Tokyo Humanities Cafe feeds hungry minds

Japan Times

07-04-2025

What do cookie decorating, lesbian cinema and Roger Fry's theory of art have in common?
That sounds like the set-up to a weird joke, but the answer is that they were all recent presentation topics at Tokyo Humanities Cafe, a free quarterly event held in Ryozan Park Cafe in Sugamo. Conducted in English, THC meetups consist of four speakers from the world of the humanities sharing a 15-minute presentation on their research or passion, a setup similar to a TED Talk or Pecha-Kucha Night.
THC is organized by two professors, Alex Watson of Meiji University and Laurence Williams of Sophia University, both of whom specialize in 18th— and 19th-century English literature.
The idea for the event came about back in 2016 when Watson, Williams and two other Tokyo-based academics were looking for a way to connect the city's humanities researchers. The Japanese capital is home to some 145 institutes of higher learning, with a dizzying array of programs, lectures and initiatives.
Yet the group found it difficult to keep tabs with what was going on outside their own academic bubbles, and discovered a lack of awareness among their overseas peers with regard to the high caliber of research being conducted here.
As a solution, the four founded the nonprofit Tokyo Humanities Project, which involved launching a Facebook page to list upcoming events and publish short interviews with academics about their current projects.
To promote the page, the group decided to host an informal spin-off event in 2017, inviting four professors to speak. Even with Facebook as their sole vehicle for publicity, they attracted an impressive crowd. The response was so positive that Watson and Williams felt there was enough demand to continue hosting live events.
'People just like to hear people speak live, right? We live in a world in which everything gets consumed through screens and our attention span is just broken up into two-minute YouTube videos,' says Williams, 44. The in-person experience, meanwhile, forces deeper engagement. It's a chance in the multitasking, perma-connected digital world to just sit and think on one thing, encouraged by politesse to focus on the speaker and genuinely consider their thesis. A live presentation offers a richness of nonverbal cues and an immersion in atmosphere and community that's missing when you're behind a screen.
For academics too, the experience of speaking to a diverse lay audience has benefits.
'Presenting at the cafe is a really good challenge for them,' Williams says. 'Because often if you're presenting as an academic, you're speaking to an audience that you know already has a certain kind of background knowledge about the field. You don't really have to try and think in broader terms like: Why is this important? Why is this interesting to a broader audience? How can I explain this in terms that make sense to the person on the street?'
Over time, Williams and Watson began reaching out to speakers beyond the academic world as well, exploring the question of what exactly the humanities encompass.
'Some of the best talks have been from people who, when we asked them, they're like, 'I'm not sure I'm exactly humanities,' but they bring something completely fresh to it,' says Watson, 45.
The crew behind THC are always on the lookout for new presenters with fresh perspectives as a way to keep the events interesting for regular attendees, including themselves. While there is an odd theme, they are usually looking for a balance of disciplines and a mix of Japanese and non-Japanese speakers. Recently, they've begun inviting musicians to perform, and they want to consider how to include more visual arts and branch into new areas like video games.
Anne-Gaëlle Saliot of Duke University gives a lecture on the classic French New Wave film 'Hiroshima mon amour.' |
Courtesy of Alex Watson
Watson avoids adherence to a narrow definition of the humanities, referring to a 'vast field of endeavors' instead. 'We've never really put boundaries around it in this cafe, where you can get people from an enormous range of disciplines,' he says.
THC has also made networking and community-building a priority. In between presentations, participants can circulate, ask questions of the speakers and introduce themselves to each other, all facilitated by a cabaret-style setup with many shared tables rather than forward-facing rows. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the event went on hiatus rather than move online because Watson and Williams felt so strongly about the value of getting people in the same room to connect.
At the group's most recent event held in January, the value of the in-person dynamic was clearly on display. Around 30 people of various ages and nationalities attended, some newcomers and some regulars, all of varying ages and nationalities.
It was the second THC for Glen Burns, 65, who enjoys the informal atmosphere and broad array of presenters. He was talking with first-timer Mami Oyamada, 33, who had come to support one of the night's speakers, and Heidi Lee, 30, a previous speaker. Burns said the event's appeal is the chance to meet up with a diverse group of intellectuals and 'inquire into what makes things work the way they work.'
As Burns suggested, the night's conversations often turned to issues of 'real world' significance and the impact of shared experience. The cyberpunk poet talked about how advances in technology sometimes outpace futuristic fiction, with art and science feeding each other. A speaker describing challenges she's encountered as a multicultural Japanese person prompted discussion about how helping schoolkids and teachers navigate questions of identity can improve academic outcomes.
Yutaka Kikugawa, founder of the music education program El Sistema Japan, speaks at a Tokyo Humanities Cafe event. |
Courtesy of Alex Watson
The atmosphere presented a stark contrast to the image of the humanities as fanciful, impractical or stuffy, disparagements that have been used to justify department cuts at universities worldwide.
'The humanities have been in crisis for a long time,' Watson says. 'We need to rethink how we make ourselves part of the contemporary world as it is.
'Humanities are about interpreting events and understanding the significance of events,' he continues. 'Being able to judge different arguments and ideas based on evidence, to understand your own subjectivity and how that informs your perspective.'
While these skills are certainly useful in the current 'post-truth age,' they are also vital to the sciences as well as in business and in life more generally.
'Humanities work in Tokyo is exciting. It's cutting edge. It's totally relevant to people's lives — and it's not an ivory tower,' Williams says. 'Nobody comes away from the cafe thinking that the humanities aren't relevant. The humanities are what it means to be human.'
For more information about Tokyo Humanities Cafe and to learn about upcoming events, visit www.tokyohumanities.org or follow THC on Facebook at facebook.com/tokyohumanities