUCJ members attended a joint event with The Cambridge and Oxford Society Tokyo and Yale Club of Japan for a seated dinner at The Tokyo Club, one of Tokyo’s most renowned members-only dining clubs.
Seats were limited and awarded on a first come, first served basis. Interest in this event was strong and registration was closed soon after the event was announced. Seventy guests, including 25 from BUCJ, enjoyed a 4-course dinner in an idyllic setting, surrounded by friends old and new.
A 4-course dinner was served (starter, soup, main course, dessert, coffee/tea) including pre-dinner drinks, drinks during the meal, and post-dinner drinks. Both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages were offered.
The dress code was strict: Smart business attire for all (ties optional, jackets required), including business shoes (sandals, sneakers, etc. not allowed).
Attendance fee: 7,000 yen (Including pre-dinner drinks, 4-course meal, and after-dinner drinks. For Brown graduates in Classes of 2021-2024, 5,000 yen (The Brown Club subsidized the extra fee for young members).
The menu included a meat course. For pescatarians or vegetarians, alternative arrangements could be made by contacting the event organizers in advance.
Online seminar: “Marriages of Convenience”: Ruling Coalitions in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand
The Brown University Alumni Association of Hong Kong and the Brown Club of Philippines will be hosting Professor Mark R. Thompson, Chair Professor, Department of Public and International Affairs and Director, Southeast Asia Research Center, City University of Hong Kong in an online seminar to be held on Zoom.
Intercollegiate Hanami 2024
The Georgetown Alumni Club of Japan led an Intercollegiate Hamani for 2024.
Paxson Visit
As part of the Dream Bowl festivities, Hiroshi and Haruko Mikitani generously hosted a reception at the Hotel Okura to welcome Brown President Christina Paxson.