No.123 Seminar ： Reconstructing the past from unearthed documents
- Kazushi Iwao (The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research)
- 2017/01/10 4:30pm
- The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research (Research Administration Building 1F)
- Japanese(This seminar is open for students and researchers at Kyoto Univ.)
Summary
Between the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th centuries, remarkable number of manuscripts written in various languages were suddenly discovered from current Xinjiang region and Gansu provinces in China. Using these unearthed documents, I mainly have researched the history of early Tibet (7th -10th centuries) and adjacent areas for more than 15 years. Although these areas are outside of the current Tibet, a number of official and private documents used in early Tibet were found there, because these areas were within the sphere of early Tibet, which was far larger than the current one. Data from a single document is limited: in many cases, it only tells us microscopic daily life in the area where the document was found. However, by accumulating these data, we can reach the macroscopic social and political backgrounds. In this lecture, I will introduce how to study unearthed document, my research results and why I become to study the diplomacy of 7th-13th centuries in Eastern Eurasia in the Hakubi project.
* Before Dr. Iwao’s talk, Dr. Croydon will report on her overall activity in the Hakubi project in the first 20 mins.
Speaker : Silvia Croydon
Title: Japan’s Police Detention System (Or “What I Learnt as a Hakubi Researcher”)
Abstract: Japan’s criminal justice system diverges in a number of ways from its counterparts in the rest of the developed world; famously, for instance, it returns some of the highest rates for confession, conviction and crime clearance. Among developed nations, Japan also permits criminal suspects to be held in police detention prior to being charged with a crime the longest – up to 23 days for each charge. I will explain the historical basis for this policy choice, and the modern day domestic police detention policy-making landscape.