east asian studies

The Keepsake Left Behind

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My love is as the path through the bamboo groves;
With the coming of the autumn wind was an endless fall of dewdrops.

A gifted scholar and teacher, the late Roselee Bundy focused much of her study on poetry, specifically poems written by women in Medieval Japan. When, how, and why did these women write poems? Why should we care? Dr. Bundy, Professor Emerita of Japanese Language and Literature at Kalamazoo College, spent more than three decades exploring these questions. The legacy of her explorations is the subject of the 2022 Nagai Kafu Lecture by Christina Laffin, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair of Premodern Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of British Columbia. Roselee was a lover of books and generous reviewer of books, so her legacy includes a trove of reading (measured by truckload!) as well as a posthumous gift to support study abroad and travel to support K students’ scholarly work in East Asian studies. All things have song and sound, and poetry was a way in. These woman poets, contended Rose, wrote poems to open a rich life and landscape of mind that transcended loss and the borders of self, community, gender, and nation. Among Rose’s many translations is the following by Izumi Shibiku:

Never did I think
that I myself, still living,
not forgetting,
would become the keepsake
you have left behind.

Paralympics Pioneer

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Japan has been the (unlikely) prime mover in the development of the Paralympics movement, says Professor Dennis Frost, which is a surprising fact given the country’s nearly total inexperience with disability sports in the early 1960s, when it made the monumental decision to host the 1964 Paralympics in Tokyo. Since that time Japan has provided foundational contributions to the expansion of the Paralympics, including: stronger links to the Olympics; expansion of participation from a single category (spinal cord injury) to multiple categories of disability; growth in the number of largescale regional and international events; the evolution of Paralympic focus from rehabilitation to elite competition; exponential growth in media coverage; and the movement’s effect on social changes, including barrier free environments and inclusion more generally. Frost is the Wen Chao Chen Associate Professor of East Asian Social Sciences. The Paralympics movement in Japan (and the world), he says, is a complicated and imperfect success story (still being written) about the effect of large events like the Paralympic Games and (even more so) of people on the course of durable changes to society. His K-Talk is based on his recent book: More Than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan.