Temporalities and Tenses: Vietnamese Internal and External Migration and its Socio-cultural Impacts on Vietnamese and Diasporic People

This panel examines Vietnamese internal and external migration, exploring its socio-cultural impacts. It shows that internal migration often arises from civic precarity, such as job market saturation, low wages, and overpopulation, prompting movement from rural areas to urban centers.

During migration, individuals leave their close-knit village networks for anonymous urban areas with few social contacts. Internal migrants face classic challenges, including sociocultural prejudices, loneliness, and a lack of support. High living costs in cities, coupled with inadequate salaries, make it difficult to meet social obligations and living expenses, leading to tensions between migrants, their families, and the state.

As a result, internal migration often serves as a temporary phase for individuals seeking better income, social networks, or relief from suffering, sometimes turning to addictions like gambling, alcoholism, or drugs. Many choose to pursue economic, labor, or marriage migration abroad for better opportunities for their families. Key destinations include Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Middle Eastern countries, and the European Union.

However, living and working abroad comes with its own set of difficulties, particularly classical migrant precarity. For the first diasporic generation, the primary sources of precarity include language barriers, socio-cultural prejudices, and a lack of socio-economic or health security, which can be characterized as stages of tension or inner fear. For the second generation, precarity consists of challenges in identity formation, more intense competition in the job market, and difficulties in selecting romantic or marital partners.

The panel’s presentations will illustrate how migrants face various forms of precarity and inner tensions that not only lead them into their migratory paths but also produce and reproduce other precarity and tensions, pushing migrants into further stages of their migratory lives. Additionally, the panel will show how migration and migrant precarities or tensions are produced and reproduced by various social, cultural, and economic institutions, as well as how migrants navigate through these precarious situations.

Temporal Morphologies, Layers, and Cognition: Narratological and Metaphorical Aspects of Time in Classical and Medieval Japanese Literature

This panel aims to explore different morphologies of time, temporal layers, and cognitive aspects of time in classical and medieval Japanese literature. Through the examination of narrative structures and temporal metaphors in various literary genres, we seek to determine whether time is depicted as cyclical, alternating, or linear, whether the texts focus on the past, present, or future, and how time is cognitively experienced in terms of duration (stretched or compressed).The panel features scholars engaged in an ongoing project at the University of Zurich on “Time and Emotion in Medieval Japanese Literature,” which employs methodological tools such as narratology, cognitive linguistics, and historical discourse semantics.

The first presentation by Berfu Sengün analyzes narrative temporalities in the Heian court novel The Tale of Genji using Genette’s categories of order, duration, and frequency. Simone Müller’s paper moves on to an investigation of various morphologies of time and temporal layers in medieval court literature by examining the narrative structure and temporal metaphors of three works from the late Kamakura period. The closing presentation by Nathalie Phillips examines cognitive experiences of time and temporal discrepancies in three tales from the Muromachi period, focusing on their language, metaphors, and narrative features.Through these case studies, we aim to determine if the temporal morphologies and layers in classical and medieval Japanese literary works are genre- or gender-specific, and how these differences relate to the texts’ functions.

Japanese support towards recovery and reconstruction of Ukraine: Resilience, sustainability and future-proofing

The support of international community towards recovery and reconstruction of Ukraine has been indispensable taking into account the widespread and ever-growing destruction of civilian and economic infrastructure, and the loss of life. Over the last three years multiple actors presented their views and ideas on how to prepare and proceed with the post-conflict reconstruction effort, underlining the centrality of sustainability principle for the purpose of “building back better”. The need for green recovery, and inclusive growth, fostering social cohesion and benefitting Ukrainian actors and communities have been underlined.

The aim of the presented panel is to introduce how Japan – one of the most important donors and supporters of Ukraine after 2022 – approaches the issue of recovery&reconstruction of Ukraine. For this purpose, the first paper introduces the broader overview of Ukraine’s resilient reconstruction, challenges to it, and priorities that should guide the process to achieve peace and security for Ukraine. Building on this, the second paper elucidates how Japanese government approaches the issues of sustainability and resilience in its discourse and practice on Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction, including the participation of Japanese private sector actors in this process. The remaining two papers explore specific and practical aspects of Japan’s engagement in recovery and reconstruction of Ukraine, namely the cooperation between Polish and Japanese actors to facilitate the latter’s access and operations in the country, and the community-based recovery lessons after the 3/11 and their utility for Ukraine. Overall, all together the papers aim to explore prospects and challenges for Japan’s participation in, and contribution towards, the future-proofing of recovery&reconstruction of Ukraine.

The Temporalities of Land Reclamation in Maritime Southeast Asia

Asia dominates the 21st-century global map of coastal land reclamation—the process of creating new land or artificial islands from the sea. For centuries, land reclamation has been employed around the world for a variety of reasons, ranging from small-scale projects like wetland or mudflat rehabilitation to large-scale infrastructure developments such as harbors and industrial zones. More recently, land reclamation has increasingly been used for the development of high-tech real estate projects, designed to create luxurious lifestyles in greener and smarter environments. However, as a form of large-scale terraformation at sea, land reclamation is a long-term process. Moreover, these ambitious infrastructural projects are vulnerable to political shifts, market fluctuations, protests, disasters (both anthropogenic and natural), and bureaucratic hurdles, including environmental impact assessments and compensation and mitigation plans.

While much attention has been given to the spatial implications of land reclamation, this multidisciplinary panel will explore its temporalities in Maritime Southeast Asia through case studies from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. How have past small-scale reclamation projects and contemporary large-scale projects been perceived over time in Makassar? How do land reclamation plans evolve over time in Penang, and in what ways can we unpack the ephemeral qualities of public relations architecture? And, how do state and non-state actors navigate the temporalities of land reclamation in Metro Manila and Penang?

Challenging the Modern Time Regime: Heterotemporal Imaginations in China and Japan

Time is fundamental, pervasive, and omnipresent – a familiar part of our mental furniture. But our temporal understanding is delimited, as it seems almost impossible to think about time without invoking the modern time regime that is homogenous, empty, and linear. History is written with the idea of time flowing irreversibly from the past. Economy is planned with the temporal projection of development. Policies are implemented with a clearly defined timeline. Our lives are punctuated by almanacs, calendars, and languages that seek to capture the passing of time. Yet, this time regime is not ahistorical but has a certain origin and genealogy.

This panel explores, with empirically grounded case studies, the ways in which heterogeneous conceptualizations of time and temporalities are articulated in China and Japan, in relation to or as an opposition to modern, homogenous, empty, and linear time, in religious discourses, imperial and colonial ideologies, contemporary socio-economic discussions, and artistic practices. Two papers in this panel examine China’s and Japan’s historical encounter with and negotiation over the modern time regime, while the third paper attends to competing notions of time and temporality that continue to exist today in social and cultural practices. By offering a way of grappling with heterotemporality, this panel seeks to bring various disciplines and academic fields into a conversation and to consider theoretical and analytical ways of addressing the question of time and temporality without erasing their heterogeneity.