2014/12/26

project, Tohoku kara no Koe


   [cross-posting from H-Japan 26 Dec 2014, D. Slater at Jochi-Dai/Sophia Uni]
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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.