The sixtieth anniversary of Antonio Gramsci's death was commemorated in Tokyo with a symposium sponsored by the Italian Embassy and held at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura on 15-16 November 1997. The symposium, organized by Dr. Silvio Marchetti (the director of the Istituto) and a special planning committee (in which Hiroshi Matsuda, the founder of the Kyoto Gramsci Society and a member of the IGS executive committee, played a prominent role), attracted a very large crowd of scholars, students, and politically active individuals from all over Japan. The halls and the spacious auditorium of the Istituto were packed from the opening session till the very end of the proceedings. On the ground floor of the Istituto, an impressive exhibit of books on and by Gramsci from all over the world and in many different langauges also attracted a great deal of attention.
The symposium was opened by the Italian ambassador in Japan, Giovanni Dominedò, who drew attention to the special place that Gramsci occupies in the history of Italian political thought and to the continuing relevance of his ideas in the contemporary world. He was followed by the renowned Japanese essayist, Ishido Kiyotomo, who devoted the inaugural speech to a detailed reflection on the evolution of the concept of hegemony.
The afternoon of the first day of the symposium was dedicated to an examination of the past decade of Gramscian studies. Giuseppe Vacca, the director of the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci in Rome, opened the session with a talk on recent developments and new directions in the study of Gramsci's life and work in Italy. He highlighted current research that purports to show Gramsci's distance from (and ostracization by) Stalinist and other "orthodox" communist elements. He was followed by Joseph A. Buttigieg with a paper on "Gramsci's Presence in North America--A Critical Assessment." The third speaker was Kang Ok-cho, a professor of History at the University of Seoul, who offered an anlysis of the various currents in Gramscian studies in South Korea. (Professor Kang Ok-cho has kindly provided us with a summary of her presentation which is reproduced in this issue of this Newsletter--please see the next article.) Professor Hiroshi Matsuda, of the University of Ritsumeikan, whose numerous contributions to Gramscian scholarship are well known to many members of the International Gramsci Society, followed with a paper on the presence and the current relevance of Gramsci's thought in Japan. He dwelt on certain "themes" in Gramsci's writings--among them, "political society-civil society", "conformism" and "transformism"--which he considered especially valuable for the analysis and [END PAGE 6] critique of the socio-political situation in Japan at the present time. Matsuda's observations were based on careful and detailed analysis of certain key passages in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. At the end of his talk, Matsuda stressed the urgent need to produce a complete critical edition of the Quaderni del carcere in Japanese. The final speaker on the first day of the symposium, Katagiri Kaoru, an independent scholar, discussed Gramsci's presence in Japanese leftist culture and left political circles. On the second day of the symposium, two simultaneous sessions were offered, each lasting from ten in the morming until four in the afternoon, with an hour-long break for lunch. One session was devoted to the general topic, "Gramsci in Our Times". The philosopher Tabata Minoru presented a paper on "practical philosophy" and on the future of philosophy in which he examined some important intersections of philosophy and politics in a number of modern poltical theorists, including Gramsci. Samejima Kyoichi, a researcher at Ritsumeikan University and a very active member of the Kyoto Gramsci Society, spoke on Gramsci's cultural theory and analysis. Kyoichi's very provocative talk revealed the many convergences between Japanese approaches to Gramsci and the treatments of Gramsci by leading figures in the field of cultural studies in the anglophone world, such as Stuart Hall. The other two papers in this session, by Kurosawa Nobuaki of Tokyo-gakugei University and Murakami Shinichiro of Chubu University, both addressed the relevance of Gramsci's work (in particular, the concept of hegemony) to the field of education, with specific reference to the Japanese situation. It should be pointed out that Professor Kurosawa is also the president of a very large national association of educators which in its many publications has, on numerous occasions, explored the pertinence of Gramsci's thought to the analysis of contemporary problems of education (including adult or continuing education) in Japan. This session also included valuable interventions by Mizushima Kazunari (Univ. of Kansei Gakuin), Ohara Koichi (a Gramscian scholar who, among other things, has translated Mario Alighiero Manacorda's Il principio educativo in Gramsci into Japanese), and by Satoe Kawakami (Chuo University) who is well known to many IGS members for, among many other things, her invaluable contributions to John Cammett's bibliographic project.
"International Politics and Contemporary Italy" was the overarching topic of the other session. In the first presentation, Ushiro Fusao (Nagoya University) discussed the place of Gramsci in current Italian politics. He was followed by Maruyama Shigeki with a paper on "Marx, Gramsci, and the Idea of Cooperatives"--a paper informed by Maruyama Shigeki's direct involvement with the Seikatsu-club cooperative. The next talk, by M. Sbaragli, focussed on "Gramsci and Colonialism." The final paper in this session was delivered by Bob Jessop of the University of Essex who offered a very original and stimulating reading of Gramsci's economic thought (in particular the notes on Americanism and Fordism) from the contemporary perspectives of postfordism and globalization. The session, that was chaired by Professor Ito Kimio of the [END PAGE 7] University of Osaka, ended with a general discussion that included interventions by the essayist Iida Momo, Sakiyama Masaki (University of Kyoto) and Yoshimi Shunya (University of Tokyo). In the final general session of the symposium, Kang Ok-cho, Joseph Buttigieg, and Giuseppe Vacca offered their reflections on the proceedings. The symposium was wrapped up by Katagiri Kaoru, and by Dr. Silvio Marchetti, the Director of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, whose initiative and organizational efforts were primarily responsible for the success of the symposium.