speach tree

This week, we got around to talking about the indigenous peoples of Japan. Concepts that we touched on: - “Assimilation” - “History is written by the winners,” and therefore - “Losers are depicted by the winners.” - “ethnic groups” - “minorities” In the first half of the class, we watched a movie – 『もののけ姫』(Princess Mononoke) – which was the most popular movie in Japan until Titanic came out afterwards. It was also the most expensive animated movie to make, up until its release date (2004), at a production cost of about $20 million. I introduced the movie by talking about the setting – Muromachi Period (1336-1573), roughly contemporary with the Ming Dynasty and the arrival of C. Columbus in what is now known as the Caribbean. The main character of the movie is an Emishi prince, from a clan of natives who have continued to resist the Japanese Shogunal government. (Historians say that the Emishi natives were all assimilated by 1300.) The main character of the movie is based on a historica...

I have been wanting to keep a log of all the movies I watch, since I keep track of all the books I read on goodreads.com. It would be nice to get better at critically analyzing the movies I watch, just because it's so easy to watch a movie but to think about what I've seen is complicated. So I will start today with a Japanese movie, made and released in 2006, called Boku wa imouto ni koi wo suru . My translation: "I fall in love with my sister." It stars Matsumoto Jun (he's in all the high-profile J-dramas these days like Gokusen and Hana Yori Dango , both of which were adapted from manga.) Not surprisingly, this movie is based on a manga of the same title, written by Kotomi Aoki and published by Shogakukan Publications, Ltd. Since I'm interested in social politics through manga as a medium, I'm going to talk about how the movie works in a social context. There are two different issues I want to talk about: Japanese geographic culture and Taboos. Geograph...

I just re-read the first paragraph of the article I wrote for the College Hill Independent after I got back from visiting Zapatista communities in December 2005. Wow. Yeah. Anyway, I will spare you the self-flagellation and just give you the link so you can see for yourself. Here it is! http://www.brown.edu/Students/INDY/cms/content/view/125/73/ Part of the impetus to write this blog is to figure out how to bring what I've learned from the Zapatistas back to my every-day life. Which is wierd when my life feels less stable than hydrogenated oils in a deep fryer. How to be a politically responsible person when making less than $300 a week as a transplant in NYC?

(10/8/07) I’m actually writing this the day after Day 2 before I head to Day 3 because last night, after the convention, I spent the rest of the afternoon/evening at Party for the People in BK. (It was excellent, but that is a different post entirely.) After P4P (or PftP as it is also known) I spent the night snacking and chatting with my room-mates DW and RL, and DW’s sister and our friend JW, aka Janejane. JW asked a lot of fun questions about my recent (?) interest in anime/manga, since we hadn’t talked in a minute. So I decided to talk here a little bit about what I’m trying to do. This is true of a lot of pop culture media but anime/manga (as most people in the US know it today) is full of the problematic gender/race/class stereotypes that permeate its source society (Japan/USA). A lot of people in the U.S. today think that anime has something to do with crazy big-eyed and impossibly skinny animated characters often involved in either magical/fantasy fighting scenarios or octopus ...

I have been facilitating an after-school Anime Club at two high schools next to Ground Zero, alongside teaching Japanese after school (there is a lot of overlap in the student participants). As I do more and more research on Anime and Manga availability in the U.S., I meet increasing numbers of young people of color from all kinds of backgrounds who are consuming and producing their own anime-related work. Yet the culture of Anime and Manga consumption/production in the U.S. is still dominated by white (and Asian) males, although there seems to be an increasing number of women being recognized on an institutional level. As an artist and teacher who was raised on anime/manga (I learned Japanese by reading and watching) I'm pretty interested in the changing social impact of Japanese/US manga and anime culture. So I decided to hop on NJ Transit bus #129 after work today and attend the 2nd annual MangaNEXT convention (only the second convention devoted exclusively to manga ever held in...