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The Rise Of Science In Japan: 日本科学発展と原因, Mario Harper

Browse All Undergraduate research

日本の科学は第二次世界大戦から始まったと多くの人は思っている。もちろん、多くの発展は戦後に行われたのは事実。しかし、戦争以前にも「テクノロジージャパン」な考え方が非常に寿実していた。このスライドショーは日本科学発展の原因となることをいくつか見ています。

Singing Japan’S Heart And Soul: A Discourse On The Black Enka Singer Jero And Race Politics In Japan, Neriko Musha Doerr, Yuri Kumagai

East Asian Languages & Cultures: Faculty Publications

This article analyses a discourse around the ascendancy of Jero, an ‘African-American’ male dressed in hip-hop attire singing enka, a genre of music that has been dubbed ‘the heart and soul of Japan.’ Since his debut in Japan in February 2008, Jero has attracted much media attention. This article analyses a prominent discourse, ‘Jero is almost Japanese because he sings enka well.’ While many argue that to challenge stereotypes and racism is to introduce alternative role models, we show that such alternative role models can also reinforce the existing regime of difference of Japanese vs. the Other and perpetuate …

Fox-Kuzunoha: The Actor Print And The Expression Of Female As 'Other' In The Late Edo Period, Kara Jefts

Honors Theses

Stories of the supernatural are a rich part of Japan’s cultural history, and one way to explore the popularity of these tales is through the widely produced visual medium of Ukiyo-e prints. By the eighteenth century, kabuki theatre became a dominant theme in Ukiyo-e, and kabuki plays provide a way to access diverse folk traditions involving the supernatural, often based on Shinto beliefs or Buddhist principles. Confucian values, at the core of Edo Period society, commonly frame these subjects in contrast to traditional familial relationships. Using the visual language of the stage, moments of dramatic climax in kabuki are emphasized …

Drops Of Blood On Fallen Snow: The Evolution Of Blood-Revenge Practices In Japan, Jasmin M. Curtis

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Blood revenge – or katakiuchi – represents one of many defining principles that characterize the Japanese samurai warrior; this one act of honorable violence served as an arena in which warriors could demonstrate those values which have come to embody the word samurai : loyalty, honor, and personal sacrifice. Blood revenge had a long and illustrious history in Japan – first, as the prerogative of the gods in the Kojiki, then as a theoretical debate amongst imperial royalty in the Nihongi, and at last entering into the realm of practice amongst members of the warrior class during Japan’s medieval period. …

The National Imagination (Spring 2012), Robert D. Tobin, Marvin D'Lugo, Alice Valentine

Syllabi

What images make people think of the United States of America? Cowboys? The flag? And are there similar icons in other cultures that help define cultural identity? The National Imagination explores the concept of a national community as constructed and critiqued through literary and cinematic narratives, as well as other cultural texts.

Our underlying premise is that national languages and cultures promote the identity of particular communities. We are interested in examining those subjective expressions of culture—images, symbols, narratives—that lead people to feel that they are members of the communities we call nations. We are also interested in discovering points …

Redefining The Multiple: Thirteen Japanese Printmakers (Exhibition Catalogue), Sam Yates, Yoshihiro Nakatani

Ewing Gallery of Art & Architecture

Curated by Sam Yates and Hideki Kimura, professor of art at Kyoto City University of Arts, Redefining the Multiple unites 13 printmakers from Japan who bring the techniques and concepts of printmaking to a wide range of contemporary and traditional media.

Of the selected participants, four make three-dimensional objects and installations, two paint with printmaking tools and techniques, three use digital photography and technology, while others utilize traditional and recognizable printmaking methods.

The featured artists are: Hideki Kimura, Junji Amano, Kouseki Ono, Koichi Kiyono, Shuji Chiaki, Toshinao Yoshioka, Shunsuke Kano, Naruki Oshima, Marie Yoshiki, Nobauki Onishi, Shoji Miyamoto, Arata Nojima, …

Japanese Nuclear Power Policy: Forty Years Of Construction, Confusion, And Conflict, Sarah Fries

Honors Papers

How could Japan, a victim of nuclear weapons, become the world's third largest nuclear power country? Drawing upon English and Japanese sources as well as pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear publications, I stove to provide a balanced analysis of Japan's nuclear power debate and context in which to understand the 2011 Fukushima Crisis. By analyzing the role of the press and the anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear coalitions, I provide arguments as to why the Japanese energy policy has been predominantly pro-nuclear since the 1950s and hazard an argument that nuclear power will likely continue to exist in Japan.

Japan As A Clean Energy Leader, Stefan N. Norbom

Gettysburg Economic Review

Over the past several decades, Japan’s energy strategy had positioned it as the world’s leader in clean and efficient electricity production and usage. This strategy, heavily dependent on nuclear energy, was essentially destroyed by one of history’s largest earthquakes, followed by a tsunami which overwhelmed five nuclear reactors on March 11, 2011. As of April 2012, all of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors have been shut down and it is uncertain when and how many may be restarted. This paper examines Japan’s options for crafting a new way forward with an energy policy to power the world’s third largest economy while …

The Sword And The Screen: The Japanese Period Film 1915-1960, Aaron Gerow, Rea Amit, Ryan Cook, Samuel Good, Samuel Malissa, Stephen Poland, Grace Ting, Takuya Tsunoda, David Dresser, Fumiaki Itakura

Film Series Commentaries

“The Sword And The Screen: The Japanese Period Film 1915-1960” was a groundbreaking collaboration between the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University and the National Film Center of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, marking the first time Japan’s national film archive had co-sponsored an event with a foreign university. The film series presented rare Japanese samurai films from the collection of the National Film Center, highlighting the abundant variety of Japan's most famous film genre. There are social critiques, melodramas, comedies, ghost films and even musicals, directed by some of the masters of Japanese cinema who, …

Awakening Between Science, Art & Ethics: Variations On Japanese Buddhist Modernism, 1890–1945, James Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

The half-century between the publication of the Imperial Rescript on Education (kyōiku chokugo 教育勅語, 1890) and the bombing of Pearl Harbor (1941) was one of tremendous institutional and intellectual tumult in the world of Japanese Buddhism. Buddhist sects and scholars were not immune to the changing political and cultural winds. While it is true that by the late 1930s, the majority of Buddhist leaders and institutions had capitulated to the status quo, preaching, in the words of Joseph Kitagawa “the virtues of peace, harmony, and loyalty to the throne,” the previous decades show anything but a continuous progression towards …