BAVS at Home and Abroad: Victorian Connections to Contemporary Japan

Organised by British Association for Victorian Studies, BAVS@Home offers occasional online events that explore different aspects of nineteenth-century culture and its relevance to the contemporary world.

Event details

Format: Live, online, via Zoom

Date: 30 September 2026

Time: 20:00 (JST), 12:00 (BST), 7:00(EST)

Speakers

Mr. Takuya Matsuzawa is currently a PhD student of Law at Waseda University Graduate School of Law. He is a researcher of Constitutional Law and his interests extend to veganism and animal rights.

Prof. Vincent Manigot is an Associate Professor of French at the School of Law, Waseda University. He graduated from Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco, France) and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (PhD). His research focuses on Japanese avant-garde art.

Prof. Rieko Suzuki (Chair & Organizer) also teaches at the School of Law, Waseda University. Her interests span across the long nineteenth century as evidenced from The Shelleys and the Brownings: Textual Re-Imaginings and the Question of Influence (Liverpool UP, 2022). She is a member of BAVS.

Talks

The first paper by Mr. Takuya, ‘From Frankenstein to The Darwin Incident: The Monstrous Vegan in Contemporary Japanese Manga’ will take its cue from Emelia Quinn (2021) and argue for the recent emergence of the ‘monstrous vegan’ in manga works such as Demon Slayer, The Promised Neverland, Beastars, Tokyo Ghoul and The Darwin Incident. The curious crossover between emerging movements to protect animals and slowly question meat diet in
Victorian England on the one hand, and Japan’s adoption of meat-eating habit as part of modernization/Westernization efforts in the late 19^th Century on the other, is the historical backdrop against which the paper will discuss questions that have become pertinent to both worlds today. Recent manga works, for example, question the hegemonic claim meat diet has gained over the Japanese consciousness by creating a bordering existence of human and non-human that refuses to consume meat. The paper will further argue that this gesture gives voice to those whose suffering is systematically erased as ‘an absent referent’ to quote the words of Carol J. Adams.

The second paper by Prof. Manigot, ‘Can Art be Cute?’ will discuss key questions such as: What does “kawaii” truly encompass? Can a Renaissance or modernist painting be “kawaii”? The Japanese term “kawaii” has become very popular and has crossed Japanese borders to be used in many languages and cultures, to the point of even being included in English or French-language dictionaries (e.g. the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “a lighthearted Japanese aesthetic that features cute characters who exude a childlike innocence”). However, “kawaii” has an extended semantic scope that goes beyond English “cute” or French “mignon”. For example, a work of art can be qualified as “kawaii”, whereas this would be much less commonly accepted with “cute”. After a brief introduction to the concept, the paper will attempt to present its differences from the English “cute”. In addition to its postmodern currency, the paper will explore how the notion of “kawaii” goes beyond the aesthetic norms of Western art to function as a concept that is not entirely foreign to Victorian aesthetics limited to the domestic sphere.