This past May, Fordham took a big step toward embracing this new world, as 14 members of the faculty and administration traveled to Sophia University in Japan as part of the first Fordham Faculty Research Abroad program.

The delegation, which was led by Fordham’s provost, the late Stephen M. Freedman, Ph.D., hailed from fields as varied as political science, economics, biological sciences, education, social service, and art history. The theme of the trip was comparative urban studies.

George Hong, Ph.D., chief research officer and associate vice president for academic affairs, said the trip was the result of Fordham’s Continuous University Strategic Planning (CUSP) process, which the University began in 2015.

In the CUSP process, four areas were given high priority: Interdisciplinary research, sponsored research, global research, and faculty-student research collaborations. This trip fulfilled all of those priorities by bringing Fordham researchers into contact with peers in Japan who are pursuing research on many topics within that field. It also established an exchange program for faculty and students between the two schools.

Collaborating on Food Justice

One of those connections was between Garrett Broad, Ph.D., assistant professor of Communication and Media Studies and James Farrer, Ph.D., a professor of sociology and global studies at Sophia University. Farrer has been researching food entrepreneurship in Tokyo and the role that small vendors play in local economies, a topic of interest to Broad, who penned More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change (University of California Press, 2016).

“We’re talking about setting up a workshop here in New York at some point next year where we bring together a group of scholars who are exploring issues related to food, society, globalization and local food economies,” Broad said.

“The hope for this enterprise is it’s not a one off, where we had this nice trip to Tokyo, made some friends and that’s that. We want to continue and build some partnerships, and since there’s only so much you can do in just a few days, a workshop is a way we can keep the momentum going.”

Broad also took the opportunity to visit and interview scientists at a Tokyo organization that is experimenting with “cellular agriculture.” The technology, which Broad had already been researching for an upcoming project, involves growing meat in a laboratory, negating the need to slaughter animals. To help him overcome language and cultural barriers, he recruited Sophia University undergraduate students to accompany him.

Making Personal Connections in the Field

Annika Hinze, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science and director of Fordham’s urban studies program, came away from the trip deeply affected by potential collaborations. While one group from Fordham was given a tour related to sustainability and environmental issues, she attended a tour centered on social issues that was led by Nanako Inaba, a professor in Sophia’s department of global studies.

Of particular interest to Hinze was a public park that had recently been partially sold to private interests, including Nike. A sizable homeless population still calls the park home, and Hinze interviewed one of them to get a sense of how his presence was actually a form of protest.

“I’m a field researcher first and foremost, and in order to understand places, it’s vital to actually visit them and get to know them a little bit. The initial connections you make with people can be the jumping point for creating meaningful research partnerships,” she said.

“The walking tours were amazing, because they were done by people who are academics who are researching social or sustainability issues and who really know the environment.”

Global Partnerships Critical to Funded Research

Connections such as these are crucial to solving challenges, Hong said. They’re also often a prerequisite for researchers who wants to get their projects funded by some external sources.

“More and more American foundations are requiring global partnership as precondition for applications. If you don’t have an international partner, you are out,” he said.

On that front, the trip was also a success, as Fordham faculty identified 27 researchers in Japan who are ready to collaborate on joint grant proposals, research projects, and research papers. Hong and his team also identified more than 40 funding opportunities to support these research projects. Several faculty members are working on joint proposals, he said, and one has already submitted one. He expects that there will be opportunities for Fordham students to assist in future studies as well.

Hong noted that a byproduct of Fordham faculty traveling together was also an increase in collaborations amongst themselves. Next summer, a group of them will travel to Europe, where the theme will be “digital scholarship.”

“They immediately picked up some ideas and learned from each other. It was the same subject, urban studies, but different disciplines, education, social service, the sciences, history, social sciences, humanities, natural science,” he said.

In addition to prearranged meetings, there were serendipitous meetings at Sophia University as well. Takehiro Watanabe, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology at Sophia whose research touches on participatory community environmental processes, led the Fordham contingent on a tour of a river revitalization project and chaired a panel discussion that Broad participated in.

“Afterward, he saw some things in my presentation that connected to some of the subjects that he’s interested in, such as participatory science and citizen science,” Broad said.

“The more time you’re able to spend, and the more people you’re able to meet, you realize you have more in common.”

The exhibit represents the culmination of a productive post-doctorate project by Fordham’s Asato Ikeda, PhD, assistant professor of art history, also the exhibit’s curator.

Ikeda culled “A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints” from more than 2,500 Japanese woodblock prints in the museum’s collection, the largest of its kind in Canada. The images depict adolescent males in Edo-period Japan, who have yet to go through the traditional coming of age ceremony but who were considered sexually active and attractive by the society.

“In the exhibition we’re developing a new definition of gender,” said Ikeda. “It’s not just determined by biological sex, but also age, role in sexual hierarchy, and appearance.”

By focusing on the topic of gender and sexuality, the exhibit provides relevance to contemporary audiences grappling with the issue, said Ikeda.

Most of the prints are from the Edward Walker Collection, which was given to the museum in 1926, but were largely underexplored. With Ikeda’s expertise in Japanese art, the museum was able to begin an overall assessment, while simultaneously curating a show.

“There were boxes that nobody had opened for years,” she said. “It was very challenging because not much was on the museum database, so we had to record all of the information.”

The museum kept a blog of the process, but outside of the database and blog very little of the collection has been seen online. Digitizing would be a costly 5-to-10-year process, said Ikeda. As such, the exhibition represents a rare opportunity not only to examine the wakashu, but also an opportunity to view significant pieces from the collection.

“The museum collection is so comprehensive that we were able to choose such a specific theme,” she said.

Ikeda collaborated on the project with Joshua S. Mostow, PhD, an expert in the gender structure of Japan’s Edo Period, which lasted from the 17^th to the 19^th centuries.

In the process, the curators consulted with the Canada’s LGBT community, social workers, and activists through workshops. The concept was very well received with great interest in the historical aspect of gender issues and appreciation that an established museum would explore the subject in in such depth, said Ikeda.

“We try to be clear that the wakashu are not identical to LGBT culture today,” said Ikeda. “But certainly its culture is very important in terms of thinking about diverse gender and sexuality practices.”

“For example, the word ‘gay’ is very specific to our contemporary culture. It’s very democratic, egalitarian, and individualistic, and you have claim to your identity. In 17^th-century Japan, however, you couldn’t really claim your identity. It was imposed on you by age, gender, and class.”

A section of the exhibition is dedicated to contemporary identity issues, but some of it is also devoted to different gender and sexual norms and ideals—from the pederasty of ancient Greece to 19^th-century binary gender norms in Victorian England to the “two spirited people” of the first nations.

Traditional Form, Edo to the 20th Century

Ikeda’s own area of research and expertise centers on fascist paintings celebrated by the Japanese government and authorities during World War II. “The desire was to return to quote-unquote ‘traditional,’” said Ikeda, “The fascist paintings don’t look violent and don’t show soldiers, but those peaceful looking paintings were meant to evoke pride in Japanese traditions and justify the war against the West.”

When Ikeda was young, stories her grandfather told her sparked an interest in the fascist art. He was from southern Japan, where the kamikaze planes lifted off.

“My grandfather was obsessed with kamikaze and he was ultranationalist,” said Ikeda.

She noted that only since the turn of the century did scholars begin to look at Japanese wartime art. The dominance of the Japanese right-wing in politics, which resulted from the strong U.S.-Japan alliance since the Cold War, prohibits the kind of self-examination engaged in by German people after World War II, she said.

“Japan has trouble understanding this part of history,” she said. “In Germany you can’t deny the holocaust and the Germans collectively tried to be apologetic, but that’s not the case for Japan, where people can publicly claim that the Nanking massacre never happened. There is no consensus. Basic historical facts continue to be contested and dismissed.”

As she worked on her soon-to-be-published book, Soldiers and Cherry Blossoms: Japanese Art, Fascism, and World War II, she discovered that some relatives of wartime artists remained resistant to allowing her to publish the material.

In both the case of the wakashu and the case of the fascist art, Ikeda is taking an unflinching look at history; however, she refuses to make a judgment call on whether the art is good or bad. That, she said, is not an art historian’s job. Instead, her job is to situate artworks in historical context.

“The art is not just important historically, it’s very important politically and ethically,” she said.

“There’s something bordering on spiritual when all the elements of the world by chance are in synchronicity, and you—and only you at that moment in time—are paying homage to time itself,” he said.

As artist in residence in the Department of Visual Arts and programmer for the Ildiko Butler Gallery, Lipani Gallery, and Hayden Hartnett Project Space, Apicella-Hitchcock wears several hats at Fordham. One is supervision of Documentary Photography Japan, a six-year-old course in which he chaperones six to eight students on a trip to Japan over the winter break.

Apicella-Hitchcock taught at the Tokyo University of the Arts in 2005. He said that, like New York, Tokyo is the kind of place where the more you look for things to photograph, the more interesting it becomes. He and fellow visual arts professor Joseph Lawton teach a similar course in Italy in the summer. In both cases, upon return stateside some 3,000 images are edited down to 64, which are then printed and bound in a book.

Both are digital courses. Apicella-Hitchcock said the goal is to appeal to students with digital photography, which has become democratized thanks to the ubiquitousness of cameras on phones.

“But then we take these interested parties and hook them into the more sophisticated photography, which is photographic syntax: putting together sequences of images that build up and create a larger meaning than the individual integers,” he said.

“The meaning in between the photographs is where the poetry of the art form comes out. One can start to create flashbacks or premonitions of what is to come. One can definitely develop subtleties, so it’s not just the bombast of a greatest hits.”

One of the joys of working with a small group of students is witnessing how creative they can be, since they have no pre-conceived notions about the craft, he said.

“I say to students, only you can do what you’re doing at this point in time. Only you have your sensitivities, your history, your cultural background, your gender background, and your age. And since you’re college students, your youthful enthusiasm is an asset. Your fearlessness allows you to barge into situations that you have no businesses being in, had you thought about it. And consequently, you get amazing primary research.”

With the Ildilko Butler gallery, Apicella-Hitchcock works with students who have finished their senior projects, faculty showing off their latest works, and artists whose projects fit the bill for a specific theme. Sometimes it’s as thematically open as landscapes; other times its more specific, like the 2013 collection of art forgeries that was timed around the Fordham/FBI International Conference on Cyber Security.

“I corral artists, I trust them. They make something, and afterwards you find sometimes tenuous but genuine connections between the works, which is an exploration for them and for myself as well, which is why [artists]do it,” he said.

He lists Gary Metz: Quaking Aspen: A Lyric Complaint, which Apicella-Hitchcock curated with Lawton in the winter of 2014, as one of his favorite exhibits. Metz took black and white landscape pictures of Aspen, Colorado, that challenged the prevailing notions of nature as sublime, heroic, and unspoiled. Metz assumed the viewer was intelligent, and could handle a certain amount of ambiguity, Apicella-Hitchcock said.

“Unlike a stereotypical Hollywood film, you don’t see the ending coming from a mile away. It’s more like European art film, where, even though you’ve watched the movie 20 times, you’re still not sure what its about,” he said.

Advances in technology have opened up new realms in photography, and Apicella-Hitchcock said he’s particularly intrigued by cameras that can now operate in extremely low light, without the need for flashes. But in the end, he said a good photograph always depends more on the human behind the camera.

“I think it was Paul Strand who said in order to make a good photograph, you have to have something to say about the world. Photography is still all about encoding that image with the photographer’s sensibilities, intelligence, and sensitivity to whoever or whatever was in front of them,” he said.

Visual Arts Students Spend Winter Break
Documenting Far East

Documentary Photography: Japan, a visual arts class taught over the winter break by Fordham Artist-in-Residence Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, introduced undergraduates to the booming metropolises of Tokyo and Kyoto.

Students were tasked with developing an emphasis on generating documentary projects focusing on the people, culture, and architecture of Japan. Their 10-day trip will be further documented in a professional-quality book that will include essays detailing the richness of their experience abroad.