speach tree

Remember how I talked about the imagery and Christian themes in the first 20 episodes of Death Note? Well now I'm going to talk about the second opening, which has a soundtrack that is much less pop than the first one. "Hey hey human sucker, Hey human fucker" is a refrain, which, along with "convenience Banzai human" sort of sums up the whole song, I think. But the imagery! So interesting! Doesn't the opening reflect more of the international audience of Death Note? Do I detect a compositional reference to the Black Panthers? Does Amane Misa finally turn into a porn star? Is there a Matrix allusion? And is it just me or does Light seem to really lose it in the end? Below are some frame stop times for you if you want to take a look at what I'm talking about. (Just look up "Death Note 2nd Opening"on youtube and you will probably find a 1min20sec video with corresponding frame-times): 0:00 - 0:08, "Death Note" in a bunch of different lan...

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...