Japanese Studies Commons^™

A Study Of Small Talk Among Males: Comparing The U.S. And Japan, Chie Furukawa

Dissertations and Theses

This study seeks to understand the social interaction of small talk in two different countries. Defining small talk as 'phatic communion' and 'social talk' as contrasted to 'core business talk' and 'work-related talk,' Holmes (2000) claims that small talk in the workplace is intertwined with main work-talk. Small talk can help build solidarity and rapport, as well as maintain good relationships between workers. Much of the research on small talk has been focused on institutional settings such as business and service interactions; thus, there is a need for research on non-institutional small talk between participants without established relationships.

This study …

Sexuality And Textuality (Fall 2014), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

"Sexuality and Textuality" serves as an introduction to gay and lesbian literary studies and queer theory. It looks at questions of sexuality and literature in ancient and early modern texts (from the Hebrew, Greek and English traditions), as well as in modern texts (from German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and English traditions). In addition to literary texts, students will work with a number of cinematic representations of queer sexuality. Besides these primary texts, students will work with important secondary literature about sexuality."

A photo of this Fall 2014 class was taken as part of Professor Bob Tobin's ongoing class photo tradition.

Modern Japanese Literature And Visual Culture: Constructions Of Religious And Historical Identity, Ronald S. Green

Philosophy and Religious Studies

This course is a survey of modern Japanese literature and visual culture since the Meiji Restoration (1868). It focuses on constructions of identities within historical contexts. Our objective is to analyze ways in which writers and artists have positioned their subjects and re-imagined culture to create particular portrayals. The class examines a selection of shōsetsu (the Japanese novel) of Natsume Soseki, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Murakami Haruki, and Ogawa Yōko, films of Miyazaki Hayao, and important anime. The course promotes critical methodologies and interdisciplinary or comparative studies, combining, for example, literature with film, visual culture, gender studies, cultural history, Buddhist …

Haiku In West Coast Poetics: What Kigo?, Judy Halebsky

Faculty Authored Books and Book Contributions

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When I attended the Meguro International Haiku Circle last year, I asked for ideas for presentation topics. Someone suggested that I explain why poets in the U.S. are not overly concerned with kigo. Coming from a lineage of California poets influenced by haiku and Japanese poetry, I am not sure if I understand the subtleties of this challenge. However, the question of kigo brings up a larger issue: the cultural translation of haiku in the work of English language poets. Today, I would like to touch on the issues that have shaped how free verse poets in California translate …

Ticket To Salvation: Nichiren Buddhism In Miyazawa Kenji’S Ginga Tetsudō No Yoru, Jon P. Holt

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Miyazawa Kenji’s Ginga tetsudō no yoru is a children’s story that explores what heaven is like with very visible Christian themes and images, but the logic and vision underneath is more Buddhist than Christian. In Kenji’s prose masterpiece, the author ultimately subsumed Christianity and science into a greater spiritual cosmic vision—Nichiren’s all-encompassing principle of three-thousand-realms-in-a-single-thought (ichinen sanzen). Among the possible interpretations of Ginga tetsudō no yoru, one must consider that it is an expression of the author’s Nichiren Buddhist beliefs, which he long held and explicitly articulated elsewhere in other works and correspondence. Reframing both the scholarship on Kenji’s ties …

The Living Torrents: Hokusai's "Journey Around The Waterfalls Of Various Provinces" (2014), Theory & History Of Art & Design Department, Elena Varshavskaya (H791 Instructor)

Ukiyo-e Prints Course | Exhibition Catalogs

"This book invites its readers to join RISD WS 2014 Japanese Prints class for an edifying expedition to Japan’s eight waterfalls portrayed by Katsushika Hokusai, an ukiyo-e preeminent artist, in his masterpiece print series “A Journey to the Waterfalls of Various Provinces.” In fact, this expedition is an academic endeavor undertaken by a collective of students who tried their hand at curating a museum exhibition as their art history course project. ..." -- Foreword, The Living Torrents: Hokusai's " Journey Around the Waterfalls of Various Provinces"

Contributing Authors

Jane Bak, Graham Bessellieu, Amy Chen, Julie Chon, Sofia Diaz de la …

In A Senchimentaru Mood: Japanese Sentimentalism In Modern Poetry And Art, Jon P. Holt

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Sentimentalism (senchimentarizumu) for Meiji poet Takamura Kōtarō 高 村光太郎, and others of his generation, was not a practice to be cultivated—not in one’s personal life, where it connoted emotional weakness, and certainly not in one’s artistic creations, where the concept suggested a sycophantic appropriation of Western trends. By the Taishō period (1912–1926), however, the term senchimentarizumu appeared with greater and greater regularity in the works of such luminaries as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Hagiwara Sakutarō. What did they mean by it? And why had the term taken on such noticeable cachet? In the article that follows I trace the formation and …

Bringing Anime To Academic Libraries: A Recommended Core Collection, Laura Pope Robbins

Publications

The author discusses Japanese anime and manga in the context of academic libraries. She notes that, while collections support the study of popular culture and give students access to materials that will engage them...they fail to include amime.

To rectify this, the author discusses a core list of anime titles for academic library collection development. This list was assembled based upon the author’s twenty-plus years of viewing anime and is the culmination of a sabbatical in which the author studied the history of Japanese animation and read extensively from acknowledged experts in the field. The films included here have stood …

Farming Satori: Zen And The Naturalist Farmer Fukuoka Masanobu, Ronald S. Green

Philosophy and Religious Studies

This paper looks at how Masanobu Fukuoka adopts Chan Buddhist philosophy in relation to his Zen natural farming method. To understand this, it examines the development in Chinese Buddhism that allowed and required Buddhist to farm, defining farming as Buddhist practice.The paper is organized as follows: I. Seeds in the Mahāyāna; II. Roots in Chan monastic regulations; III. Farming satori, Fukuoka’s writing on awakening.

Deepening Scholarly Access To Geppō: Toward A Collectively Contributed Article Citation Database, Michael P. Williams

Michael P Williams

Geppō 月報, journal‐like pamphlets issued within monographic sets, are important resources containing material that complements the volumes with which they are issued.1 Typical contents for geppō include: brief academic articles, chronologies, bibliographies, reminiscences‐as‐biographies, editorial notes, biographical sketches of contributors to the series, errata and corrigenda, tables of contents, indexes, and information about other volumes in the series. Despite their wealth of contents—much of which can be found only in these publications—geppō traditionally have been overlooked and underappreciated. In many libraries, they have been lost or discarded. Based on an assessment of the current situation of geppō at the University of …

Ticket To Salvation: Nichiren Buddhism In Miyazawa Kenji’S 'Night On The Galactic Railroad' (Ginga Tetsudō No Yoru), Jon P. Holt

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Presentation focuses on the Night on the Galactic Railroad, a classic Japanese novel written by Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933).

Tokuya Higashigawa's After-Dinner Mysteries: Unusual Detectives In Contemporary Japanese Mystery Fiction, Jessica Claire Kindler

Dissertations and Theses

The detective fiction (tantei shōsetsu) genre is one that came into Japan from the West around the time of the Meiji Restoration (1868), and soon became wildly popular. Again in recent years, detective fiction has experienced a popularity boom in Japan, and there has been an outpouring of new detective fiction books as well as various television and movie adaptations. It is not a revelation that the Japanese detective fiction genre, while rife with imitation and homage to Western works, took a dramatic turn somewhere along the line, away from celebrated models like Poe, Doyle, and Christie, and developed into …

Lessons In Immorality: Mishima's Masterpiece Of Humor And Social Satire, Nathaniel Peter Bond

Dissertations and Theses

From 1958 to 1959, Mishima Yukio published a series of satirical essays titled Lessons in Immorality, in the magazine Weekly Morningstar. Lessons in Immorality was made into a television series, a stage play, and a film.

Famous in the West for writing serious novels, Mishima's work as a humor writer is largely unknown. In these essays Mishima writes in a very comic style, making liberal use of hyperbole, burlesque, and travesty, in order to parody and satirize contemporary Japanese morality. Mishima uses humor to create a world in which Mishima Yukio, iconoclastic author and pop-culture figure, is an arbiter of …

Classroom-Library Collaboration: Incorporating Information Literacy Into The Beginning Japanese Curriculum Using Japanese Grade Readers And Other Resources Beyond The Textbook | 図書館との連携による情報リテラシー教育を取り入れた初級日本語カリキュラムの作成と実践—多読ライブラリーや教科書外のリソースを使った日本語情報リテラシー・プロジェクトー, Atsuko Takahashi, Sharon Domier

East Asian Languages & Cultures: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Along The Tokaido With Two Brushes (2013), Theory & History Of Art & Design Department, Elena Varshavskaya (H791 Instructor)

Ukiyo-e Prints Course | Exhibition Catalogs

"This book is a student version of a scholarly catalog – it was written by RISD students to accompany the Japanese prints’ exhibition they have curated at the RISD Museum as the final project for 2013 spring semester course in art history. The idea of the course was to put emphasis on active learning from objects – not only through looking at the originals and analyzing them during visits to the museum but by trying a hand at various responsibilities of a museum curator. The Department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs of the RISD Museum welcomed this experimental course and …

Political Interpretations Of The Lotus Sutra, James Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

The Sutra on the White Lotus of the Sublime Dharma (Sk., Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-sūtra; Ch., Miàofǎ liánhuá jīng; Jp., Myōhō renge kyō), commonly known as the Lotus Sutra, is arguably the most influential sutra of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and certainly one of the most revered sacred texts in East Asia. Via parables and short stories, the twenty-eight chapters of the Lotus Sutra indirectly present a number of core doctrines of the early Mahāyāna, the form of Buddhism that first emerged in India and West Asia roughly five centuries after the death of the historical Buddha Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563–486 …

Review: Barbara R. Ambros, Bones Of Contention: Animals And Religion In Contemporary Japan (Hawai'i, 2012)., James Shields

Other Faculty Research and Publications

Review: Barbara R. Ambros, Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan (Hawai'i, 2012).

Zange And Sorge: Two Models Of 'Concern' In Comparative Philosophy Of Religion, James Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

The concept of Sorge, as developed in Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) classic work, Sein und Zeit (1927), describes an existential-ontological state characterized by “anxiety” about the future and the desire to “attend to” the world based on our awareness of temporality. In Japan, this concept was borrowed and critically developed by Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960). In Rinrigaku (1937–49), Watsuji argued that Heidegger’s Sorge remains overly reliant on the philosophical structures of Western individualism and subjectivism, and thus neglects the social dimension of human being. In turn, Watsuji’s contemporary, Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), developed an alternative theory of “concern” in his reflections on …

Review: Steven Heine, Sacred High City, Sacred Low City: A Tale Of Religious Sites In Two Tokyo Neighborhoods (Oxford, 2011)., James Shields

Other Faculty Research and Publications

Review of Steven Heine, Sacred High City, Sacred Low City: A Tale of Religious Sites in Two Tokyo Neighborhoods (Oxford, 2011).

Raising A Sense Of Self-Worth: Action Research On Self-Compassion In An English Program, Shinichiro Matsuguma

MA TESOL Collection

The suicide rate among Japanese youth has been dramatically increasing over the last decade due to the downturn economy and their lack of sense of self-worth. In this qualitative action research, the author introduces the concept of self-compassion to Japanese youth in a content-based English classroom as an attempt to raise their sense of self-worth. The research shows that self-compassion has a possibility of providing Japanese young people with more rational perceptions of themselves, creating an emotionally supportive environment, and allowing them to develop their self-awareness. The author concludes that it is this development of self-awareness that can raise the …