Japanese

This introduction to Japanese language and culture is designed for students who have had little or no experience learning Japanese. The goal of the course is to develop four basic skills: listening comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing (hiragana, katakana, and some basic kanji) in modern Japanese, with an emphasis on grammatical accuracy and socially appropriate language use. Students will put these skills into practice through in-class conversation, role play and group work, and daily homework assignments. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, weekly individual meetings with a Japanese language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required.

In this course, students will continue to develop basic skills in listening comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing while expanding their vocabulary and knowledge of grammar. At the end of the course, students should be able to effectively handle simple communicative tasks and situations, understand simple daily conversations, write short essays, read simple essays, and discuss their content. In addition to classes with the faculty instructor, there will be weekly, one-on-one tutorials with one of the Japanese language assistants.  

This course will aim to advance students’ Japanese language proficiency in speaking, listening, reading (simple essays to authentic texts), and writing in various styles (emails, essays, and/or creative writing). In addition to class, students will attend weekly individual tutorials with a Japanese language assistant. 

This course will take an industrial approach to the study of global film and film history, highlighting box-office hits, fans, stars, workers, and dream factories from multiple (trans)national contexts. Foregrounding questions of labor, technology, circulation, and genre, we will examine popular cinema as an industrial film form with a particular emphasis on melodrama, comedy, and the musical. This seminar is framed by some of film history’s most persistent questions: What is “popular” culture? What is a “mass” medium? Is cinema a universal language? Can art be separated from commerce? Proceeding chronologically from the 1920s through the present, we will first explore “classical Hollywood cinema” as an exportable style and mass reproducible system. Next, we will follow the rise of other “-ollywoods” around the world, contextualizing and comparing several major film industries and their popular cinemas. Ranging from Western Europe to the Soviet Union and the Global South, topics will include the studio lot as dream site, urban film cultures, vernacular modernism, colonial film production and cultural imperialism, cine-workers as global workers, divisions of voice labor in Hollywood vs. Bollywood, the transnational feminization of film handiwork, and the relationship between new film industries and new media from polyglot talkies to Nollywood video-films.

The American conception of Japan is largely based on the pop culture that it exports. This is not a politically neutral process. Many of the things that we think of when we hear “Japan”—like anime and manga, ramen and sushi, Pokémon and Zelda, mecha suits and Godzilla, and kawaii (cute) culture—are products consciously pushed abroad by the Japanese government since the 1980s as part of the “Cool Japan” initiative. Many of these modern-day markers of “Japanese-ness” were also shaped by the US occupation of Japan after World War II and other transnational encounters within the Japanese Empire and its aftermath. In this course—through close examination of a range of Japanese media objects, including but not limited to anime and manga, the modern serial novel, cinema, architecture, food, fashion, and video games—we will consider how pop culture forms and circulates around the globe. In the process, we will think through issues of genre and form in transnational media reception: Why are the samurai film and the Hollywood western the same, actually? What can J-Horror tell us about the concerns of postwar Japanese society? Why are cyberpunk stories always set in Japan, and what is the state of “techno-orientalism” today? Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities that will include transition to college, research sessions, literary and media analysis strategies, and academic writing/editing workshops. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

A historical survey of religious beliefs, practices, and institutions in Japan, from ancient times to the present, this course will cover all major Japanese religious traditions and movements—Shintō, Buddhism, Shūgendō, Confucianism, and the so-called “new religions”—as well as various elements of religion and culture, such as Noh theatre and Bushidō, that are not readily subsumed under any of the preceding labels. Readings will include many primary sources (Japanese texts in English translation), and audio-visual materials will be used whenever possible to give a fuller picture of traditional religious art, architecture, and ritual performance in Japan. Prior study or experience with Japanese culture (language, literature, history, etc.) is desirable but not required.

The American fascination with Zen Buddhism began during the postwar occupation of Japan and took off during the 1950s, when Jack Kerouac and other members of the Beat Generation styled themselves as freewheeling Zen "dharma bums." In the 1960s, the Zen writings of D. T. Suzuki became popular and introduced the possibility of satori, or spiritual “enlightenment,” which seemed to fit right in with the “turn on, tune in, drop out” philosophy of the hippie movement and its use of psychedelic drugs. From the 1970s, Zen centers sprang up across the United States and Europe, giving people who were serious about gaining satori a taste of the rigors of Japanese-style Zen monastic training with its long hours of zazen (sitting meditation) and emphasis on ascetic endurance. Karate and other martial arts dojos opened in neighborhoods everywhere, and anyone who trained in one likely heard about the deep historical connection between Zen and Bushido (the “way of the warrior”) in Japan. Meanwhile, Zen has also became known in the West for its refined aesthetic sense, as represented in the “Zen arts” of the tea ceremony, flower arranging, ink painting, landscape gardening, and Noh theatre. This course intends to pull back the curtain of these Western images of Zen and look behind them to see what Zen Buddhism in Japan has really been like from the time of its initial importation from China in the Kamakura period (1185-1333) to the present. It may be surprising to learn, for example, that Zen was instrumental in introducing Confucian-style ancestor worship to Japan and that, even today, the main occupation of Zen monks is the performance of funerals and memorial services for ancestral spirits. Zen monasteries were indeed built and patronized by samurai rulers right down to the advent of the Meiji period in 1868, when Japan began a headlong rush to adopt many elements of Western technology and culture; but what attracted samurai to the religion was largely the elite Chinese culture that it conveyed, not any warrior spirit of fearlessness in the face of death. Ironically, much of what Americans think of as “Zen” was invented in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the Zen Buddhist priesthood in Japan struggled to make itself relevant in the modern, scientific age of colonialism and militarism. The notions that Zen dispenses with religious superstition and empty ritual, for example, and that it is a kind of spirituality that can be practiced in the midst of everyday life no matter what a person's occupation were formulated in Japan by Zen monks and lay practitioners who had been deeply influenced by Western cultural norms, such as rationality and individualistic self-help. The idea that Zen training could toughen up soldiers to fight for the empire similarly dated from a time when the samurai class had been dissolved and the country was consumed by conscripting the sons of farmers and merchants into the military. In the postwar period, the theme of “Zen and Bushido” was conveniently muted, while “Zen and the arts”" was promoted—both within Japan and abroad. This course explores these and other aspects of the history and current status of Zen Buddhism in Japan. Some background knowledge of the Buddhist tradition is desirable but not mandatory.