Coerced and Forlorn: Centering Forced Labor in the Visual Art of Tomiyama Taeko

KOICHI TAKASHIMA LECTURE IN JAPANESE CULTURAL STUDIES 2025

APRIL 23, 4-6pm
McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020)

Coerced and Forlorn: Centering Forced Labor in the Visual Art of Tomiyama Taeko
Dr. Laura Hein
A major recurring theme for artist Tomiyama Taeko (1921-2021) was the larger social implications of the practice of forced labor. This starting point led her to several different analyses, including one of the first critiques of the Japanese military’s use of “comfort women.”

Laura Hein, the Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of History at Northwestern University, works on modern Japan in its international context. Her two most recent books are The New Cambridge History of Japan vol. 3; The Modern Japanese Nation and Empire: c. 1868 to the Twenty-First Century, and Post-Fascist Japan: Political Culture in Kamakura after World War II, 2018 (Japanese edition, 2023).