"The Pluralistic Convergence and Cultural Embeddedness of Communication Media" Lecture Series 1: Revolution, Ruination, and Media

Speakers:
1. Joel Littler (Japan Foundation - Global Japan Studies Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo);
2. Alan Dai (PhD student in the Department of Asian Languages & Cultures at University of California, Los Angeles)

Topics:
1. How Do Revolutionaries Talk?: Writing in Secret and Entertaining in Public in Tokyo, 1902-1910
2. Writing Ryukyu as a Lost Nation: Kiyuna Tsugumasa’s Postloyalist Writing in Historical Discussion of the Loss of Ryukyu

Host:
Fang-Ru Lin (Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica)

Discussant:
Rwei-ren Wu (Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica)

Date and Time:
Thursday, August 27, 2026. 2-5 p.m.

Place:
Room 802 at ITH

Language:
Mandarin and English

Registration:
Click Here to Register (redirecting to Chinese version)

Please Note:

1. To register, please fill out the registration form by August 24 (Mon.).
2. After registration, please attend directly. No further notice will be sent. If you are not able to attend after registration, please contact us (email: bettywong40129@gmail.com).

About the Lecture

When communities disappear or are forcibly dissolved, how do individuals reinvent or transcend their relationship to “the nation” amid the sweeping tides of imperial expansion and collapse? Taking revolution, ruination, and media as its core themes, this workshop traces how those excluded or abandoned by existing orders in modern East Asia remapped new forms of belonging through transnational action and practice.

Title 1:
How Do Revolutionaries Talk?: Writing in Secret and Entertaining in Public in Tokyo, 1902-1910 

Abstract:
At the turn of the twentieth century in Japan, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Filipino and many other revolutionary activists gathered in Tokyo. This paper discusses the strategies they used exchanging ideas and making themselves understood. This included speaking face-to-face, but also ‘brush talk’ in literary Sinitic, written translations, preparing written texts in advance of meetings, journals and newspaper articles, books, as well as oral performances such as naniwabushi. Chinese, Russian, and English were the main languages being translated into Japanese, but publications like Revolutionary Review (Kakumei Hyōron) were also a nexus for translating things from Japanese to Russian (in Volya) and Chinese (in Min Pao). As such, there was a transnational flow of ideas circulating around and through Japanese, with many origins and destinations. By examining sources left by various activists and intellectuals, this paper looks at how the same ideas were expressed differently in different languages, modes of articulation, and cultural contexts.

Bio:
Dr. Joel Littler is a Japan Foundation - Global Japan Studies Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (Tōbunken), University of Tokyo. He is a transnational cultural and intellectual historian of Modern Japan. His ongoing monograph project is titled A World Revolution: Imagining the Future in Meiji Japan, in which he examines the cultural and intellectual activities that emerged from the losing sides of Japan’s civil conflicts. Dr. Littler received his DPhil in History from the University of Oxford in June 2024. He has previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University (2024-25), a Visiting Researcher at Kyushu University (2022-23) and as a Lecturer in Philosophy at Thammasat University and Mahidol University in Thailand (2018-20).

Title 2:
Writing Ryukyu as a Lost Nation: Kiyuna Tsugumasa’s Postloyalist Writing in Historical Discussion of the Loss of Ryukyu
以琉球作亡國：喜友名嗣正（蔡璋）在《琉球亡國史譚》中的後遺民寫作

Abstract:
While Taiwanese and Japanese scholars have already investigated in depth the political activities of Kiyuna Tsugumasa (Chinese name Cai Zhang) as an advocate for Ryukyuan independence in postwar Taiwan, this paper in instead turns its focus to Kiyuna’s 1951 work, Liuqiu wangguo shi tan (Historical Account of the Loss of Ryukyu), pointing out its unique position within East Asian literary history. Through a textual analysis and cross-referencing of historical sources regarding Kiyuna’s longest public-facing work, this paper not only contextualizes the immediate origins of this “history of a lost nation" (wangguo shi) within the postwar East Asian context and Kiyuna’s intelligence-gathering work on behalf of the Nationalist government, but also traces another of the work’s lineages: namely, the wangguo shi genre that flourished across China, Korea, and Vietnam in the early twentieth century. Kiyuna’s adoption of this genre to advocate for the “unification of China and Ryukyu into one integrated body” could admittedly be deemed an anachronistic loyalism detached from his time. However, drawing upon David Der-wei Wang’s theoretical framework, this paper argues that a postloyalist consciousness also emerges within Kiyuna’s work. At the historical juncture of postwar Taiwan and the Ryukyus, and on the cusp of the early Cold War in the Asia-Pacific, what Kiyuna mourns through the wangguo shi genre is not the historical reality of the Sino-Ryukyuan tributary relationship, but rather a phantasmatic past sculpted from the residues of history that comprise the present. By reexamining Cai’s writings, this paper explores the inherent contradictions embedded within modern political thought—even a thought so steeped in nostalgia—as it attempts to traverse national space and historiographical time, thereby offering a new avenue of inquiry for research into the history of Ryukyuans living in postwar Taiwan.

Bio:
Alan Dai is a second year PhD student in the Department of Asian Languages & Cultures at UCLA. His dissertation will focus on the cultural history of bilingual periodicals in Taiwan, Vietnam, and Asian American communities during the twentieth century. His work has been published in the Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies as well as History and Perspectives: The Journal of the Chinese American Historical Society.