Please join us for a lecture by Nobuko Toyosawa about the Japanese artist Tani Motokatsu’s visit to Ezo (Hokkaido) in 1799. Motokatsu visited Ezo as a member of a governmental delegation sent to record life on the northern island, which was not yet integrated into Japan. Toyosawa’s paper explores how Motokatsu used conventional frames of reference to deal with unfamiliar landscapes, both literally and figuratively.

Nobuko Toyosawa, PhD is a post-doctoral fellow in Japanese studies at the University of Chicago. Her research deals with spatial narratives and cultural artifacts that comprise a sense of communal togetherness to understand the formation of cultural communities. She is completing a book manuscript, Imaginative Mapping: Place and Geographic Affinity in Japan since the 17th Century, which explores the representations of landscape that played the vital role in mediating Japan’s cultural identity.

The lecture will be held in the American Geological Society Library at UWM’s Golda Meir Library at 3 pm on Wednesday, March 9th. This event is sponsored by the UWM Year of the Humanities, the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, and the Department of Art History.