Speaker
Dr. CHO Chi Hang, Harry (CUHK)
Harry Chi Hang Cho is a historian of East Asian intellectual history. He holds a Ph.D. in Japanese Studies from CUHK. He has published more than ten articles in renowned journals including Twenty-First Century and The Global Sixties etc. and has presented his work at the University of Oxford China Centre. His forthcoming monograph, Red Sun in the Hinomaru: The Dissemination and Influence of Mao Zedong Thought in Japan during the Cultural Revolution will be published by NTU Press.

Event Details
Originating in eighteenth-century Europe, phrenology became popular in Japan from the late Meiji to the Taisho period. The most prominent phrenologist of the time, Sekiryūshi, founded a Japanese phrenology magazine and toured the country to promote the discipline, which is now regarded as pseudoscience, and gained considerable public influence. Unlike the common Japanese translation kossōgaku (“study of bone”), he coined the term seisōgaku (“study of nature”), reframing phrenology as a hybrid of scientific and philosophical thought. This talk examines how Sekiryūshi interpreted phrenology through diverse Eastern thoughts, including Confucian ethics, Buddhist ideas, and Yijing cosmology (yin-yang and the wuxing [five phases]) etc., and argues that philosophy compensated for phrenology’s lack of scientific rigor, facilitating its use as a tool for social and state reform.

Registration Link/ Event Page
No registration required.

Enquires
NAGAOKA Misaki (mnagaoka@cuhk.edu.hk)