2014/12/26

project, Tohoku kara no Koe


   [cross-posting from H-Japan 26 Dec 2014, D. Slater at Jochi-Dai/Sophia Uni]
___________________________________________
Voices from Tohoku, http://tohokukaranokoe.org/
 
Over the past 3+ years, we have collected video oral narratives from more than 10 communities in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima. We have more than 500 hours in total, making it one of the largest such archives we know of. Most of the interviewing has been done by undergraduates at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University, Tokyo. 

"Voices of Tohoku" is a Japanese website that features a collection of clips taken from our full archive, each with Japanese transcriptions and thematic tags. These clips were first provided to our primary audience--the Tohoku informants themselves--as some record of how people felt during the unfolding of events within community life in post 3.11 Tohoku. The stories are not always happy but one informant suggested that we make them available to the public. "After all," she said, "we only told you these stories so you would tell the world what really happened." The website is not fancy but it is functional, a work in progress. (Of course, we have full release forms for all material.) 

During the data collection, we returned to each site for repeated visits for at least a year, always doing volunteer work to better understand the specifics of the community. Rather than focusing on the often horrific tales of destruction on "the day of," we tried to give our informants a more expansive chance to talk about their lives in more detail. Wanting minimal interruption, we often asked only three questions during our interviews: what was your community like before 3.11; how has it been from the disaster until today; what is your vision of the future? 

We are not collecting any more Tohoku narratives, not because the situation is in any sense "over"--it is not--but because we do not have any more money to send people into Tohoku. We are currently translating the interviews into English and looking for a way to make the full archive open to other scholars in a responsible and effective way. 

We gratefully acknowledge support from Sophia University, the Toyota Foundation and a JSPS grant from the Japanese government. Also, we thank the many graduate students, post-grad scholars, colleagues, NPO leaders and of course, our many interviewees and collaborators in Tohoku, who have helped us make the archive what it is so far.
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2014/12/20

multimedia source, "Re-envisioning Japan"

[cross-posted from H-Japan 20 Dec 2014]

 introducing Re-Envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture at http://humanities.lib.rochester.edu/rej/.


This open-access critical archive is a multimedia project using travel, education, and the production and exchange of images and objects as a lens to investigate changing representations of Japan and its place in the world in the first half of the 20th century. Re-Envisioning Japan makes available a wide range of ephemeral objects (e.g., films, postcards, brochures, photographs, stereographs, and guide books); please see the menu tabs under 'Research" for more detailed background and other information. The site is also a versatile pedagogical tool. As author and editor, I've been using it in the curriculum of "Tourist Japan," a course in which tourism and tourist culture is used to illuminate the relationship between modernization processes and identity formation. Using Re-envisioning Japan, students build their own exhibits linking cultural objects generated by tourism and education with evolving concepts of nationalism and cultural identity.


Re-Envisioning Japan is inherently ongoing: I work continuously on adding metadata and contextualization. The addition of a 16mm Timeline (See "Moving Images") is the most recent development. I am currently working on descriptions for each film and fair use excerpts of titles with complex copyright issues; some titles not yet uploaded await copyright permission. Similar Timelines for 8mm film formats are planned for the end of January. In 2015 we'll be migrating the entire site to an Omeka platform in order to make it even more interactive. In the meantime, if you have any information about any of the objects that you would like to share with others, please contact me at joanne.bernardi[atrochester] dot edu. Feedback and suggestions are also most welcome.

2014/12/10

set of short videos from Japan Tourism Agency

The one about values or aesthetic highlights four features of social life,

Taking the collection of short videos as a Cultural Text, it is interesting to reflect on the (collective) self-image being presented.
After all, foreign observers and social analysts have been writing and producing their views for decades, and Japanese also engage in similar pursuits.
But there are a number of divergencies in outsider and insider views, depending on the intended audience: foreigners writing for compatriots, Japanese writing for foreign (tourists) vs. writing for themselves.

2014/12/04

rare color photos postwar Japan

cross-posting from H-Japan at www.h-net.org

The University of Wisconsin-Parkside has received a generous donation of 260 beautiful, color slides of 1950s Japan, and they are now free to view online. The photographer, U.S. Army non-commissioned officer Charles Nicholas Johnson (1923-2005) was stationed in Tokyo from fall 1954 to September 1957, during which time he took hundreds of color photos. They feature streetscapes, landscapes, shops, festivals, vehicles, people, objects, artwork, cultural landmarks, and more. The slides were painstakingly cleaned, digitally scanned, and we now invite you to please help us identify them.
     Can you name any of the places, objects, people, or cultural activities captured in these photos? If so, please contact Ms. Melissa Olson, the Digital Initiatives Librarian at UW-Parkside, at olsonm@uwp.edu. Users can email her a simple list of notes, or receive login access to the development site, where they can tag and describe multiple photos online.
Please also contact Melissa for permission to use or reproduce these images – we ask that you please credit the UW-Parkside Library and the Charles Nicholas Johnson Slide Collection.
     To view the Collection, please visit: http://archives.uwp.edu/items/browse?collection=3


The Collection homepage is: http://archives.uwp.edu/collections/show/3

2014/12/01

about the 50 years of Shinkansen service

http://japanfocus.org/-Vaclav-Smil/4227

opening paragraph of this essay, 

Japan of 2014 is clearly a troubled nation -– and I will remind the reader about only a few key components of its peculiar situation. The country is still rich by any global standard but its national debt is far higher than that in any other affluent country, and rising, and in 2014 its economy has been chronically close to, or actually in, a deflationary recession. Japan is still the world's third largest economy, but after decades of huge trade surpluses it is now running substantial trade deficits. The cause of these deficits goes beyond the post-Fukushima need for higher imports of oil and gas: offshoring of Japan's manufacturing has seen widespread loss of capacities and jobs, and many jobs have become part-time and temporary. Japan is still home to famous global brands (Toyota, Honda, Nikon) but performance of some of these companies has been tainted by poor quality products and corporate scandals (financial fraud by Olympus, massive recalls of Toyota cars, Takata's deficient airbags installed in millions of vehicles) and some firms that were previously pioneers of widely admired technical advances and the envy of corporate managers (Sony, Panasonic, Fujitsu) now face chronic difficulties, if they are not nearly bankrupt.

2014/11/24

short, substantive articles 2014

Both JapanFocus.org (the home of the weekly digest, Asia-Pacific Journal) and Asia-Pacific Memo
provide short articles with solid scholarship. Here are a few examples to lead curious readers to the searchbox for archived articles:

1. This week at A-P Journal includes, http://japanfocus.org/events/view/233
 Extremists Flourish in Abe's Japan (Nov. 20, 2014 by Jeff Kingston) The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 44, No. 2

2. List of selected articles from recent years (66 tagged Japan, 32 tagged Korea, for example)

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/whither-area-studies

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/canada-china-fipa

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/downton-abbeystan-why-central-asia-is-like-twentieth-century-upper-class-england

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/china-and-the-sco-influence-and-soft-power

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/supplementary-education

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/unsettled-remains-tensions-over-unrepatriated-bodies-from-the-asia-pacific-war

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/hikikomori-entering-middle-age

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/drivers-education-in-japan-personality-tests-and-road-rage

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/japans-culture-industries-cool-or-cruel

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/japan-failure-to-enfranchise-its-permanent-resident-foreigners

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/immigrants-in-korea-and-japan

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/japanese-education-policy

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/myanmars-enduring-dilemma

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/the-politics-of-mining-in-mongolia-and-burmamyanmar

2014/10/29

art in the 1950s - Japan's protest painters

http://japanfocus.org/-Linda-Hoaglund/4203 is connected to the MIT Visualizing Cultures project and includes video and many images.
For teachers of Japanese this rich visual material tells about important times in Japan. For students of Japanese, as well, this chapter of Japanese life is worth knowing.
 [excerpt from the introduction in the article itself]

The image-driven VC explorations of protest in Japan begin in 1905 and end with the massive "Ampō" demonstrations against revision of the U.S.-Japan mutual security treaty in 1960. The four treatments that will be reproduced in The Asia-Pacific Journal beginning in this issue are as follows:

1. Social Protest in Imperial Japan: The Hibiya Riot of 1905, by Andrew Gordon. We reprint this article with this introduction. Other articles will follow in the coming months.

2. Political Protest in Interwar Japan: Posters & Handbills from the Ohara Collection (1920s~1930s), by Christopher Gerteis (in two units).

3. Protest Art in 1950s Japan: The Forgotten Reportage Painters, by Linda Hoaglund.

4. Tokyo 1960: Days of Rage & Grief: Hamaya Hiroshi's Photos of the Anti-Security-Treaty Protests, by Justin Jesty.

2014/10/13

online segments (science news)

Good listening practice; cross-posting from Senseionline (yahoo groups), thanks to Mio T.

series of science news for children on you tube. There are 45 episodes. 
One of them is 「紅葉の季節がはじまる。」   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tr4PjdjK9s 

Program list at the science channel, http://sc-smn.jst.go.jp/M100002/ 

2014/09/16

Urban sites abandoned in Japan

Yet another side of Post-Industrial society is the collection of discarded, abandoned and defunct facilities.
   Opening lines of article follow here,
__________________________________________________________
As with any populous country that's experienced a shift in demographics over the past century or so, Japan is littered with abandoned locations devoid of human population – a phenomena known as "haikyo."


Urban exploration involves actively seeking out and documenting these places in photographs and videos for all to see. Enthusiasts risk personal safety and being caught by authorities to bring the rest of us some amazing sites.


Here are some highlights from Japan, home to some of the oddest abandoned locations.




2014/09/03

online photos - Okinawa; Ryukyu collection

cross-posting from H-Japan of 2014 September 3:

Resources on Okinawa/Ryukyus online

The University of Hawaii at Manoa Library and the University of the Ryukyus Library are pleased to announce the availability of the digital archives site for the Sakamaki/Hawley Collection.Over hundred items of 218 digitized titles are now online at the University of the Ryukyus Library Ryukyu/Okinawa Special Collections Digital Archives. In addition to content summaries & explanations in English & Japanese, special features such as a glass view function, modern language translations, and text reprints of the original language will be added at a later date. Please stay tuned for the rest of the digitized titles to be online early 2015.


List of the titles of the Sakamaki/Hawley Collection online
The University of the Ryukyus Special Collections Archives
The University of Hawaii at Manoa Library's Sakamaki/Hawley Collection

2014/08/30

matsuri (Kyoto area) - photos & video clips

Nice photo story at exposure.co with brief description, many vivid pictures and a few video clips:

2014/06/29

Tokyo statues

Public art on the streets of Seoul is diverse and numerous, but Tokyo has some notable statues, too, according to this article from AtlasObscura.com where an eclectic mix of stories appear with the search term     japan.

2014/06/13

documentary - Buddhism response to Tsunami 3.11

http://soulsofzen.com includes 2.5 minutes (trailer)

 [background to this visual project]
This documentary explores the role of Buddhism in care for the 3/11 bereaved and the dead based on attention to the everyday lives of Buddhist professionals in the disaster zone. Shot from March to December 2011 with a focus on Zen and Pure Land Buddhism, the film captures Buddhist temples and local communities in their struggles to rebuild. By contextualizing the triple disaster within recent rapid transformations in Buddhism and Japan's enduring tradition of ancestor veneration, Souls of Zen reflects on the complex role of Buddhism in a society shaped by natural disasters, religious pluralism, and demographic change.

Tim Graf is a Ph.D. candidate at Heidelberg University (Religious Studies), and a Ph.D. candidate and Research Associate at Tohoku University (School of Law). He worked at the Collaborative Research Center Ritual Dynamics at Heidelberg University and conducted fieldwork on Zen Buddhism as a JSPS fellow at the University of Tokyo. His research interests focus on transformations of Buddhism in contemporary Japan and more broadly deal with the interplay of religious practice and modern social change.
 [cross-posted from H-Japan announcement for screening in Tokyo at Sophia U. in June 2014]

2014/06/08

"Tower of the Sun"

From the 1970 World Expo near Osaka at Suita-city and near the grounds of Minpaku.ac.jp, the National Museum of Ethnology:


Short blog article and photos.

2014/05/23

Fwd: views of Kuril Islands and brief history in 20th century

Short photo story from the editors of AtlasObscura.com this week,

2014/05/14

newspaper PHOTO database (free)

Mainichi Shimbun_ has a PHOTO DB that one can search freely, MAINICHI PhotoBank - 毎日新聞社

2014/04/27

compressing time - Time Lapse views around Japan

-- search string at vimeo.com, http://vimeo.com/search?q=japan+timelapse
Techniques vary from long video that has be condensed (extracted still frames), to timer devices or programs to snap photos (fed into video software for playback), or a combination of both methods: pulling from video, or pouring in still images. Scenes tend to be places with motion such as traffic points for roads, trains or people. Sunrise or set, clouds across the land or seascape, and flowing water are popular views. Music often accompanies the playback, either contemplative classical or piano chored, or else techno with rapid percussive feeling to accompany the speeded up perspective of compressed time. Field recording (e.g. the sound of flowing water to accompany a rice paddy time lapse) is rare. A few projects combine all of these things: still image, time lapse, full-motion (normal playback) video.

The value of foreshortening time (and perhaps the opposite, recording/presenting things in slower than normal motion, but not freezing altogether) comes from detecting patterns and relationships that otherwise do not seem salient or offer any sociological insight or significance. So beyond aesthetic novelty, these are thinking tools, or food for thinking. Cars zooming around, sunrises at crazy rates, and people moving like rapid robots can soon become dull. But the change in seasons, flow of air, water or shadows never seems tiring to watch.


Busy Tokyo (1.5 minutes), http://vimeo.com/92982066

Tokyo water bus (1 min.), http://vimeo.com/7144128

Roppongi Hills sunset (1 min.), http://vimeo.com/26781363

Hachiko statue (20 seconds), http://vimeo.com/27562931

Walking and Timelapse (2 min.), http://vimeo.com/92529217

Hakone cablecar (ropeway; 1 min.), http://vimeo.com/962369

Compilation "hayaku" (8 min.), http://vimeo.com/12112529

Hokkaido vistas (1 min.), http://vimeo.com/77701966

2014/04/26

timelapse playback - downtown Kyoto to Narita

http://vimeo.com/92989467 shows the view from car dashboard. It begins at normal speed, then changes to "time lapse" to take one photo every few seconds for video playback.
The result is a 5 hour drive plays back in 45 minutes. Of course you can fast-forward to browse the scenes along the way.
This is not an exciting block-buster movie, but it does show the land, the traffic and signs along the way.

2014/04/19

collection of 800 slides, Japanese Religions

via H-Japan announcement 19 April 2014

Photo Archive of Japanese Religions

The Nanzan Institute has prepared an open-source collection of visual images related to Japanese religions, based on a donation of over 800 slides from Ian Reader, professor at Lancaster University. All images may be downloaded free of charge in two formats: one suitable for multimedia presentations and the other at high-resolution suitable for printing.

How to use: Go to http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/activities/photo-archive-of-japanese-religions/

Select an album from the Main Gallery. You will be brought to a page with thumbnails of all the images in that album. There are two options here:

(1)  Clicking on any image will bring up a page with that image and related data, often including detailed commentary by Ian Reader.

(2)  Clicking on Start Slideshow will run you through the entire set of pictures. You can click on the circled images at the bottom to select another slide.

The menu bar at the top right of the Slideshow gives you options for pausing and downloading. Clicking on the top left on the menu bar brings you back to the album's main page. The search function in the menu bar covers all the data included in the descriptions.

When using an image for printed material, we ask that you add the following acknowledgement: "From the Photo Archives of the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, Nagoya, Japan."

2014/04/16

visual stories

From the newly launched site for photo storytelling, http://exposure.co
Here are close-up photos from 2 festivals in the Kansai area, https://dataichi.exposure.co/matsuri
The captions are not very ethnographic, but the images are valuable.

The Atlas Obscura collection of museums, exhibits, and events includes many under the tag "japan" as well.

The user groups at flickr.com include many, many connected to Japan, such as:
Japan Hiking Photography 日本のハイキング写真 =212 members 
Japan Through the Eyes of Others =5,639 members 
Japan Images  =12,736 members 
Japan Deluxe 日本デラックス =597 members 
Japan and Germany / 日本とドイツ =144 members 
Japan Network 2007 (Post 1, Comment on 3) =58 members 
Japan 2011: Tokyo Fuji Kyoto Tokyo =1 member
Japan by tips4travels =99 members 
Japan in Postcards =252 members 
Japan, View of the Mysterious Village =22 members 
Japan Donations =222 members 
Japan Weekend =17 members 
Japan cultural assets =71 members 
Japan Eats =102 members 
JAPAN: The Balance of Old and New (MUST have Old AND New) =497 members

The interactive essays at Magnum In Motion (audio, video, text, hotlinks) include:
Tsunami Streetwalk 1, Kesennuma

... - March 11th 2011 (chris steele-perkins, earthquake, japan, Kesennuma, Magnum In Motion, magnum photography, magnum photos, ...

FLV Essay - 03/05/2012 - 12:21pm - 0 comments

Tsunami Streetwalk 2, Kamaishi

... - March 11th 2011 (chris steele-perkins, earthquake, japan, Kamaishi, Magnum In Motion, magnum photographer, magnum photos, tsunami) ...

FLV Essay - 03/05/2012 - 12:21pm - 0 comments

Children Of The Lotus

... buddhism, buddhists, cambodia, china, documentary, japan, journey, korea, laos, magnum, magnum photographer, monks, myanmar, sri ...

FLV Essay - 04/21/2011 - 9:29am - 0 comments

Tokyo Love Hello

... out. -Chris Steele-Perkins. (chris steele-perkins, HP, japan, love, tokyo, travelogue) ...

FLV Essay - 05/01/2009 - 3:01pm - 5 comments

Gangster Types And Tough Guys

... gangster types and tough guys, gangsters, george abe, go, japan, magnum photographer, magnum photos, new york city, tough guys, yakuza) ...

FLV Essay - 02/12/2010 - 4:24pm - 16 comments

2014/01/22

View the world with these 40 surprising maps‏

Visual context for worldview in 40 maps: These visual treats will prompt lots of thinking and talking. Share with others keen on understanding the world and its people.

2014/01/21

all about Soba

The morning radio show "Morning Edition" carried a nice story about making and eating soba.


[opening excerpt]

Traditional Japanese cuisine, known as washoku, is now an Intangible Cultural Heritage, according to the United Nations.
     
Tofu, mochi and miso are a few examples, but it's the buckwheat noodle, or soba, that many consider the humble jewel of Japanese cuisine. It's not easy to find in the U.S., but one Los Angeles woman is helping preserve the craft of making soba.

     In a cooking classroom off a busy street in L.A., Sonoko Sakai is teaching about the simplicity of making buckwheat noodles.

     "Basically, soba is only two things: flour and water," Sakai explains.

     A handful of students gather around the slender Sakai as she shows them how to mix the flour and water together.


=-=-=-=-= added comment

While teaching English in rural west Japan (Takefu city, merged and renamed Echizen city in 2005) I was introduced to the local pride, cold soba with grated daikon radish: Oroshi Soba. One aficionado credited the soba to Saracens in Central Asia. And since the 30-40 km radius to Takefu boasts uniquely chewy and flavorful soba tradition, they claim the True Tradition of Soba. In recent years they opened the "soba dojo" or practice hall where busloads of day trippers and area school children, elderly day-center people and others learn all about the varieties of the noodle. There is a restaurant, museum and gift counter as well, all dedicated to celebrate the humble and sincere treat. See panoramas of the display case diorama showing soba making in miniature, http://tinyurl.com/sobadojo1 and http://tinyurl.com/sobadojo2

2014/01/20

origami - show me the money

spotted at restaurant wall in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105