Speaker
Prof. HSIUNG Hansun
School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University
From flows to blockages and things that move to the inveterately local, the concept of “circulation” and its discontents have, for the past decade, been a cornerstone of debates in global history. This talk seeks a somewhat unorthodox approach to understanding the how circulation was understood in interwar and wartime Japan, arguing that one of its most concentrated expressions was to be found neither in political economy of trade, nor diplomatic relations, nor telecommunications infrastructures per se, but rather the realm of psychical research. Starting in 1910, psychical research began to emerge in Japan first with the work of Tokyo Imperial University psychologist Fukurai Tomokichi (1869-1952). Core to psychical research was the claim that “material” laws of physics might be transcended ways that allowed persons to see and perceive across barriers of time and space. Tracing Fukurai Tomokichi’s work with the medium Mita Kōichi (1883-1943), I examine the ways in which psychical research articulated its role in Japan’s imperial project both theoretically—for instance, through the notion of a “cosmic Japanese empire” (宇宙的日本帝国)—and practically, e.g., in military-sponsored projects to discover new submarine and subterranean resources, and even the production of images of the dark side of the moon. I conclude with more general conceptual and methodological questions of why forms of fringe science, and psychical research in particular, can serve as unexpectedly fruitful arenas for the historicization of the circulatory imaginary.
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