Anthropology 254
Current course announcements
Please note that the articles by Fukuzawa and Hori in the education section are not included in the photocopy course packet. Instead they are available on-line (and of course at CCL reserve). I have now added the correct links to the syllabus page of the course site.
Local events of interest
For an updated calendar of speakers, films, and other events about Japan, consult the Council on East Asian Studies events page
Thursday,
December 5
The Council
on East Asian Studies presents the first lecture in its new Journalism and Japan
Speaker Series
"The
Media and Japan: One Writer's Perspective"
a lecture by Alex Kerr, author of Dogs & Demons: Tales from the Dark
Side of Japan
4:00 PM, Room 202, Henry R. Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue
For more information on the Journalism and Japan Speaker Series, please visit http://www.yale.edu/ycias/ceas/journalismandjapan.html
Also, the final screenings in the 2002 Japan film series on Japanese Cinema:
Classic, Modern, and Beyond
"Maborosi"
(Maboroshi No Hikari) - Dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, 1995, 35mm
Thursday, December 5
Whitney Humantities
Center Auditorium
53 Wall Street
Screenings at 7:00 and 9:30 PM
"Metropolis" - Dir. Taro Rin, 2001, DVD
Thursday, December 12
Henry R. Luce Hall Auditorium
34 Hillhouse Avenue
Screenings at 7:00 and 9:30 PM
More on Alex Kerr
As background to Alex Kerr's visit, those interested may wish to listen to a program broadcast on The Connection, a news program produced by WBUR in Boston. This was a feature about Japan on April 24, 2001, following Junichro Koizumi's election as Prime Minister. The program can be heard, if you have RealPlayer, at this page of The Connection's site, which introduces it as follows:
"Japan once boasted one of the best educational systems in the world and a post-World War II industrial boom that made it one of the world's wealthiest nations.
"Once admired for it remarkable successes, Japan's economic miracle has turned into a spectacular mess. Imagine a land of endemic pollution, tenement cities and skyrocketing debts. A country beset by high unemployment, a failed banking system and a stock market melt down that wiped away more than $10 trillion dollars in assets. Driven by its mania for control and growth at any cost, Japan's bloated bureaucracy props up old industries instead of investing in new technologies. But there's light on the horizon, a maverick reformer, Junichiro Koizumi, yesterday won an election that will put him in a position as the country's new prime minister.
"Can the 59-year-old mop-topped rock music fan transform the political system? How did Japan get itself into so much trouble anyway? "
Guests on the program are
Ezra Vogel, professor of social sciences at Harvard University and author of
Is Japan Still Number One?; Alex Kerr, Kyoto resident and author of Dogs
and Demons, Tales From the Dark Side of Japan; and Toshiaki Miura, a Washington
based political reporter with the newspaper, Asahi Shimbun. [Thanks to Gavin
Whitelaw for the above information.]
The Connection produced a more recent program about Japan on August 15, 2001, "Scrutinizing Japan's New Prime Minister," following Koizumi's controversial visit to Yasukuni Shrine. The program can be heard, if you have RealPlayer, at this page of The Connection's site , which introduces it as follows
"Japan's Prime Minister Koizumi is called the Japanese John McCain; a maverick who won his post in April on a platform of economic reform and record popularity. Today, though, Koizumi is under fire for visiting a controversial shrine that honors Japan's war dead, including convicted war criminals.
"The response from neighboring nations has been dramatic: Protesters in South Korea are slicing off their fingertips and mailing them to the Japanese embassy. In the Phillipines, elderly women who claim they were forced into prostitution by the Japanese military are demonstrating for compensation.
"So why would a reformer who's trying to bring Japan's economy back to life and focusing on his country's future get mired in a controversy that's all about its past? "
This time, the program guests are Richard J. Samuels, professor of political science, Director of the Center for International Studies, and Founding Director of the Japan Program at MIT and Toshiaki Miura, Washington based political reporter and consultant with the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
Speaking of Alex Kerr (a Yalie and longtime Japan resident and writer), his recent book, Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan, has received much critical attention--and itself is a scathing critique of the devastating consequences of Japan's development policies and programs. The program above features some provocative exchanges between Kerr and Vogel. Another informative exchange was that initiated by James Fallows, national editor of The Atlantic, whose comments about the book drew a response from Kerr. This can be found at Fallow's site. [Again, thanks to Gavin Whitelaw for this info.]
Among the many reviews of Kerr's book was that of Richard J. Samuels (the distinguished MIT political scientist) in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. The review, entitled "Land of the Setting Sun?" (April 15, 2001, page 15), included the following passage:
"Kerr has a keen eye for paradox. Japan is today a high-tech economy that lacks the know-how to test for toxic waste, a ''postindustrial country with preindustrial goals.'' It is an industrial battleship on faulty autopilot. But it gets worse. Kerr's Japan is a land of prevarication: the government tells children that plutonium is safe to drink. It is a land of duplicity: retired government officials skim profits from public-works spending. It is a land of incompetence: wooden ladles and plastic buckets are used to clean up after nuclear disasters and oil spills. It is a land of collusion: industry and government join to hide the poisoning of innocent citizens. It is a land of widespread intimidation: students are afraid to subscribe to environmental magazines for fear that it will hurt their career chances. And it is a land without transparency: in response to demands for audits, officials torch public records with impunity and police departments develop training materials to teach officers how to cover up scandals.
"But one must ask: How satisfying would a portrait of American culture and politics be if it described only corporate cover-ups, reality television, racial profiling, misogynistic rap lyrics, widening income disparities, electoral miscounts, police brutality, glass ceilings, suburban sprawl, hate crimes and the excesses of the Las Vegas strip? While each of these is a slice of the contemporary American pie, they add up to less than the full plate of national life. So it is with this important and oddly romantic, if imbalanced, book."
And speaking of James Fallows, a number of his much-debated essays about Japan
from the late 1980s and early 1990s are available for reading at the archives
of The Atlantic Monthly, including:
"What Is An Economy For?" The Atlantic Monthly, January 1994
"How the World Works," The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1993
"Remember Pearl Harbor How?" The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1991
"Containing Japan," The Atlantic Monthly, May, 1989
The fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Habor fell last year on December 7, 2001 (December 8 by Japan time), which occasioned much commentary. Several essays and op-ed pieces are posted on the "clippings" page. Others include:
"Flashbacks: Pearl Harbor in Retrospect," The Atlantic Unbound, May 25, 2001
Murray Sayle, "The Kamikazes Rise Again," The Atlantic Monthly, March, 2001