# Japan Anthropology Workshop

Japan Anthropology Workshop (JAWS) is an international academic association concerned with furthering the field of anthropology of Japan. JAWS holds major conferences – some in conjunction with the European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS) – as well as smaller workshops and seminars. It runs a website and issues a newsletter. JAWS publishes selected works on Japan anthropology in partnership with Routledge.
The first conference was organised in Oxford in March 1984. It is now a conference held approximately every 18 months, organised with hosts across the world.

## History

The Japan Anthropology Workshop developed out of a growing international interest in the anthropology of Japan, both for from anthropologists looking at Japan as a country which may have a contribution to make to their own specialist field, and from scholars already specialising in Japanese studies who increasingly appreciate the insights that an anthropological approach can bring to their work. The idea for JAWS was conceived at the 1982 European Association of Japanese Studies (EAJS) Conference in The Hague, after which a planning meeting was organised the following year at the Nissan Institute for Japanese Studies in Oxford. The first workshop was held in March 1984 when a need was identified for a forum for the growing but largely isolated band of anthropologists of Japan to meet together and exchange ideas. It was here that JAWS was officially founded.

## Conferences

An overview of the JAWS conferences from 2005.
| Date | Title | Subject | Location | Keynote speaker | Notes |
| 2005 | 16th JAWS Conference | East Meets West | University of Hong Kong | Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney | |
| 2005 | 17th JAWS Conference | Time and Memory | University of Vienna | | Held in conjunction with the 11th European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS) Conference |
| 2007 | 18th JAWS Conference | Japan and Materiality in a Broader Perspective | University of Oslo | Joy Hendry | |
| 2010 | 20th JAWS Conference | Religion, Ritual, and Identity in Japan | University of Texas at Austin | Delores Martinez | |
| 2011 | 21st JAWS Conference | | Otago University, at Dunedin | | |
| 2011 | 22nd JAWS Conference | | Tallinn University in Estonia | | Held concurrent with Section 5 (Anthropology and Sociology) of the 13th EAJS Conference |
| 2013 | 23rd JAWS Conference | | University of Pittsburgh, USA | | |
| 2014 | 24th JAWS Conference | Living with disaster: Comparative approaches Mutual anthropology: a proposal for future equality in the discipline | Chiba, Japan | Dr. Hayashi Isao and Dr. Brigitte Steger Professors Joy Hendry and Shioji Yuko | Held at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and organised by the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology (JACSA) |
| 2014 | 25th JAWS Conference | | Ljubljana, Slovenia | | Held concurrent with Section 5 of the 14th International Conference of the European Association |
| 2015 | 26th JAWS Conference | | Boğaziçi University, Istanbul Turkey Seijo University, Tokyo Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, Germany | | |
| 2016 | 27th JAWS Conference | | Kobe University, Japan | | Held concurrent with the 2nd EAJS Japan Conference |
| 2017 | 28th JAWS Conference | | Lisbon, Portugal | | Held concurrent with section 5a and 5b of the 15th EAJS International Conference |
| 2019 | 29th JAWS Conference | | Aarhus University, Denmark | | |