Beginning in the second week, Friday classes will be conducted as discussions of the course materials. For that purpose, the class will be divided into smaller sections, depending on enrollment. All students may attend these classes, but to qualify for the "sections" option and for WR course credit, you must (a) attend at least nine of the sections, (b) participate actively in the discussions, and (c) complete the short written exercises that will accompany most weeks' section meetings. If you miss a section meeting, the exercise should be handed in at the next Monday class.
Those of you selecting this option will receive a grade for section participation based on an evaluation of your written responses and general participation. This grade will be about 25% of your course grade.
The following are the tentative assignments for the discussion sessions to give you some idea about their topics and scope. However, I will be revising some of the topics as we go along in the course, and you should always check for the current formulation.
Exercise for discussion session 1: September 14 and 15
Over the years, students who take this course have varied widely in their previous experience with Japan, ranging from those with little or no exposure at all and those who have interests in something Japanese (e.g., anime, martial arts) to those who have studied and lived in Japan. In this first session, I would like to get a sense of the range of motivations, experiences, and expectations that you are bringing to the course. Please prepare and bring to the class a brief statement of your own previous encounters with Japan or topics relevant to a study of Japan and reflect on images of the society that you may have developed through this. We are talking in this first week about the pervasiveness of "national character" stereotyping of Japan, and try to analyze the extent to which your images of Japan may have been shaped by common stereotypes of the society and the people. You needn't write more than a one page response to these questions.
Exercise for discussion session 2: September 21 and 23
Your video assignment this week is to view the documentary, "Reinventing Japan," about the American Occupation of Japan following World War II and the reconstruction of the society in the decade, 1945-1955. The documentary is available as a streaming version here, and a DVD copy is on reserve at the Film Study Center. Please also refer to Prof. Kelly's extensive screening notes about this documentary.
For those Japanese now in later life, including Mariko and Takeshi Tanaka in Bumiller's Secrets of Mariko, this was their childhood, and the period deeply influenced their subsequent lives. As you reflect on the documentary, write a brief response that speculates on just what events and developments of this decade might have had a particularly powerful impact on the people they became.
Exercise for discussion session 3: September 28 and 29
Your video assignment this week is to view the documentary, "Living Through a Miracle." The documentary is available as a streaming version here, and a DVD copy is on reserve at the Film Study Center. Please also refer to Prof Kelly's notes about this documentary.
The miracle of the title was the unprecedented acceleration in the national economic growth rate during much of the 1960s, the decade in which Mariko's generation came of as young adults. As I have argued in class, this reflected and reinforced the national commitments to national affluence and cultural identity that redefined Japan in the second half of the twentieth century. It also expressed itself in the sense of "mainstream consciousness" that bounded people's lives and their designs for living. What I would like you to express in a response paper for this session is (a) what evidence you see in the documentary of developments that helped to build this mainstream consciousness and (b) what evidence you find in Bumiller's book that Mariko and Takeshi, in what they said and in how they lived, were part of this societal mainstream.
Exercise for discussion section 4: October 5 and 6
Your video assignment this week is to view the documentary, "Being Japanese" (a misleading title for what is a documentary about a Japanese company work place, Fuji Film Company). The documentary is available as a streaming version here, and a DVD copy is on reserve at the Film Study Center. Please also refer to Prof Kelly's notes about this documentary.
I realize that I am expecting a lot of you this week in assigning the articles for Monday's session, the Ogasawara book for the rest of the week, and the documentary on Fuji Film. I have provided notes on Ogasawara's book and the documentary to help you in reading and viewing expeditiously for some of the main themes and central arguments. For Ogasawara, I don't expect a thorough and close reading of the entire book, but I do hope that you can identify the main features of the OL situation and the key question of power and resistance.
Thus, I give you a choice in writing your response to these materials in preparation for our Thursday and Friday discussion sections.
EITHER write a longish paragraph response to EACH of the following questions
OR write a couple of paragraphs in response to ONE of the following questions.
(1) Identity those features of work, workplaces, and workers at Fuji Film that seem to you illustrate the general characteristics of "the large Japanese company" model.
(2) OLs at Tozai Bank (and elsewhere) are in positions of formal subordination but Ogasawara finds that they are not entirely without power. OLs, she thinks, deploy several "weapons of the weak" to resist male domination. Among the specific questions she poses are:
“What exactly can OLs do to annoy and trouble men?”
“How disturbed are men by such action?”
“Why do men in authority not prevent OLs from resorting to such measures?”
“Are there limits to women's acts of resistance?”
“What implications do these acts have on OLs' jobs and positions within the organization?”
In general, what do you think about the balance of power in the Tozai Bank offices? Is Ogasawara right about the leverage that OLs exert, or do you believe that she exaggerates their ability to keep their male bosses anxious and off balance?
Exercise for discussion section 5: October 12 and 13
The documentary on "The Learning Machine" focuses the elementary and junior high school experiences, and it is a highly instructive accompaniment to the readings. This week, in place of a written response, I'd like you instead to experience something of difficulties of Japanese university entrance exams. I have made a copy of an examination given to applicants to the Keio University Faculty of Law, probably the most difficult faculty within an elite private university. The first section of the exam (a pdf version of which is here) tests written English language (pages 2-8 of the pdf). I'd like you to take this part of the exam, keep track of how long it takes you and how many right answers you get, and come to discussion section prepared to talk about the exam and the issues raised by the documentary in the context of the topics that I will raise in Wednesday's session.
PS: The answer code for the Keio exam is here.
Exercise for discussion section 6: October 19 and 20
I am asking you to view two shorter documentaries this week, both of which profile some very anxious young people. "Cram School" ends with a phone call from Manabu Ueda reporting his latest university entrance exam results to his father and mother back in Hiroshima. "The Story of Noriko" ends with the woman of the title, Noriko Otsuna, having just found a job after a long search. Placing their stories in the context of our other readings and class sessions, I would like you to respond to the following questions:
1. Put yourself in the position of Manabu's father when Manabu returns home from Tokyo. You sit him down. What advice or instructions would you give him about his (Manabu's) determination to try once again.
2. Where do you think Noriko Otsuka's life will be in four to five years following the end of the documentary?
Exercise for discussion section 7: October 26 and 27
Given that a first draft of your second essay will be due on Monday, October 24, your "written response" assignment for this discussion section will be to prepare a one-page precis of your essay. Each student will briefly present his/her main idea in section, and we will ask one other student to respond to the idea with comments and suggestions.
Exercise for discussion section 8: November 2 and 3
The documentary I am asking you to view and think about this week is "Dream Girls," in conjunction with an essay on Takarazuka fans by Nakamura and Matsuo that is assigned for Monday (that is, you are not expected to read it before watching the documentary). Next week, I will relate this profile of Takarazuka to broader issues of mass culture in contemporary Japan and how it is related to the experiences of everyday life. For today, however, focus on the portrait of Takarazuka (the Academy, the Revue, the stars, and the fans) given us in this documentary. What I would like you to write in response and in preparation for our discussions is a response to the following issue:
In what ways is Takarazuka comfortably within the mainstream of society and its norms and in what ways is it set against the mainstream of society? That is, what are some of the moments in the documentary that support either or both of these positions?
Exercise for discussion section 9: November 9 and 10
For our discussion sections this week, I would like you to focus especially on three of the texts I have assigned this week: Gordon Mathews' brief article on "Seeking a Career, Finding a Job"; Diane Bethel's portrait of life at the Aotani Home for the Elderly; and Brice Pedroletti's film documentary of the day laborers of Osaka's Kamagasaki district, especially his main character, Shintaro. One of the common themes to me that runs through all three studies is the way in which meaningful life is created out of the constant, mutual "conditioning" of the objective structures that organize our lives and define us as social persons and our own actions that animate those structures. One of the most famous quotations in social science, by Karl Marx, expressed it as: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past."
To some of you, this may seem like rather obscure social science jargon, but I'd like you to try to think about these three texts in light of this theme. The authors are talking about freeters, about elderly, and about down-and-out laborers, and about how these people are trying to make something meaningful out of the conditions of their life. How exactly are they doing this? That is what I'd like you to write about in preparation for our discussion.
Exercise for discussion section 10: November 31 and December 1
In our section discussions this week, I'd like us to focus on the first half of Roth's book and on the assigned video documentary that explores salsa and salsa clubs in Japan. Both draw attention to those "new strangers" who are the rapidly increasing numbers of immigrant workers from South America, almost entirely of Japanese descent. Two (related) questions that you should consider in reading and viewing and which I would like you to discuss in section are the following:
(1) Roth analyzes the position of Japanese Brazilian migrants in terms of a concept he calls "structural marginalization" (see, for instance, his pages 8-10). His chapters 3 and 4 focus particularly on the workplaces in which most of these migrants work. What is some of the particular evidence that he introduces in these chapters to support his argument about these migrants' "structural marginalization."
(2) Japan is sometimes accused of being open to foreign ideas and products but closed to foreign people themselves. The 1990s fad in Japan for salsa and salsa dancing coincided with the rapid increase in Japanese Brazilian (and also Japanese Peruvian) worker-immigrants in this decade, although the two phenomena are only indirectly linked. Elizabeth Chamberlin's documentary takes us to the two main venues of salsa music and dancing in Japan, one of which is frequented by largely Japanese patrons and the other of which attracts many of the Japanese South American migrants. Do you think it is fair to take this as evidence for critics' charges about Japanese enthusiasm for foreign things but intolerance of foreign people--or are there other ways by which we can/should understand these salsa clubs?
WRITING EXERCISE: Use Roth's theory of "structural marginalization" to respond to Elizabeth Chamberlain's documentary. Writing in either Roth's voice (or your own), deconstruct and analyze what is occuring with Japanese salsa clubs.
Exercise for discussion section 11: December 7 and 8
There are certainly more documentaries that we might view and talk about in this final section meeting, but as a way of having a discussion that tries to bring together some of your reflections on the course and its subject and that helps you to work out your themes for the final essay, I'd like you to prepare in the following way. We have been talking about some very abstract ideas (like mainstream consciousness), about the formal institutions that organize life in Japanese society (like workplace organization), and about actual individuals as they lead their lives. It is the last of these that I want you to focus on. Write a page or so about what is to you the most memorable individual you have encountered in course readings, lectures, or documentaries. Explain why that is so (that is, why is s/he so memorable for you) and explain just what does this person tell us about contemporary Japan?