speach tree

Death Note Notes, Part 2 I finished watching the Death Note series on the internet over Turkey Break. My earlier observations remain with no major modifications. I don't want to spoil the ending for those of you who are still watching, but I do want to talk a little bit about a few trends that I see in Japanese pop media. #1 The Thriller. As I said before, this series masterfully juggles suspense, fantasy, and thriller elements into what I consider to be the epitome of good anime: It does what live-action movies can't do, it does what novels can't do, and it has a great soundtrack. So fun. On another note, I think that many viewers of this anime (myself especially) have been so thoroughly trained to consider the Greek Tragedy to be Good Form that we can't help but get sucked in. According to Greek Tragedy formula, Light is a Tragic Hero because he comes from a "good," noble family, is good-looking, smart, attractive, and has a Tragic Flaw : Hubris (in Engli...

Lately, I have been watching the anime series Death Note obsessively on youtube. Here is the premise, in my own words (you can also check out Wikipedia etc): Light Yagami, the smartest kid in school, one day finds the “Death Note,” a magical notebook that gives its owner the supernatural ability to kill anyone by merely writing the victim’s name in the pages of the book, while thinking clearly of the victim’s face. without both the name and the face of the victim, the owner of the Death Note cannot complete the killing. Light decides to create a “perfect world” by killing all criminals. Eventually the most powerful political institutions of the world appoint a mysterious genius detective, known only as “L”, to solve the mystery of why all the world’s criminals (that make it onto the nightly news) are dropping dead. (To find Death Note episodes free on youtube, look for “DN ep 1” or some other variation. If it’s overly obvious, the people who hold the rights to the DVD will pull it of...

DW found me an article by Michio Kaku (famous physicist on string theory and - apparently - sometime anti-racist cultural critic) anayzing the history of racist Asian imagery/stereotypes in U.S. comics! Amazing! and I am also reading a feature article in the Japanese magazine, PEN with New Attitude, about the history of world comics and its impact on Japanese manga! The analysis, to come.

This is turning into a weekly installment brought to you from Wall Street... J-Class! ...I need to think of a more catchy name for it... Operation Asian Sabotage... hmmm, too Fu Manchu. After this Tuesday's class, I decided to try to write a post about performing/entertaining for my students in after-school. Basically, my supervisor keeps telling me that I can't expect to turn out fluent speakers by June. We meet for basically an hour once a week to learn whatever we can while eating pizza or mochi after being in school since 8am. What can we possibly do in such little time? (The answer, of course, is a lot, but first...) I am worried that in the absence of real material, I am basically performing a racialized culture of "Japaneseness" for the entertainment of my students and for the agency that employs me, instead of being a facilitator/educator. There are a few reasons why I feel this way: My students see me as Japanese. And I am. But that's not the only thing t...