Postwar Japanese Family Fictions

Comments and Questions for Your Classmates!

2007-12-13T16:13:00.001-08:00

I thoroughly enjoyed today's class! What a treat! I look forward to more on Tuesday, bright and early. Daniel's poster is already on my office wall, so feel free to stop by to take a leisurely look and relive the magic.

If you have links or images from your presentations you'd like me to post, just let me know, and I'll see to it that it happens.

In the meantime, please leave your comments and questions for Randy, Ellen, Elizabeth, Daniel, and Andrew below!

New Schedule

2007-12-12T11:25:00.000-08:00

Our make-up class session will be Tuesday, Dec. 18th at 7:30 a.m. in our regular classroom.

Those of you who were scheduled to present on Tuesday will make your presentations tomorrow, and those of you scheduled for Thursday will present on Tuesday, Dec 18th at 7:30 a.m., which is our scheduled exam time, so you all are presumably available then.

Since we will be meeting on the 18th, you can use that date as your new paper/project deadline.

No one will be "iced" out of this class!

2007-12-12T05:49:00.000-08:00

I'm sure you have been thinking about what losing class yesterday meant to us all, and maybe some of you have some ideas as to how we can make time for everyone to present. Please share any ideas you may have. We can't have everyone present tomorrow, and I've been thinking of alternatives.

Option #1:
The obvious solution is one that may not be popular. If our class had a final exam, our exam time would be 7:30-9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, December 18th (in our regular classroom). Presumably, you all are available then, as am I. I know that is very early, but it is also fair.

Option #2:
Determine an alternate class time that works for everyone. For example, we could meet after class on Thursday. I'll have to schedule a room for us, so we'll need to decide asap. Here are some suggestions for alternate times. Please indicate which times would work for you in the comments section below.

A. Thursday 3:45-5:00 p.m.
B. Thursday 1:15-2:30 p.m.
C. Thursday 5:00-6:15 p.m.
D. Friday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
E. Friday 4:30-5:45 p.m.
F. Sunday 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
G. Sunday 12:00-1:15 p.m.
H. Sunday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
I. Sunday 2:00-3:15 p.m.
J. Sunday 3:00-4:15 p.m.

As far as how to proceed tomorrow, I'm still really struggling with that, and once I know what our plan is for the second session, I'll make an official announcement. In the meantime, everyone should be prepared to present Thursday just in case.

UNIVERSITY CANCELS CLASS THIS AFTERNOON

2007-12-11T09:51:00.001-08:00

Hi everyone,

I know you have been working so hard to prepare, and I promise I will figure out a way for us to enjoy everyone's presentations.

You can check the university's website for more information on the decision to cancel all classes this afternoon.

Please stay safe, everyone. If you need something, let us all know on the blog, and we can help one another.

take good care,
adrienne

Your friendly reminder!

2007-12-06T20:44:00.000-08:00

Below is the schedule for your presentations!! I'm excited!

Please be prepared to stick to the 10-minute limit so that everyone has the chance to present. I know it's short, but if you prepare carefully and practice, I know you can do it. We probably won't have much time for questions or discussion, so write down questions you have for your classmates, and you can post them to the blog after the presentations. (I will stop you after 10 minutes if you start to go over the time limit. Please don't make me do that.) You are welcome to make handouts, use powerpoint, the computer, etc. The room has the computer, a DVD player, and a document camera too.

December 11th
Randy
Ellen
Elizabeth
Daniel
Andrew
Akiko
Angela

December 13th
Shiho
Laila
Stephanie
Peter
Justin
Lindsey
Daigo

TOMORROW ni tsuite

2007-12-03T14:41:00.000-08:00

Please check your university email accounts for important information about tomorrow's class. (Hint: no class tomorrow)

I thought you might like to check out the following links:

AsiaSource Interview with Julie Otsuka

Terry Hong Interview with Julie Otsuka

William Nakayama interview with Julie Otsuka

Excerpt:
William Nakayama: Do you feel a deep suspicion toward authority?

Julie Otsuka: I do think I'm a sort of suspicious person. Yeah, I think so. In general I'm just wary, very wary I think. I think I get that from my mother. I don't trust that things are going well. Even if things are going well, I'm not sure. I don't take anything for granted.

William Nakayama: Is the humor that was in your comic writing a way of expressing or venting anger?

Julie Otsuka: I think comedy very much comes out of anger, or sadness. Good comedy I think especially has a vein of sadness in it too, but humor is sort of an expression of anger.

I'll bet Andrew will have something to say about that part! :)

I'm very excited to hear what you all think of this novel. Which scenes were toughest for you to read and why? Can any of you guess which chapter is my favorite? Which parts do you like the most?

What fun!!

2007-11-30T08:22:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's class was so much fun! I am still laughing about Daigo, Ellen, and Randy's pitch (and Shiho's reaction). What a great time. Thanks!

FYI

2007-11-27T15:41:00.000-08:00

If you click here, you can see a Yuri Kochiyama t-shirt with a note from the designer.

Yuri Kochiyama

2007-11-21T19:00:00.000-08:00

I've been wondering what you all think of Yuri Kochiyama so far. I'm glad you have the break to absorb her writing and think about it. Here are some links and whatnot for you to look over while you read Passing it On.

That's a preview for Freedom Fighters, a documentary about Yuri Kochiyama and Kiilu Nyasha.

You'll probably want to listen to Tavis Smiley's interview with Yuri Kochiyama.

You can learn more about her by visiting the following sites too.

Learn to Question
Kil Ja Kim's interview with Yuri Kochiyama
Revolutionary Worker interview with Yuri Kochiyama
Melissa Hung's article on Yuri Kochiyama
Yuri Kochiyama nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
Yuri Kochiyama bio at Discover Nikkei

I've taught this book before. Shiori Yamazaki and another student, Jacob Boss, were so moved by Yuri's life and writings that they made her a birthday gift, which we sent her last spring. They also had some classmates write notes for Yuri. Maybe some of you might want to send her notes and messages too. Here are just a few of the many images I scanned from the scrapbook album Shiori and Jacob made for her before we mailed it. To view larger versions of any of the pages below, please click on the image.

Dear Informants,

2007-11-15T15:51:00.001-08:00

Please tell me all about the "extra class" tonight and Daigo's introductory remarks!

Reduced Office Hours This Week

2007-11-12T13:45:00.001-08:00

I won't be holding office hours on Thursday this week, so please come by on Wednesday between 1-2:30 if you need to see me before break. I'll hold additional office hours after the break, but you can always ask me questions via email if you have questions that require an immediate answer.

Twinkle Twinkle

2007-11-08T17:27:00.000-08:00

Why did I assign this novel? How does it fit in our class?

The author (pictured here) was born in 1964, so she's only a little older than me. The novel you are reading was originally published in 1991.

What do you think of the narrative structure and changing points of view?

From Angela

2007-11-08T10:30:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone!

We won't be watching Who Killed Vincent Chin?, but it is a film I hope you all watch someday. Maybe it can be post-class "homework." Angela sent me the following information to share with everyone:

Scroll down a little here, or go to the imdiversity archive here.

It's just a memorial piece, really, that Tak made a while back, but if you haven't seen the strip before, you might want to look through the archives for some funny/insightful/interesting stuff. Every once in a while there'll be a strip I disagree with, but a lot of them are pretty awesome, I think.

From Kota Inoue to Norma Field

2007-11-03T14:09:00.000-07:00

Prof. Inoue enjoyed his time in Iowa City very much. I was happy to see some of you at his talk on Friday. After his talk, we happened upon the weekly antiwar vigil in front of Schaeffer Hall, and Daigo took this picture. Those of you who weren't able to attend can ask your classmates about Prof. Inoue's interpretation of the story by Miyazawa Kenji you read. I was especially struck by his description of the forests as insurgent. That was a really fresh reading, I thought. If you have any additional questions for him, let me know, and I'll forward them to him.

This week, we'll be discussing one of my very favorite books to teach. (Just as a reminder, you can access your reading here.) In some ways, it's the book that ties everything in our course together. I've taught this book at three different universities: UC Irvine, Stanford, and the UI, and my students often have very personal and thoughtful responses to it. I'm really looking forward to hearing and reading about how you all respond to it. The unique revisions we have made, collectively, to our class and the special rapport we've developed will make this time especially meaningful, I think.

Norma Field visited the UI last fall, and she spoke to my classes and also gave an amazing public lecture that still airs on UITV sometimes. In addition to her stunning scholarly output on Japanese literature (everything from The Tale of Genji to Sôseki to Takiji), Professor Field writes and speaks about everything from Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution and "comfort women" to depleted uranium. You might remember that I invoked her work on our first day of class when I talked about o-bon and August in Japan.

She is definitely not a "typical" scholar. I think you already are realizing that as you read From My Grandmother's Bedside. Here's an example:

Sakamoto Ryûichi, the composer/artist/activist who made the video with Imawano Kiyoshirô (Richard Sagawa) I posted earlier, has been drawing attention to a plutonium reprocessing plant in Rokkasho (Aomori). A uranium-enrichment plant is already there and has been in operation since 1992. Sakamoto and others are opposing this reprocessing plant. Norma Field was asked to contribute a poem to the ongoing campaign to stop the reprocessing plant. The piece she wrote has been set to music by OTO. To hear it, click here and then scroll down to "Before Then."

Prof. Field has generously given me permission to post the poem here. You can read it while you listen.

BEFORE THEN

Once upon a time
I read about how
If you strip it down enough,
every story in the world
would be a Cinderella story.

But you and I know
that's only half the story,
the happy-ending half.
Most stories
I'm willing to bet
end up sadder than happy.

You know how it works
the Hollywood way:
it's ok, he's gonna get the girl,
the girl's gonna get the prince,
the kid's gonna find his dad.

Or
don't open that door
______ go down the stairs
______ walk into that forest.
Don't turn that corner, come back!
It doesn't matter, none of it matters
because we know it's a horror story,
the one we paid to enjoy.

Knowing the ending lets you sit
through one hair-raising scene after another.
Knowing this toothache
______ this test
______ this strained conversation
will come to an end
helps you do, or harder, just be
until the promised end--and then
normalcy again.

Some endings are so horrible
we can't touch them even with our mind's eye.
Better pretend it didn't happen:
the past is already past anyway.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki,
is like that for me. Too immense—the consequences
are too immense, spreading far, far beyond the mushroom cloud
quietly, steadily, into the present.

But there're two lines
by poet Ishigaki Rin
that take me straight to the unbearable precipice
of before, just before.

She starts with the photo of a face of festering burns
one of the two hundred and fifty-thousand instant dead,
imagines it back into a classroom or an office or
maybe a factory of fresh
morning faces.

Eight-fifteen a.m. comes 'round each day:
weren't those faces
like yours and mine now
calm, beautiful
caught--
off-guard?

Rokkashomura: Village of Six Places
land of plains and wetlands,
stopping-off point for migratory birds
crossing the majestic northern sea,
once the bearer of prosperity
______ squid sea urchin seaweed;
there's dairy farming and fine produce too
now even—often--organic.

All of it, well, all that's survived
decades of a poor northern economy
in a nation hurtling way past development
is still beautiful.

Soon, very soon
______ this soil
______ this air
______ this water
will be bathed in radiation.

There won't be faces burned beyond recognition,
or much of anything for our eyes to see.
It's not as if a bomb were being dropped, after all.
But six decades into the atomic age
we can't pretend to be innocent just because
radiation's invisible.
After all.

The plutonium reprocessing plant
is supposed to save the region.
People will have jobs again
feed their kids
help their old moms and dads for a change
get new flat-screen tv's down the road.

Just think of it:
spent nuclear fuel
trucked by convoy
from all over the archipelago
converging on the Village of Six Places.

Gotta keep them running, you know—
the fifty-four plants around the country
never sleeping, feeding our hunger
yours and mine
for heat, cool
speed, beauty
and the magic
of making all that waste born of our appetites
disappear.

We know
we know
enough of what will come
from the solution
of Rokkashomura.
We know this poisoning of
______ earth
______ ocean
______ sky
and all who live within
is irreversible
at least as far as our imaginations can reach
and then some.

It looks like it's a go right now, a go for plutonium
prince of toxics.

Here we stand, at the edge of the precipice
knowing not everything, but enough
about what's on the other side.

Here we stand, knowing
the possible ending.

Here we stand, before then.

Here is a photo of Norma with some familiar faces.

Guest Tracker

2007-11-01T06:25:00.000-07:00

As of 8:27 am (local time), Prof. Inoue is somewhere between Ontario, California and Denver, Colorado on a plane. That first flight departed on time. He is scheduled to arrive in Cedar Rapids at 12:52pm. I'll pick him up, give him a sandwich, and bring him directly to our class. I'll post updates here.

Daigo and Daniel left great comments related to the Miyazawa Kenji story beneath the earlier post about Prof. Inoue. Check them out!

UPDATE at 11:10 am: Prof. Inoue is now on a plane from Denver to Cedar Rapids! It looks like there will be no delays, so see you all in a while!

Prof. Inoue's visit

2007-10-27T14:07:00.000-07:00

This coming Thursday, Professor Kota Inoue of the University of Redlands will be visiting our class! I also want to urge you to attend his public lecture on Friday if you can. You will earn extra credit for attending and even more extra credit if you write a 1-2 page response paper. The details for his talk and some information about him are below.

"Colonialism on the Beach, Colonialism in the Woods: Cultural Imagination of the Imperial Metropolis Tokyo"

A Center for Asian and Pacific Studies public talk by

Professor Kota Inoue, The University of Redlands

Friday, Nov. 2, 2007
302 Schaeffer Hall from 4:00 to 5:30 pm

The grand narrative of the history of modern Japanese literature has been that of awakening individualism ostensibly prompted by the country's encounter with the West in the mid-19th Century. This view of modern Japanese literature, helped in part by the dominant idea of history that equates modernity with Western culture, is facing increasing challenges. One of the reasons for the change is the growing awareness of the connection between modernity and colonization. Literature of modern Japan up to 1945, when the country's colonial empire was dismantled, has now been studied in relation to Japan's colonialism by some critics in the last two decades. The new direction of research suggested by these works could potentially lead to a substantial revision of our basic undrestanding of modern Japanese literature. However, in the pursuit of the new direction, the issue of colonialism and literature has so far too often been narrowly understood as that of colonial literature -- literature by or about the colonized -- especially its representation of the colonial Other. This talk widens the path of inquiry by taking up unlikely texts from the 1920s, usually known as one of the most liberal and cosmopolitan periods in modern Japan, and teasing out their colonial relevance, whether in the form of participation in or resistnace to colonial logic. The broad connection made between colonialism and literature, it is hoped, will help us think about the relationships of dominace in other times and places, such as postwar Japan and beyond.

Professor Inoue is currently working on a book manuscript that examines colonization of the everyday through closely analyzing suburban space in Japanese literature and cinema. His research interests include postcolonial interventions, critique of globalization, configuration of power in modernity, and cultural forms of resistance to the state authority in Japan.

I wanted to tell you that Prof. Inoue has been to Iowa once before, but it wasn't the happiest of times for him as you'll see in the photo below. He was moving from Chicago to Irvine, California when his car, affectionately known as "Sunshine Boy," broke down near Wilton, Iowa. Let's make this next trip to Iowa a much, much better one for him!!

Finally, I really love this photo of Prof. Inoue with Yuri Kochiyama. You will soon be reading Passing It On by Yuri Kochiyama, so we'll probably go back and look at this photo again together.

Great-Grandpa Katakuri and Others

2007-10-25T07:05:00.000-07:00

Last time, I mentioned that there are many famous Japanese actors in the next movie we'll watch. For example, you'll see someone from Nobody Knows (Endô Kenichi, the guy who worked at the pachinko parlor) near the end of The Happiness of the Katakuris. We can talk about many of the actors who appear in the film, but I wanted to start out with a little information on the late Tanba Tetsurô, who died just last year.

You can read an obituary from Variety by clicking here. He had a really interesting career – acting in films that ran the gamut from kitschy-weird to period dramas. He was in the classic anti-authoritarian film Seppuku, which you can watch if you take Asian Humanities: Japan with me next semester. Tanba plays the the character who fights the hero played by Nakadai Tatsuya in this famous scene.

By clicking here, you can see that he was a "trippy dude." (Even if you can't read Japanese, you'll get the "vibe.") Those of you who know Japanese can get a better sense with this.

Some of you might be familiar with Matsuzaka Keiko, who is pictured here.

She has appeared in many Japanese films, tv shows, and commercials.

She has also released a few songs, although she's not known as a singer as much as the next two people I'll describe.

Also in the film is Imawano Kiyoshirô. He plays the character Richard Sagawa, who is often very popular with my students who are studying Japanese. Imawano is known, among other things, for his unusual voice and for singing a somewhat punk version of the Japanese national anthem. Enjoy his website.

This one is him (singing) with the very famous (look him up) composer, musician, and activist Sakamoto Ryûichi in 1982.

On Tuesday, I mentioned that Sawada Kenji is also in this movie.

Just so you know I wasn't kidding when I described him in class, here is a photo from his glamorous "Julie" days.

Before he was Julie, he was in a boy band (kind of a Beatles-inspired thing) called The Tigers.

Nishida Naomi plays Shizue.

She was in the film Densha Otoko, which you might have seen when it was screened at the UI last semester. In addition to her film career, she has appeared in many television dramas.

A question

2007-10-21T19:56:00.001-07:00

As we prepare for Tuesday, here's another question you can consider.

Do you think it's okay for kindergarten or elementary school teachers to ask the children in their classes to draw pictures of their families? Why or why not?

International Crossroads Community Open House

2007-10-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

The International Crossroads Community Open House is in the Mayflower Dormitory from 3 to 6 pm on Sun Oct 21. Andrew wrote to tell me the Japan room was scheduled to be 824C, but they may need to move it to a room further down the floor due to technical difficulties, but check around 824C first.

Choose Your Own Assignment for Tuesday

2007-10-18T17:12:00.000-07:00

I'd like everyone to pick a few of the readings below. You may comment on them below, but we'll also discuss what you've read (along with the film) on Tuesday.

Part I. Readings in Japanese for Those Who Can Read Them
If you can read Japanese, please study one or more of the following websites and describe what you learned for your classmates in the comments section below.　Keep in mind that many of your classmates are interested in what kinds of services and programs are available in Japan. Feel free to share other services and institutions with which you might be familiar, and I'll do the same on Tuesday.

Kodomo Hiroba

子ども虐待防止センター

Tokyo Child Guidance Center

National Child Abuse Prevention Network

Family Court in Chiba

NCRC Japan

Part II. Readings in English
Pick one or more of the following and try to read carefully and critically. I'm especially interested in questions you might have after reading these pieces.

A 'socially accepted' act of child abuse by Tomo Shibata

Foster Parents in New Role as Population Slumps by Suvendrini Kakuchi

Foster Care Group Aims to Change the Way Japan Treats its Children by Eric Prideaux

Ministry of Foreign Affairs Report

Child Research Net

Part III. Some General Concepts

Finally, I want to give you a few things to think about for Tuesday.

The aftereffects of prolonged, repeated (or chronic) trauma combined with the ways in which severely abused children develop patterns of psychologically dissociating or “checking out” of their physical realities during frightening times make it very difficult for traumatized youth to communicate their experiences and feelings.

What do I mean by "checking out"???

Well, the Japanese psychiatrist Nishizawa Satoru explains that children who are unable to escape an abusive situation learn to escape the only way they can, which is through “dissociation.” His explanation is consistent with what most other people who work with traumatized youth think. An example of dissociation would be imagining oneself somewhere else, going numb, being unable to see or feel anything, or staring intently at the ceiling (or closet wall). There are lots of ways to dissociate. Sometimes things like video games or repetitive actions can help a child "focus through" a dissociated state. “Checking out” in this way complicates later attempts to remember the abuse for obvious reasons.

I'd like you to think about and discuss what factors make it hard for the children in the film at access help or support.

In the film, we encounter a variety of ways in which the children attempt to cope. What coping mechanisms did you notice?

Finally, there is no single way that every abused or neglected child responds to their experiences. Just like each situation is different, each response is different. Some kids exhibit the "frozen watchfulness" (a kind of hypervigilant attentiveness without affect), and some kids will be very clingy and desperate for affection. In the movie, we saw children of different ages with different "roles" in the family. You can see a range of responses in the film too. Try to think about how each child responds to their situation.

Responding to the movie

2007-10-18T17:09:00.000-07:00

Andrew already shared his thoughts about the title and ending under the previous post on the movie, so make sure to go back and read that. Please post your comments on the title, ending, or anything else related to the film below. As I mentioned in class, we'll discuss the film on Tuesday. I will also post a reading later tonight.

Extra Credit Opportunities This Weekend!

2007-10-17T18:50:00.000-07:00

If you are able to attend any of the conference panels listed below, you can earn extra credit by writing a short (1-2 page) response paper. The more panels you attend and discuss, the more extra credit you can earn.

"North Korea: Policy, Modernity, Fantasy -- International Conference," will take place Friday and Saturday, Oct. 19 and 20, at the International Programs Commons, 1117 University Capitol Centre. The conference is free and open to the public.

Friday October 19

9:00-9:30 Opening remarks by Dean William Reisinger, International Programs, University of Iowa

Session 1 North Korea in the World
9:30-10:15 Gavan McCormack “North Korea and the Birth Pangs of a New Northeast Asian Order: Setting the Twentieth Century to Rest”

10:15-11:00 Charles Armstrong “Socialism, Sovereignty, and the North Korean Exception”

11:00-11:30 Discussant’s comment by Jeff Baron, questions and further discussion

1:40-2:15 Greetings from President Sally Mason, University of Iowa

Session 2 Inside North Korea
2:15-2:45 Steven Chung “Reading Sin Sang-ok’s Cinematic Discourse across the Border”

2:45-3:30 Sonia Ryang “Biopolitics, or, the Logic of Sovereign Love: Love’s Whereabouts in North Korea”

3:30-4:00 Discussant’s comment by Scott Schnell, questions and further discussion

4:30-6:30 Film viewing “A State of Mind”

Saturday October 20

9:00-9:30 Coffee

Session 3 Migrants and Defectors
9:30-10:15 Hyun Ok Park “From National to Market Utopia: North Korean Migrants, Peace, and Humanism”

10:15-11:00 Michael Doveton “Atomization in North Korea: Through the Eyes of the ‘Defectors’”

11:00-11:45 Discussant’s comment by Adrienne Hurley, questions and further discussion

Session 4 Human Rights Update
1:45-2:30 Peter Beck “The Plight of North Korean Women in China”

2:30-3:15 Tessa Morris-Suzuki “Border Crossings: Refugees, ‘Returnees,’ and North Korea’s Regional Relations”

3:15-4:00 Discussant’s comment by Jae-on Kim, questions and further discussion

4:15-5:15 Documentary show “North Korea: A Day in Life”

Organizers gratefully acknowledge funding from University of Iowa International Programs Major Project Grant, Northeast Asia Council of Association for Asian Studies, and Center for Asia and Pacific Studies, University of Iowa.

A gift to the class from Shiho

2007-10-17T09:32:00.000-07:00

Shiho has read something that will be of interest in relation to our film this week even though it comes from an earlier time. I think Angela and Randy might be especially interested since they have studied the author, Kaneko Fumiko. Enjoy! And let Shiho know what you think in the comments section below.

“Chichi (My father)” by Fumiko Kaneko

“Chichi” is a short story about Kaneko’s childhood memory of her family and father. The story takes a time period moving from Edo to Meiji era. The author remembers that it had been a happy time for her till she was four years old. Her father spoiled her so much and took a good care of her as if he was her mother. (Don’t worry! He was not becoming a child molester.) Her father was from (sort of) a good family (in Edo social hierarchy, I guess). Her mother was a daughter of a farmer. Fumiko thinks that her father was working for a police station at first, but he seemed not to have permanent jobs after he quitted the job for the police station. The happy time ended when Fumiko’s father brought a young woman into her house. Fumiko’s mother and the woman fought often in the house. Fumiko’s father hit her mother while he was holding the young woman’s shoulder. He stopped coming home regularly and her mother also didn’t come home for a few days at that time. (She was at her relative’s house when nobly couldn’t take care of her.) The women disappeared from her house sometime and then Fumiko’s mother’s sister started living together. The mother’s sisters become a new lover of her father. Her father stopped taking care of Fumiko, but instead he started giving his devotion to the woman. When Fumiko became 7 years old, she was informed that she could not go to school because she had not registered. After all, her mother and her father had not been married. The father’s lover (her aunt) told Fumiko that her parent didn’t get married because he never loved her and he was waiting someone better to come to his life. Fumiko assumed that her father didn’t marry her mother because she was a daughter of a farmer. Eventually her father and her aunt started living together at another house, it located close to Fumiko’s house) while abandoning his family. Fumiko’s family was becoming poorer and poorer. One night, they didn’t have any things to eat for supper. Her mother took her and his brother on her back and went to a house where men drunk and gambled cards. Her mother yelled at her father in front of his friends and her father kicked her to outside. His friends stopped her father kicking her mother badly. Fumiko, her mother, and her brother left the house and sill had nothing to eat. Her father came after them. Fumiko thought that he brought some rice or something, but instead he started punching her and said he was going to push her mother over the cliff. Her brother was crying on her mother’s back. Fumiko rushed and went back to the men’s house to get help and the men came to stop him…..The aunt said that she was going home. Fumiko was so happy that she thought that her family was going back to normal. However, her father also left home a few days after the aunt left home. At the end, her mother and Fumiko looked and found their house (Fumiko’s father and her aunt’s house). However, his father kicked her mother by his wooden sandal.

Fumiko was also “nobody knows”-unregistered child. Her father said that it was so shameful that Fumiko was unregistered child – even thought he created the situation. I see something common between Fumiko’s father and the mother in Nobody Knows. It was interesting what Fumiko said. "I would not have been crying so badly if there was no school (that I could not go). However if there were no school, that would take girl's (going to school) happiness away.” I didn't know happiness always constructed on sadness.”

Nobody Knows

2007-10-16T16:28:00.000-07:00

Having all been children, we can conceive of childhood dependency in particular and personal ways, as I mentioned at the end of class. We have all “been there.” And when it comes to discussing the ways in which adults harm children, we will also respond in particular and personal ways. That's why I didn't want us to enter into a truncated discussion over just a few minutes or end with a word or description that might not sit well with everyone. When you comment and respond to one another below, try to be as generous as possible and imagine other people's comments come from personal and particular experiences.

Anyone who interacts with abandoned and abused youth knows it is often very difficult for children to comprehend and describe what has happened to them. Even those taken away from daily torture may, for example, speak lovingly of a parent who burned, beat, and raped them – or blame themselves, saying that they “made” a parent angry or somehow caused the abuse. We saw a bit of that in the film already, didn't we? It is not until years have passed that some adult survivors are able to find words to begin to recount what they endured and extricate themselves from the belief that they were “bad” and deserving of maltreatment.

With all that in mind, please share your initial responses below.

Oh, and please do remember that this fictional "docu-drama" was inspired by real events. Even though it is fictionalized, there are many details that evoke the actual case.

Final Project Schedule

2007-10-16T08:46:00.001-07:00

Hi everyone,

Since it's midterm time, I thought we ought to start planning for the last two class sessions, when you will make your in-class presentations. You should submit topics for your presentations and final projects to me by the beginning of November. It's definitely okay if your presentation and project are on the same topic, but you need to submit the topic(s) for approval either way. Remember that your final project can be, but doesn't have to be in the form of an essay. I will, for example, accept pre-approved films, art work, or oral history projects.

If you don't already have a topic in mind, you are welcome to come by office hours to discuss ideas. The links on the right might help generate ideas as well.

The following is the schedule for your presentations. You'll need to make sure you stick to the 10-minute limit so that everyone has the chance to present, so please, please practice your presentation ahead of time. I will stop you after 10 minutes if you start to go over the time limit. You are welcome to make handouts, use powerpoint, etc.

December 11th
Randy
Ellen
Elizabeth
Daniel
Andrew
Akiko
Angela

December 13th
Shiho
Laila
Stephanie
Peter
Justin
Lindsey
Daigo

Some photos from Akiko (more on Facebook, folks!)

2007-10-15T14:08:00.000-07:00

Our field trip to Cedar Rapids

2007-10-14T09:22:00.000-07:00

As several of you noticed, a maple leaf was placed as a decoration in one of your dishes. The Japanese maple tree is, like other maples, a deciduous tree that produces vibrant fall colors. You can find many references to maple trees in Japanese poetry and prose. For example, this page provides a variety of examples. Even as far back as the Heian Era in the Kokin wakashû (or simply Kokinshû) anthology, you can find poems such as the following (by Fujiwara Toshiyuki):

shiratsuyu no
iro wa hitotsu o
ika ni shite
aki no ko no ha o
chiji ni somuramu

How might it happen
that dewdrops of purest white,
all single-colored,
bring forth a myriad of hues
in the leaves of autumn trees?

(translated by Helen Craig McCullough)

Even though the word momiji ("maple") isn't mentioned, the last two lines evoke images of Japanese maple trees in the fall. Sometimes just a single word (like "chestnut" or "maple") is enough to let the reader know the poem is about autumn, but the topic is more obvious in the poem above. You can learn more about the Kokinshû from Prof. Leutner.

I was so glad that almost everyone was able to attend the field trip to the Sushi House in Cedar Rapids. Thanks to our special guests Yuki, Kimiko, and Misa for helping to make the evening so memorable, and many thanks to Shiho for all her hard work in organizing the event.

Kimiko asked me a few questions that were quite good. I don't have good, clear answers for her, but I do want to refer you all to some sources for further information.

She asked about the differing attitudes toward Japan in Taiwan and Korea, both of which had been colonized by Japan. There is a very good book by Professor Leo Ching called Becoming "Japanese": Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. In this book, Professor Ching provides many helpful ways to think about assimilationism and the specifics of Japan's colonization of Taiwan. I would also suggest learning about the kempeitai (or military police who were used to control general populations and political dissent or resistance in Japan and its colonies). Colonized Koreans had some very horrific experiences with the kempeitai (including torture and murder), and I can't help but think that degrees of violence and oppression might have influenced the differences Kimiko observed. Similarly, as we learned in class, the vast majority of "comfort women" were Korean, something we might also consider as illustrative of some of the differences between Korean and Taiwanese experiences. Of course, it would be wrong to think colonization was wonderful for Taiwanese people. My other class will soon be reading a short story called "Sayonara, Tsai chien" by Hwang Chun-ming that reveals certain hard feelings and resentment in Taiwan as well, so some of the differences Kimiko has correctly observed might relate more to the specific situations of the people she's encountered.

Kimiko also asked why a resolution denouncing Japan's use of "comfort women" in the Pacific War was introduced in the U.S. at this particular time. That's a great question, and, again, it's not one that I can easily answer. Congressman Mike Honda of California introduced the legislation this past year, and as Randy has mentioned, it passed. What do you all think it means for this resolution to pass at this particular time? What do you think it means for a US legislative body to pass such a resolution? How might US politicians respond if a resolution denouncing the US use of "military brothels" or "recreation areas" in Vietnam were passed by Japanese legislators?

Please post your thoughts and reflections on our field trip and/or Kimiko's questions below.

Finally, here are the photos Shiho sent me.

The three of you who chose to "live it up" outside of the university-approved activities are shown here.

Some material to discuss and review before we start watching the movie

2007-10-04T18:46:00.000-07:00

This is a still image from the film we'll watch next week. But before we watch it, I want to get you thinking about families we haven't studied yet, Korean Japanese or zainichi Korean ("Koreans residing in Japan") families.

First, I'd like to start with a question: Why are there ethnic Koreans living in Japan? When and how have modern Korean Japanese (zainichi Koreans) come to Japan? What do you already know? What can you guess?

I'd like you also to read and comment on the following articles:

"Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan" by Norimitsu Onishi

"Hating 'the Korean Wave'" by Rumi Sakamoto and Matt Allen

"Memories of a Zainichi Korean Childhood" by Kang Sangjung

Although the video is no longer available, the post you can see here is also worth reading to see how the writer characterizes the young woman's complaints and also how some people respond to the post. What do you think of the reactions and attitudes you see here?

Finally, a note about the film next week: There are several violent scenes in the movie. One in particular is too much for me to watch. You'll see some abuse scenes (a father beating up his son), as well as a bloody stabbing scene. If, like me, you have a hard time watching scenes like that, let me know. We can easily figure out ways for you to manage next week. For example, I could tell you when a "bad scene" is coming so you can close your eyes (what I do), or we can discuss other options. I won't compel or require anyone to watch violent material.

Another gift from Shiori: Hoshino reflects on the "family values" of politicians

2007-10-03T06:54:00.000-07:00

Shiori sent me the following message and translation for you all!

The blog post is from the site below on 2007/5/9:

http://hoshinot.exblog.jp/i5/

This blog post has some stuff that readers need to know beforehand. I added some sentences to explain them briefly with brackets. If someone wants to know more about those issues, I'm including the sites. Below are some of the newspaper articles that might help.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/sb20070425h1.html

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ed20070304a1.html

Enjoy.
Shiori

2007年5月9日（水）

Concerning the incident of honor students who play high school baseball, and looking at Minister Ibuki, I feel like he is a hypocrite. Doesn’t everyone know that powerful schools pay to scrape together strong students to play baseball, and whether it is right or not, doesn’t everyone still watch high school games in the summer? It seems unfair for the administration to punish the students now for what was a tacit understanding; especially looking at those northern high school students who spoke Osaka dialect.

You can usually see the gaps between the goody two shoes and the self-indulgent baseball conservatives, which is symbolized in high school baseball or “[Yomiuri] Giants,” but it looks to me like one of the reasons for a disintegration of baseball culture is Japanese society. Although this looks like a problem arising from the separation of public and private life, this actually is a class problem.

These seeking to impress their morality on the schools have embraced an authoritarian perspective. Perceiving a threat to their privileges, the authorities lash out. Purposing to sustain and display their authority, they set themselves apart from the players. It’s as if the authoritarians are saying that the players are barbarians without their “high morality”, but we are civilized people, with the power to do anything.

This tendency seems to be typical of hawkish education officials who preach about the “appropriate family image” for example. There are many politicians who oppose the registration [in the family record] of a child “within 300 days after divorce”. [For example, a child whose mother had the child with a man other than her husband, before the approval of the divorce, will not be approved for registration.] These politicians claim approving the child will cause disintegration of the family. However, I wonder if those politicians live morally perfect lives. I wonder if people can acquire a happy family life if people imitate those politicians’ lives.

It depends on the person, but many normal people don’t think that politicians live moral lives worthy of admiration. From the little bit I saw while working at a newspaper company, politicians live a dirty life of sex and money, which normal people possessed of common sense cannot even imagine. The reason why they make such a big deal about the “disintegration of the family” is because they don’t think these ethical codes would apply to them. It’s like Shoko Asahara [the founder of Japan’s controversial religious group Aum Shinrikyo (now called Aleph)], who is heavily tainted by greed, and at the same time preaches abstinence.

I think that a family that disintegrates was in some fashion bringing these kinds of authoritarian concepts into their lives. If people want a family to function as a unit, in order to live an ordinary life, they should start by not imitating those who preach “family disintegration.”

by hoshinotjp | 2007-05-09 16:02 | 社会　

Missing Fathers

2007-09-30T14:35:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of HOSHINO Tomoyuki with our beloved Japan Studies librarian. The picture was taken in 2006, when Hoshino was here (along with NAITÔ Chizuko and Su Tong, a Chinese novelist) for the "New Nationalisms" symposium.

Our new class plan for the coming week involves a significant jump forward in time, but thematically, we do have a thread to carry us from last week's material to this week's. Some of you might have thought about the figure of the "absent father" we read about earlier when you read Embracing Family. Shunsuke may have been absent in some ways, but we also saw him make attempts to be present as well. Now, we are reading a story in which the fathers are truly absent (yet somehow present). The theme of Tuesday's story is significant for a number of reasons. In the late 1990s, it wasn't hard to find books with titles like the following in bookstores in Japan: 『「父」をなくした日本人』. How would you translate that title? Hoshino's story may involve particular characters and their losses, but we should also think, as Ellen urged us to do last time, about what bigger socio-economic and even political factors might be evoked in "The No Fathers Club." In other words, is there a metaphorical level to our story? (It also warrants mention that Hoshino lost his own father at a young age.)

Would you like an additional post on the author? What about one for "Treason Diary"? I want to make sure the new blog plan is still meeting your needs.

extra credit opportunity tomorrow

2007-09-27T18:05:00.001-07:00

Click on the image above to view a larger version of the poster with all the details on tomorrow's talk, which is free and open to the public! If you attend and write a short response paper, you can earn extra credit!

Preliminary Discussion Topics and Questions for Today's Class

2007-09-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

If you happen to see this post before class, you can start thinking about how you might answer some of these questions. Please also feel free to leave comments, additional questions, etc. below, and we can use them in our in-class discussion today. You'll also have the chance to go back later and discuss anything we don't get to address in class.

1. Way back on September 1st, Daniel asked the following question in a blog comment: “For anybody else who's read Embracing Family, why do you think there's a quote on the back of the book that says ‘Embracing Family should be read by all American readers?’ Should the book be seen as a lesson for American readers about how western influences aren't always the best, or just an eye-opener about Japanese familial culture?” Now is our time to answer him, so what do you think?

2. Imagine you were asked to write a very short blurb for a jacket cover for Embracing Family. How would you characterize the novel? How do you understand Shunsuke’s internal monologue on p. 94 in relation to how you understand the novel as a whole?

3. What is Shunsuke’s job? Why is that significant? Look at page 11 and think about how times have changed. What did he do prior to this job? How do you know this?

4. Re-read the prologue. What image do we get of Shunsuke in that first section? How did that image change for you, as a reader, as the novel progressed? Why do you think Kojima started out with that particular image of Shunsuke?

5. Read the passage on page 27 before the break. How do you understand the psychology of this moment? Tokiko says, “Whatever you say; you are always right.” Why do you think she says that?

6. Is this “colonial fiction”? Why or why not? How do you understand what the Occupation means in the novel?

7. Are you familiar with the concept of “upward mobility”? If so, how might that concept be applied to this novel? How, for example, do you understand the comments on page 60 about “construction workers” and “Indian women”?

8. On page 44, Shunsuke feels “pain in his gut” when seeing “foreign actors again fill the screen.” What do you make of that?

9. On page 45, who overhears what Shunsuke says to Tokiko? How or why is that significant?

10. At one point in the novel, Tokiko makes Shunsuke and their children stop cleaning. She says they must stop because she’ll have to do it all over again anyway. This passage is on p. 47. How do you understand Tokiko’s response to the situation here?

11. Why do you think Shunsuke is angry at what George says on p. 71?

12. The novel ends abruptly, especially if one is accustomed to modern fiction originally written in English. But, as we’ve discussed, it’s not uncommon for modern Japanese fiction to end without all the “loose ends” being tied together nicely for the reader. What do you make of the ending in this particular novel? Why do you think, for example, Kojima chose to end the story at that point instead of after Tokiko’s death or the awkward meeting with Chikako?

13. How are issues like sexuality, desire, and intimacy represented in this story?

14. If you were to write a sequel to this novel, how would you do it?

15. Finally, here's an extra question for people who know Tokyo:
The Miwa family gets a house on the Odakyu line 40 minutes from Shinjuku. We see the location referred to as "T City." Where do you think this would be? And do you think anything is potentially significant about the location?

An imaginative exercise

2007-09-26T17:04:00.000-07:00

Pick any point in the novel and invent a character who enters the story. Your character is there to correct or prevent a problem or difficulty the original characters are or soon will be experiencing. You can decide who your character is and what that person will do or say. After you describe or narrate your new character's appearance in the novel, tell us how you think that person could have changed the story.

Thanks to Ellen, we now know...

2007-09-25T06:08:00.000-07:00

... that I can still call you by your names in class!

Click here for more.

Embracing Family

2007-09-24T11:38:00.000-07:00

KOJIMA Nobuo died just last year, in October, after suffering the effects of a stroke a few months earlier. He was 91.

He won the Akutagawa Prize for his short story "American School" in 1954. That story concerns a group of English teachers (Japanese people) who visit a U.S. military base and its school. This story is frequently taught in Modern Japanese literature survey courses in the U.S. What strikes you as significant about the title and date of publication?

Kojima won the Tanizaki Prize for the novel you are reading. This story also deals with life under U.S. Occupation and related questions of differential power.

What do you think of the novel so far? Does it remind you of anything else we've read or studied so far?

Class Field Trip Announcement

2007-09-21T16:59:00.002-07:00

Our student coordinator [see below to see why there is no name here] has set the date of our field trip to the Sushi House in Cedar Rapids for Saturday, October 13th at 7pm. We can make carpool and other arrangements in class.

Announcement

2007-09-21T16:59:00.001-07:00

According to today's newspaper, I am no longer able to use your names in class or on the blog without first obtaining your permission. This story indicates that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) now requires that I refrain from calling you by name to prevent violations of your privacy. If you would like to permit me to use your name in class and/or on the blog, please let me know in the comments section below or in my office hours. If I do not receive your permission, I will no longer use your name in class or on the blog. I will, however, need you to pick a "handle" or alias to use on the blog for grading purposes. You can provide this information to me in person or via email.

The Hatakeyama case

2007-09-20T08:54:00.001-07:00

This morning, I remembered a more recent case related to yesterday's long post. Some of you may even have heard about the woman who killed her daughter and a neighbor boy. As is sometimes the case with incidents involving mothers who kill their children in the U.S., this story was covered widely in the Japanese mass media. I posted about it on my personal blog, and Jim Fujii and others have discussed the case with me. Here are some initial mass media reports I posted on my blog:

1
2
3
4

Finally, the most recent report (below) comes from The Japan Times.

Woman denies intent to kill daughter, admits killing boy

AKITA (Kyodo) An Akita Prefecture woman denied Wednesday intending to kill her 9-year-old daughter but admitted killing a 7-year-old neighbor boy.

As the trial for Suzuka Hatakeyama, 34, got under way at the Akita District Court, her lawyers said she was "in a state of diminished responsibility" when she strangled the boy, Goken Yoneyama, on May 17, 2006, in her house in Fujisato.

On the death of her daughter, Ayaka, that April 9, her lawyers said Hatakeyama brushed her off when the girl tried to hold on to her on a bridge, which resulted in her falling into a river, because Hatakeyama "has a disorder in which she dislikes being touched by other people."

"I never made a decision to kill" the girl, Hatakeyama told the court, while admitting to killing Yoneyama and abandoning his body, saying the allegations are "right."

"I'm not sure if my mental condition was normal at that time," she added.

Prosecutors argued in their opening statement that Hatakeyama, who allegedly so disliked her daughter that she had not wanted to touch her from the time she was born, became distracted by her mere presence.

They said Hatakeyama decided to kill the girl on the bridge in Fujisato when her hatred reached the breaking point. Hatakeyama knocked her off the bridge by pushing her left shoulder with all her might as the girl, who was sitting on the railing, tried to cling to her and said, "Mom, I'm scared," according to the prosecutors. She fell into the river screaming "Mommy!" they said.

After her daughter's death, Hatakeyama asked the police, who had concluded the girl's death was accidental, to conduct an investigation again on the cause of death and sought information from other people.

Thinking she was being unfairly ignored because the police were not eager to take up the case, her hatred of people grew and she searched indiscriminately for a target on which she could project her emotions, killing Yonehama and abandoning his body, the prosecutors said.

The main points of the trial are whether she intended to kill her daughter and how she caused her death, whether she was mentally competent in the case of Yonehama, and whether her confession during the investigation was voluntary, the court said.

The court has decided to conduct a mental examination on her at the request of her lawyers. The examination will be carried out in parallel with trial sessions.

The Japan Times: Thursday, Sept. 13, 2007

Extra Credit Opportunity!

2007-09-19T22:32:00.000-07:00

I just learned about an upcoming public lecture by Dr. Christine Ivanovic, a visting scholar. I don't know anything about her other than she teaches German and Slavic literature at the University of Tokyo. She's giving some other talks, but I figured this one might be of interest to some of you. I'm sorry that I have no description for her lecture. But, if you want some extra credit (maybe to make up for missed blog comments), you can attend the talk and write a short (1-page) response paper.

Tuesday, Sept. 25, 4:00 p.m. E132 AJB
"Transforming the 'Empire of Signs': Tokyo's Acoustic Media Profile"

What do you think? (a long post!!)

2007-09-19T18:04:00.000-07:00

Here are some Japanese maternity and baby magazines. Any thoughts?

What about this?

And what about the relationship between children and their adult caretakers? Akiko had a problem with the father in the movie telling his son something like "don't whine like a woman." How do you understand what constitutes good or "good enough" parenting?

Having all been children, we can conceive of childhood dependency in particular and personal ways. We have all “been there.” (I'll bet you all were super-cute!) As adults, we can discuss children and their futures; we can make decisions on their behalf. School officials, politicians, religious organizations, and parents can vie for the moral high ground, claiming they know what is “best for the children.” Some of the most fiercely debated issues in contemporary Japan and the U.S. (such as juvenile criminal justice and the death penalty) are frequently discussed in terms of how they affect children. The very material needs of children, who are, indeed, uniquely dependent, leave them especially vulnerable, as a group and as individuals, to their adult caretakers – from those who make policies to parents. I hope this makes sense, because we'll be exploring this in depth with some of our later stories this semester.

What about mothers? Shiho gave us a window into an important question when we read "Snow." Whether in Japan or the U.S., we have belief systems that deem a mother’s unconditional love as natural and universal; yet on the other hand, those same belief systems make it very difficult for many real mothers to express the ways in which their daily lives are less than ideal because they feel bound by our collective attachment to idealized motherhood. In other words, it can be hard to say you are frustrated when you are supposed to be a perfectly loving and ideal mom. This is certainly the case at the Japanese child abuse prevention center I mentioned. There, counselors often describe their female clients’ complaints that motherhood is not like what they anticipated, not like it is represented in magazines and on television. And, as is the case in the U.S., the response to a news story about a mother who kills her children frequently involves shock and outrage at this “unnatural” behavior. Let me give you just one example.

On March 26, 1998, a “young mother” (yanmama) in Japan left her two toddlers in the car with the engine running (for air conditioning) while she played Pachinko for nine hours. She checked on them only twice, leaving them juice and candy, and the two children died. Accounts of this incident in the Japanese mass media portrayed the mother as lacking “normal maternal instincts.” What do you think of that?

Similar examples from U.S. news sources will be familiar to some of you. In class, if we have time, I can tell you about a professor in the U.S. who left his infant son in a car (in very hot weather) for hours. The baby died, and the professor was never charged with any crime. I can also share other similar stories involving mothers and fathers in Japan, and the different outcomes suggest class, gender, and status play a large role in who goes to prison and who doesn't.

Akiko came by my office today with lots of thoughts about the essay you read for Tuesday, and our conversation inspired me to make this post. As I mentioned in class, there are some inconsistencies in that reading. There are also some claims that are too broad or vague to be supported. Still, there are some other claims that Akiko and I agreed made sense. If we can remember the basics from the essay, we will get more chances to refine our understandings as the semester progresses. Your answers to the blog quiz are already showing some of the essay's strengths and weaknesses. I really liked Peter's comment about how he used to be nervous around girls, reminding us that many of the issues addressed in the essay could be true for people in various cultures or historical moments (even if for sometimes different reasons).

There are also all sorts of variations on (and exceptions to) the "trends" addressed in the essay. For example, about a decade ago, a woman in Japan became, I believe, the first person to have her name legally changed because she was sexually abused and no longer wanted the family name of her abuser. She wrote a book called Yomigaeru tamashii. (A savvy student who can read Japanese can look up her name for extra credit.) As a side note, as interesting as her book is, she begins with a very problematic claim that her life was harder than those of comfort women.

There are also some cases when a man changes his surname to the woman's when he gets married. This might happen, for example, if the woman's family is more affluent and without male heirs. And we'll get many more variations as we move forward.

You'll find a lot of useful information in "The Mystique of Motherhood" too, but you might also find some phrases strange or troubling, such as "Japanese society's peculiar emphasis on motherhood." I'm very excited to learn what you all think of this essay.

I think we should think about Lindsey's comments under the blog quiz post in class tomorrow. Her connections to "Snow" really set up the direction we are going! (Thanks, Lindsey!)

Finally, why do you think I assigned these two essays even if I don't think they are perfect?

A lighter post

2007-09-18T15:48:00.000-07:00

Shiho has suggested we all go to Sushi House in Cedar Rapids for dinner. We were thinking it might be good to go on Sept. 28th or Oct. 5th, both Fridays. We could arrange carpools for those without transportation. What do you think?

笠智衆 RYÛ Chishū (pictured here) plays the father in Good Morning, and as I mentioned in class, he was a famous actor. OZU Yasujirô, the director of Good Morning used RYÛ in many films. He started out on the path to become a Buddhist priest, but RYÛ ended up a career actor, often playing a beleaguered father.

Film buffs often note OZU's distinctive style. For example, he often shot scenes from a low angle, and his characters are often looking directly into the camera even when they are speaking to someone else. (Think about how Isamu looks at the camera when he tells his mother and others, "I love you.")

Blog Quiz

2007-09-18T07:08:00.000-07:00

You've probably noticed some contradictions in your reading for today. This should serve as a reminder of just how difficult it is to try and describe or define something as complex as family "values" and systems. Even in the 2nd sentence of the essay, the author makes a big overgeneralization. It is true that marriage has been the dominant life choice for women in Japan, but to say that it used to be the only choice is asking for trouble. If you take Classical Japanese literature courses with Prof. Leutner, you might learn about some great classical poets, like Princess Shikishi, for example, and see how some women also had religious and other lifestyles that did not involve marriage. Marriage was sometimes more casual for many rural women in pre-modern Japan. So, be wary when you encounter what seem like totalizing claims in this essay. They are basically an example of what we’ll strive to avoid.

With this qualification about how some of her claims are a bit oversimplified, we can say that the essay is representative of mainstream views of "the Japanese family" and its recent history. As such, it’s helpful as a start.

Like any set of cultural ideals or traditions, marriage and family ideals and traditions have to be learned by newer generations -- they are not inherited automatically. These ideals and traditions can, therefore, be altered. They are not stagnant or timeless. That is to say, culture is inherited only insofar as it is taught to kids. How and What we teach about culture is not always -- nor should it always be -- in the interest of replicating the past.

For now, here's a little true/false blog quiz. Post your answers in the "comments" section below.

1. The ie system is the marriage licensing system in Japan. ___________

2. In Japan today, the family register or “resident form” must be submitted upon registration to school, upon being hired for a job, and when applying for various jobs. ______________

3. The biggest problem for Japanese feminists is the general public’s perception that all feminists are lesbians. _____________

4. The family register system can lead to discrimination. ___________

5. Under the ie system, marriage meant creating a new family. _________

6. In prewar Japanese society, adultery was a criminal offense for both men and women. ______________

7. In Japan today, some people still turn to a nakodo (go-between) to meet a prospective spouse. _____________

8. Japanese couples who want time to themselves are likely to hire a babysitter on a weekend night so that they can go out for dinner or see a movie alone. ________________

Abe resigns.

2007-09-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't heard, check out the news from Japan today.

Habitual Sadness

2007-09-11T16:21:00.000-07:00

I really was moved by our discussions today, especially what Shiho shared. I'll confess I couldn't wait and started reading your assignments on the Cambus ride home, and what I've read so far is quite good!

Please use this post to make comments and questions about the films this week.

Some references for Thursday's class and beyond

2007-09-11T07:39:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, Shiori will show you Habitual Sadness, the second film in the series by director Byun Young-Joo (pictured here). That film is only 61 minutes, so you will be able to watch the whole thing in class.

I have a feeling you will want to refer to the women in Thursday's film, so here are their names with brief descriptions to help you remember:

Kang Deuk-kyung (granny with lung cancer)
Park Tu-ri (granny who likes to drink, sing, and joke - below, left)
Yun Tu-ri (Christian granny with fighting skills)
Shim Mi-ja (white-haired granny who wishes she'd been married and had kids)
Kim Soon-deuk (the hard-working granny who painted the cow - below right)
Park Ok-ryun (granny whose chiles died)
Kim Pok-tong (granny who married the divorced man)

Choice

2007-09-11T07:11:00.000-07:00

At this point, you've been working on your assignments, and you also will see some of Byun Young-Joo's documentaries this week, so you are ready to tackle questions related to the experiences of "comfort women" and also what those experiences mean.

Recently, the issue of "choice" has been invoked by some who call into question the veracity of "comfort women's" testimony or minimize (or refute) the trauma they suffered. Any time a Japanese politician or official makes statements about the "comfort women," it makes news in Korea (and China and elsewhere). For example, take a look at this article from a Korean news service. Here is a follow-up story from a US news service.

A scholar whose archival research brought many issues to light gave this response.

As we move through this material, I'd like you to consider what constitutes "choice" and how the kinds of choices (if any) available to "comfort women" were shaped or determined by the context. What is "coercion"? What is "force"?

Finally, what do you think of the cartoon below by New York-born and Boston-based artist Tak Toyoshima, who draws the "Secret Asian Man" cartoon series?
Click on the image above to view a larger version if you like.

Some videos

2007-09-08T09:13:00.000-07:00

Kim Soon-deuk, the woman who made the painting in the previous post, is featured in the following brief report from a San Francisco TV station (KRON). You will also see her in the films we'll watch this coming week. (Just click the "play" button to view the video.)

Here's a Canadian CBC news report on a Chinese "comfort woman" that raises some issues very germane to our class topic.

The following videos (from varying perspectives) will also be helpful as you work on your assignments.

"Comfort Women"

2007-09-06T19:04:00.000-07:00

Remember that your assignments are due next Tuesday! We will also watch parts of 3 documentary films by Byun Young-Joo next week. I first saw one of them in Japan in 1998, and I remember sitting in the audience in a small "art" theater with a good friend, crying. I have watched the films dozens of times since then, and I still cry sometimes. You might want to bring tissue to class next week. Although there are no graphic images, these films are truly hard to watch. As you work on your assignments, I think you'll begin to understand why. You will meet a group of Korean "grannies," several of whom use art as a way to express their pain, sadness, and anger. You can see some of their works here.

You can use the "comments" section below to share any thoughts, ideas, or feelings you have as you work on your assignments. You are also welcome to share resources with one another.

"Kidnapped"
by Kim Soon-deuk

Resources and Answers!

2007-09-05T08:32:00.000-07:00

Shiho learned about this website from Chiaki Sakai, and Shiho wanted me to share it with you all! You can click on "English" near the top of the page to access the testimonies with English subtitles/text.

Also, Chiaki Sakai sent me an email message in response to Angela's population question. She wrote, "According to one of the posters, the population of Hiroshima was 350,000 and that of Nagasaki was 240,000. Looking at Wikipedia, Wichita has 353,823 and St. Louis has 353,837. Madison, WI has 223,389 and Lincoln, NE has 241,167."

When stories end...

2007-09-04T16:09:00.000-07:00

I want us to think about the end of KÔNO's stories.

NAITÔ Chizuko, a professor at Otsuma University and literary critic, wrote a short essay that I remember whenever I read KÔNO's works, especially "Snow." After class, Daniel shared his reactions to finishing a story we will read later this semester, and his reaction reminded me of NAITÔ's essay too. So, I decided to share it with everyone.

In 1999, NAITÔ wrote the essay for the journal Gendai Shisô (現代思想 or "Contemporary Thought"), and it's called "Mikan to Uragiri" (未完と裏切り or "The Unfinished and the Betrayal"). In this essay, she refers to the very famous case of the novel by NATSUME Sôseki called Meian (明暗 or "Lightness and Darkness"), which was left unfinished when Sôseki died in 1916. Many decades later in 1990, the writer MIZUMURA Minae imagined her own ending and even published a "sequel" to Meian. You saw both of these texts in the library exhibit when Chiaki Sakai showed us the displays of Japanese writers.

NAITÔ begins her essay by telling us she has been "fascinated by the word unfinished" and goes on to describe some of the ways in which we, as readers, create our own endings through whatever longings, imaginings, hopes, fears, etc. we bring to a story. Does this make sense to you? Have you ever, for example, loved a story so much that you didn't want it to end? Did you imagine what might happen next?

In some stories, such as “Snow,” the “ending” almost refuses to let us leave and asks us to examine how a moment, event, feeling, relationship, or situation came to pass and what it could mean.

How do we read the ending in "Snow"????? Is everything settled? Do we feel betrayed or let down since Kôno doesn’t tell us what happens? Does it make us mad? (I've had a few students who felt angry at the end of this story before.) Or do we treat it as "in progress" or unfinished & take up the burden of imagining an ending for ourselves?

I'm going to give you some vocabulary words NAITÔ uses in her essay, because they will help us think through our responses to the endings in KÔNO's stories. Since all of you are studying (or already know) Japanese, I think it's worth using some Japanese in our class, especially this time. I'll provide some kanji help for those of you who are studying Japanese.

She discusses three types of endings:

結末／けつまつ (ketsumatsu): an ending, a conclusion ("closure")

1. What does this first character "ketsu" mean? This is the same character for the verb "musubu" - to tie or to bind. So, it means fastened, tied, bound, or even concluded in a way.

2. What does "matsu" mean? (It also can be read as "ura" by the way) It means "the end."

So, the word means fastening things together, tying up loose ends. It's kind of a finished or completed image, right?

Now, for the next one, we have a character that might look similar to the first one in the next word, but it's different. Can you see how? (This is why the length of characters is VERY important and why kanji tests matter!)

未完／みかん (mikan): unfinished, incomplete

1. What does "mi" mean? It's used for the word "imadani," which some of you might know. It means "not yet" or "still." (hitherto)

2. And what about "kan"? It means complete or fulfilled. This kanji is used in the word "mattaku" (which means completely).

So, what does this mean? Not yet fulfilled. Still incomplete.

裏切り／うらぎり (uragiri): a betrayal (also double-crossing, treason)

1. What does "ura" mean here? It means the backside, the reverse, the rear.

2. "Giri" or "Kiri" are from the verb "to cut."

Maybe kind of like "back-stabbing," huh?

I want us to use these words as our reference points when talking about how Kôno's stories end. I think we'll find them useful with other stories too.

As I’m sure you’ve already noticed, there is a difference between literature that imposes closure and literature that invites the reader to hold onto an imaginary and potential space, continuing the explorations incited by reading an author’s words. There's a difference between "they lived happily ever after" and the end of "Snow."

Naitô writes that, in a sense, every act of reading lets us take up a story line or a character’s life and that we all can, and often do, linger in the space created between a writer and reader. I’d like you to think about the shared space that a reader can not only revisit and revise, but also use to sustain an ongoing relationship with a text. If you've ever left a movie, wishing you were still with the characters, you already know this.

We may love characters, wish to honor them, or even want to correct troubling situations. (Daniel experienced this when he read Embracing Family.) We may even want to kill off some characters sometimes. :)

By imagining and wanting to stay with a story or a character, the story is, for us, necessarily “unfinished.” Of course, sometimes, it's not so much a choice as something a writer tries to demand of us, when they want to make us work! I think KÔNO wants us to do a lot of interpretive work, so our discussion on Thursday is sure to be a good one!

Trivia Challenge!

2007-09-04T15:24:00.000-07:00

Here's where you can post your answers to Chiaki Sakai's Trivia Challenge! The first person to get them all correct will win a prize!

And, wow, the comments below are amazing! Please go back and check out all the things your classmates have written.

Happy Birthday, Shiho!

2007-09-04T08:36:00.001-07:00

Today is Shiho's birthday, everyone!

Shiori's first gift to the class: Recent News about KÔNO Taeko!

2007-09-03T18:53:00.000-07:00

Shiori Yamazaki translated a recent article about KÔNO Taeko into English for us! Here it is:

The first collection of short stories since coming back from US: Taeko Kono (a writer)

Taeko Kono, 81 years old, moved back to Tokyo from New York last year. It’s been 14 years for her. “I don’t care if I die suddenly; but concerning the event of becoming seriously sick, Japan, be it medical expenses or the welfare system, is a heaven.” She was 66 years old when she left for the US.

“I was told that it is the age, if it’s any ordinary person, to quit living in foreign countries and withdraw to Japan. One of the biggest reasons to go to the US is that I thought I had to leave from the once too easy life in Japan.” What she desired for in NY was “openness and stimuli.”

“I could receive plenty of both. I felt like my wild sense of smell was revived. I also felt the danger of life because of the harsh cold weather. There were fresh findings with the same human beings, but different races at the same time, life and culture. Also, what I experienced is hard to explain.”

The first publication since returning is the collection of short stories, “Heso no o wa myouyaku” (umbilical cord is a wonder drug).

The publication contains 4 pieces that were published from 2004 to the beginning of this year. It includes the titled story about a woman who, realizing that the box of her umbilical cord was opened and it was shortened, investigates the mystery. The publication also includes “Ma” (Evil Spirit) about a wife who creates a face with cornstarch. She wanted to see the baby who might have been born between the couple while her husband was away on his business trip. Another story, “Gekko no kyoku” (the Moonlight Sonata), describes daily life at elementary school around the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War.

There is something extraordinary that you can find in something ordinary. There is a thrill that you deviate a little. You can recognize that obsession with which women are hung up.

“Even if you say it’s small, it’s not trivial. It’s not something you nose out like who is responsible for the spot on a wall. It’s evocativeness. Without it, I don’t get interested.”

Ms. Kono was born in Osaka. After WWII, she joined “literary people” which presided by Fumio Tamba. When she was 35 years old, “Youji-gari” (Child Hunting) received Shincho-sha members’ magazine award. Two years later, “Kani” (Crab) received Akutagawa award. Since then, she received major literary awards in Japan such as literary women’s award, Yomiuri literary award, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki award, Noma literary award, and Yasunari Kawabata literary award. Her writer life has been under full sail.

“I don’t think I’ve had any writer’s block since I came into the world. There is no piece that I gave up halfway in the process of writing, and I always had two or three works ahead. I appreciated that,” she says cheerfully.

There is another piece in the collection called “Seishin” (Star Dragon). The main character is a woman who consults a fortune-teller about her dead husband. It is well known that Ms. Kono likes fortune telling a lot.

“Before coming into the world, there was a writer’s block that I couldn’t get over. When I consulted the fortune-teller, I was told that I’ll go a long way, but I would be slow to do anything. Being slow was right, wasn’t it?”

She takes plenty of time to write.

“I am a slow-poke. The process is so slow like I think I can live until I am 100 years old.”

She resigned as a member of the selection committee for the Akutagawa Award after this January, of which she served twenty years. She already stepped down from other positions, too.

“Young people should serve of course,” that’s her feeling.

“When I see the picture of the award winner in the next day’s newspaper, even someone who I oppose so much, I feel like that’s nice.”

“The title should be positive. The novel with a negative title is somewhat weak.”

Her positive attitude appears even in the anecdote of the selection. “Affirmation” is the key to understanding Kono literature.

“The reason why I write is that I am interested in this life, including nature. I don’t like the way of thinking about how we should live. That narrows the world. There is no charm of living.”

Like her novels show, no one knows if the umbilical cord is either a medicine or poison until taking it. It is impossible to taste the charm of living unless you take daily phenomenon into conscious and memorize them. It is so subtle, but actually needs patience.

“I can’t write if I don’t feel good, even a little. Even if I catch a cold, I can’t even write one page. Health comes first for me.”

Leaving the US and coming back to Japan looked necessary. It duplicates “the tireless desire toward life” that was expressed in her pieces.

“This writing wasn’t a warming up, but this collection becomes the preparation for the long novel that I am writing as a result.”

This mysterious notice sounds like the healthy pulse of Kono-World.”

(Chizu INABA)
(Tokyo Shimbun, Tokyo Newspaper; June 9th, 2007)

Moving ahead to the second week!

2007-09-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Daigo for telling the class about Go For Broke in his comments under Angela's post! Please continue to share your suggestions for readings and films related to our class topic! Whether it's from Daigo sharing his vast knowledge of film, Laila sharing what she's learned about how war affected families in Cambodia, or anyone else in the class contributing relevant information, you all can learn so much more from one another than you could ever learn from me.

You also should feel free to post any and all questions you might have about material covered in class or on the blog.

We now have two "snapshots" of families affected by the Pacific War (the Miyakoshi and Mirikitani families), and we also have watched some of Rabbit in the Moon. We've learned a little about the lingering effects of war as well. Our readings for the next two sessions are by KÔNO Taeko (pictured here). She was born in 1926 in Osaka, a city some of you may know. As was the case with a younger writer featured in the library exhibit (ÔBA Minako), KÔNO was mobilized to work during the war (shortly after she started college). In KÔNO's case, she worked in a garment factory, making military uniforms.

The two short stories you will read are in many (albeit different) ways shaped by the end of the war and also the extent to which the main characters in each story were touched by the war. Your first story is "Iron Fish." When you've finished reading it, I'd like you to answer the following question:

Why did the old woman stay overnight in the exhibit?

Now, that might seem like a simple question, but what do you think that action meant to her? Why did she feel compelled to touch and experience the exhibit? Can you relate her actions to anything we encountered during the first week of class?

Shortly, I will share more information on the exhibit, but I think some of you may already know what and where it is. If so, please tell your classmates in the "comments" section below.

And don't forget: we're meeting in the library next time!

Angela sent us this!

2007-08-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone!

I'm really enjoying your comments to the posts below and am looking forward to class! Angela sent us the following description of the novel No-No Boy by John Okada. Thanks, Angela!

**********************************

A "No-No Boy" is a Japanese-American who answered "No" to the questions following two questions

* "Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered?"

* "Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government, power or organization?"

The first question is confusing, because many responders thought that by saying "yes" they would automatically be drafted. Whether that was true or not seems to depend on circumstance. The second question is problematic in its own way, as well. The reasons for saying "no" were many and varied, and we can discuss them here or probably in class, but the consequence was almost always the same. "No" to the second question got you thrown into federal prison.

The protagonist, Ichiro, was a No-No Boy, and the book opens on the day he is released from prison. It is also very much a "family" novel; Ichiro's mother is fanatically pro-Japanese, and refuses to believe that Japan has been defeated. She says, many times, that she would rather kill herself than live with the "shame" of a child in the US Army. His brother, who went into the army, sees Ichiro as a coward,
and is very disconnected from the family. Ichiro's father, who is to me a very sympathetic character, knows Japan has lost, has to try to keep the peace, and has turned to alcohol to ease his mind. He meets former friends and schoolmates and neighbors, and they all react in different ways. No-No Boy is about relationships between people, first and foremost. Emi and Ralph and Taro and Ichiro and Ma and Pa and Kenji and Kenji's father and Eto and Bull and so many others, and how they all interact with each other in the aftermath of WWII.

No-No Boy also spends a lot of time exploring the issue of discrimination, especially persecution by the persecuted, discrimination from the discriminated-against towards another group. John Okada also explores intergenerational differences in an immigrant family, where the parents speak Japanese with only a few English phrases, and the children speak English with only a few Japanese phrases.

The lieutenant from Nebraska said: "Where you from?"
The Japanese-American who was an American soldier answered: "No place in particular."
"You got folks?"
"Yeah, I got folks"
"Where at?"
"Wyoming, out in the desert."
"Farmers, huh?"
"Not quite."
"What's that mean?"
"Well, it's this way..." And then the Japanese-American whose folks were still Japanese-Japanese, or else they would not be in a camp with barbed wire and watchtowers with soldiers holding rifles, told the blond giant from Nebraska about the removal of the Japanese from the Coast, which was called the evacuation, and about the concentration camps, which were called relocation centers.

The lieutenant listened and he didn't believe it. He said: "That's funny. Now, tell me again."

The Japanese-American soldier of the American army told it again and didn't change a word.

The lieutenant believed him this time. "Hell's bells," he exclaimed, "if they'd done that to me, I wouldn't be sitting in the belly of a broken-down B-24 going back to Guam from a reconnaissance mission to Japan."

"I've got reasons," said the Japanese-American soldier soberly, and he was thinking about a lot of things but mostly about his friend who didn't volunteer for the army because his father had been picked up in the second screening and was in a different camp from the one he and his mother and two sisters were in. Later on, the army tried to draft his friend out of the relocation camp into the army and the friend had stood before the judge and said let my father out of that other camp and come back to my mother who is an old woman but misses him enough to want to sleep with him and I'll try on the uniform. The judge said he couldn't do that and the friend said he wouldn't be drafted and they sent him to the federal prison where he now was. "What the hell are we fighting for?" said the lieutenant from Nebraska. x-xi

I wish with all my heart that I were Japanese or that I were American. I am neither and I blame you and I blame myself and I blame the world which is made up of many countries which fight with each other and kill and hate and destroy but not enough, so that they must kill and hate and destroy again and again and again. It is so easy and simple that I cannot understand it at all. 16

What had happened to him and the others who faced the judge and said: You can't make me go in the army because I'm not an American or you wouldn't have plucked me and mine from a life that was good and real and meaningful and fenced me in the desert like they do the Jews in Germany and it is a puzzle why you haven't started to liquidate us though you might as well since everything else has been destroyed. And some said: You, Mr. Judge, who supposedly represent justice, was it a just thing to ruin a hundred thousand lives and homes and farms and businesses and dreams and hopes because the hundred thousand were a hundred thousand Japanese and you couldn't have loyal Japanese when Japan is the country you're fighting and, if so, how about the Germans and the Italians that must be just as questionable as the Japanese or we wouldn't be fighting Germany and Italy? Round them up. Take away their homes and cars and beer and spaghetti and throw them in a camp and what do you think they'll say when you try to draft them into your army of the country that is for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? 31-32

"I want to know," he said loudly and distinctly. "I've ruined my life and I want to know what it is that made me do it. I'm not sick like them. I'm not crazy like Ma is or your father was. But I must have been."

"It's because we're American and because we're Japanese and sometimes the two don't mix. It's all right to be German and American or Italian and American or Russian and American, but, as things turned out, it wasn't all right to be Japanese and American. You had to be one or the other." 91

Janice Mirikitani

2007-08-28T15:41:00.000-07:00

Our first class was great! I am so excited. You all already know so much, and I have a really good feeling about our journey ahead.

You can read a short biography of Janice Mirikitani here.

This film was made about one of her relatives. I wish we had the time to watch many, many more movies together this semester, but I'm afraid we won't get to this one.

If you'd like to hear what Janice Mirikitani's voice sounds like, click here.

So, what do you think of Janice Mirikitani's poem? Share your comments (as well as any questions) below.

Here are four words we should all know for Thursday. Can you all define them?

Issei
Nisei
Sansei
Kibei

Don't forget to check out the interview with Jim Fujii (below under August 15th). Feel free to make comments under the posts below if you like, and please check to see if your classmates make comments on earlier posts too.

If you have any trouble with the blog or getting your readings, please let me know.

Our first day of class is Daigo's birthday!

2007-08-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday, Daigo!!

Online Radio Interview with Jim Fujii and Rabbit in the Moon

2007-08-25T06:33:00.000-07:00

Click here to listen to an interview two UI Students, Dylan Mooney and Jamila Yakubu, conducted with Professor Jim Fujii of the University of California-Irvine as part of a class radio show we had last semester. He discusses his family history, which I think will be of interest to you as we start thinking about how various families were affected by the end of the Pacific War. Prof. Fujii's father was at the Poston internment camp, and his mother was living in Tokyo during the fire bombings.

Click here to learn about the film we will watch on Thursday.

Fall 2007 Class Info

2007-08-21T17:20:00.000-07:00

The complete syllabus will be made available to students on the first day of class. The basics are posted here for easy reference.

8/28: Introduction: August, 1945
Our class begins in August, a month that Norma Field writes is not only a “haunted” month in Japan because of O-bon (a seasonal festival honoring ancestors). She explains, “First the sixth, then the ninth, and finally the fifteenth: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and surrender. So many souls to be appeased.” In class, we will reflect on the end of the Pacific War. I will share with you the testimony of MIYAKOSHI Asae, and we will discuss our reactions.

8/30: The internment of Japanese American Families
In class, we will watch the documentary film Rabbit in the Moon. Please read "In Remembrance" by Janice MIRIKITANI before coming to class. This is your only required reading for today, so please read it carefully and look up any words or terms you don’t know. If you have questions you cannot answer yourself, please post them to the blog before coming to class.

9/4: The Long-term Effects of War
Read the short story “Iron Fish” by KÔNO Taeko in your coursepack.

9/6: The End of the War and a Very Different Family
Read the short story “Snow” by KÔNO TAEKO in your coursepack.

9/11: Stigmatized Victims
Read the selections from Embracing Defeat by John Dower in your coursepack. Also due on 9/11: Your Comfort Women assignment! We will watch Habitual Sadness by Byun Young-Joo in class.

9/13: Comfort Women Continued
In class, you will watch more from Byun Young-Joo’s 3-part documentary series on Comfort Women.

9/18: The Nuclear Family Ideal
Read “Marriage and Family: Past and Present” by Kyoko YOSHIZUMI in your coursepack.
In class, we will watch Good Morning.

9/20: Motherhood
Read “The Mystique of Motherhood” by Masami OHINATA in your coursepack. In class, we will watch the rest of Good Morning.

9/25: Embracing Family
Read pp. 1-83 (through the end of Chapter Two) in Embracing Family by KOJIMA Nobuo.

9/27: Embracing Family Continued
Finish reading Embracing Family.

10/2: Postwar Familial Excoriations, Redemptions, and Nightmares
We will watch the film Dodes Kaden in class.

10/4: Dodes Kaden continued
We will finish watching and discuss Dodes Kaden.

10/9-10/18 Abuse, Abandonment, and Related Trauma
Please note that the following two weeks’ material will be determined by you. You will be asked as a class to decide to what extent and how we will study one or both of the following over the next two weeks: Fazaa Fakkaa by UCHIDA Shungiku (novel and/or film version) and Seija no kôshin (TV drama series). Should you choose, as a class, not to engage either, you will be given the opportunity to substitute Boys Choir, Nobody Knows, Kansai Koen, Spirited Away, and/or Go for one or more of the above.

10/9: TBA
10/11: TBA
10/16: TBA
10/18: TBA

10/23: Family Camp
We will watch the film The Happiness of the Katakuris in class.

10/25: Family Camp Continued
We will finish watching The Happiness of the Katakuris.

10/30: From My Grandmother’s Bedside
Read from “Clutter Love” to “The Postwar Garden” in From My Grandmother's Bedside(FMGB).

11/1: From My Grandmother’s Bedside Continued
Read from “The History Contained in Animals” to “Peace and Banality” in FMGB.

11/6: From My Grandmother’s Bedside Continued
Read the rest of FMGB.

11/8: Who Killed Vincent Chin?
We will watch the documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? in class.

11/13: Twinkle Twinkle
Read pp. 1-71 (through “A Handful of Candy”) in Twinkle Twinkle.

11/15: Twinkle Twinkle Continued
Read the rest of Twinkle Twinkle.

11/:27 Yuri Kochiyama
Read Passing it On. (Pages will be announced in class.)

11/29: Yuri Kochiyama Continued
Finish reading Passing it On.

11/29: When the Emperor was Divine
Read When the Emperor was Divine. (Pages will be announced in class.)

12/4: When the Emperor was Divine Continued
Finish reading When the Emperor was Divine.

12/6: Sisters, Babies, and Jam
Read “Pregancy Diary” by OGAWA Yoko.

12/11-12/13: Final Projects, Presentations, and Conclusion
Our last two sessions will be devoted to in-class presentations and a final discussion. Your final projects are due on December 13 at the beginning of class.

12/11: 10-minute presentations
12/13: 10-minute presentations

Some scenes to launch the return of the Family Fictions Class

2007-08-15T08:14:00.000-07:00

The Postwar Japanese Family Fictions class is back for the fall of 2007 -- with lots of changes and lots of "new and improved" content! Here are a few clips from some celebrated postwar Japanese films to get you in the spirit.

From Mother (1950, Naruse)

From Tokyo Story (1953, Ozu)

From Hogs and Warships (1960, Imamura)

Finally, those of you who can read Japanese might be interested in viewing the opening of Kinoshita's 1953 film A Japanese Tragedy:

Discover Nikkei!!

2006-04-27T12:44:00.000-07:00

Check out the amazing new resource coordinated by the Japanese American National Museum!

DISCOVER NIKKEI

Updates

2005-12-27T21:35:00.000-08:00

I still haven't been able to properly upload Nico's presentation, which I hope to do. I also plan to input some excerpts from your final exams. And I will definitely let you know about the screening of Ivan's documentary.

Now that class is over, I'll bet you can identify the family on this poster.

Thank you all!

2005-12-08T16:44:00.000-08:00

I haven't finished reading them all yet, but so far, I am really delighted with and humbled by your projects. Wow. And the presentations were great. I am sorry we didn't have more time for each of you.

We also didn't have the chance to end our class with the kind of discussion and vibe it deserved. That is my bad all around. I wish I'd skipped the movie and allowed three days for you to make presentations and discuss one another's projects and ideas. I'm going to keep this blog active so that we can continue to "talk" with one another, share ideas, and retain some of the sense of community we developed.

(Nico, I can't figure out how to upload your presentation to the blog and will have to discuss that with you.)

The rest of Ivan's documentary is deeply, deeply moving. I wept while watching the whole thing today. I will arrange a screening of the film next semester. Please check back here (or with me periodically) for details on that.

I think Bettina also wanted to contact you all about the anime screenings, so look for comments from her too.

I received a call from Tessa, who had a bad fall today. Tessa, we all hope you are okay and that you heal quickly.

Norma Field has a question for our class!

2005-12-04T13:52:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone,

It's hard to believe we only have two classes left!

I received a message from Norma Field in response to our class blog. She had a question for you. You can earn extra credit by posting comments in response to her question below. Since we know she's reading it, feel free to ask her questions too!

"I was (happily) intrigued by your suggestion (12 November entry) that some of your students said they weren't as bothered by criticisms of America as they otherwise might have been--and would like to know how they understand that."

Also:

Several of you have asked about the actor playing Richard Sagawa in The Happiness of the Katakuris. You can see his website here:

Imawano Kiyoshiro

Of greater interest in terms of our class is the following article related to his punk cover of the Japanese national anthem:

Little Screaming Revue's Kimigayo

No Office Hours Tomorrow 12/1

2005-11-30T17:17:00.000-08:00

Sorry, but I need to cancel my office hours for tomorrow. Please, please email me if you want to meet, and I will set up an alternate time with you. In the meantime, feel free to rant and/or rave about The Happiness of the Katakuris.

"Japanese Americans and the Making of U.S. Democracy During World War II"

2005-11-26T23:39:00.000-08:00

The following is an introduction to two Office of War Information propaganda films on Japanese Internment. To view the films, click on the following:
Japanese 1943
Challenge to Democracy

by Gary Y. Okihiro
ZNet, November 14, 2005

Upon viewing once again the Office of War Information's "newsreels" on the forced removal and confinement of Japanese Americans during World War II, I am struck by the contradictions of the ideals of U.S. democracy and its realities. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his message to Congress about a year before the U.S. plunged into the war, articulated some of those ideals. In his speech, Roosevelt told the nation and world that the U.S. was a beacon of democracy amidst the darkness of Europe and East Asia engulfed by despotisms. "We look forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms," the President declared. "The freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want -- everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear -- anywhere in the world." That global insistence on American democracy's imperative, "everywhere in the world," bespeaks an imperial and "noble" mission that became the ostensible purpose for U.S. involvement in World War II.

Needless to say, at home, the inequities under democracy were made manifest by the recent Great Depression in which capitalism's temporary collapse prompted a New Deal for enhanced federal powers and the welfare state that strengthened corporate capitalism and instigated social reform that provided little for those at the bottom of U.S. society. As was noted by African American Clifford Burke, "The Negro was born in depression. It didn't mean too much to him, The Great Depression, as you call it. There was no such thing. The best he could be is a janitor or a porter or shoeshine boy. It only became official when it hit the white man." And Lakota Indian Benjamin Reifel remembered: "While I was a boy growing up on the Rosebud Reservation, we had the most sickening poverty that I could imagine. TB was a killer of Indians. The people on the Pine Ridge Reservation at Oglala were eating their horses to survive. Impoverishment was everywhere."

So when President Roosevelt famously thundered, "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan," peoples of color and the poor in the U.S. were cognizant of the opportunities but also the inequalities of democracy. "It was a December Sunday, so we were getting ready for our Christmas program," recalled Japanese American Mary Tsukamoto. "We were rehearsing and having Sunday School class, and I always played the piano for the adult Issei service.... But after the service started, my husband ran in. He had been home that day and heard on the radio. We just couldn't believe it, but he told us that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. I remember how stunned we were. And suddenly the whole world turned dark. We started to speak in whispers...we immediately sensed something terrible was going to happen."

As the thick smoke rose from what was once America's Pacific Fleet, Hawai`i's governor surrendered civil authority to the U.S. Army, and teams of FBI agents and military and civilian police swept into neighborhoods and seized mainly Japanese but also German and Italian Americans in Hawai`i and along the U.S. West Coast. Martial law in Hawai`i and summary detentions in the islands and on the continent not only undermined civil liberties but tarnished the objectives of a war presumably being pursued for freedom. The situation of Japanese Americans differed from Germans and Italians in that there were no distinctions made between citizens and aliens among the nonwhite group, and the martial law instituted in Hawai`i applied to everyone in the Territory but was designed specifically to contain the "Japanese menace." On the continent within the Western Defense Command, all Japanese Americans were removed and interned, while in Hawai`i only a select group of over a thousand experienced internment. At the same time, in the islands, Japanese Americans as an entire racialized group faced special scrutiny and restrictions, including forced removals from farms and neighborhoods and controls on religion, Japanese language, and employment.

Roosevelt himself embodied the glaring gap between the rhetoric and practice of democracy when he promised shortly after Pearl Harbor, "we will not, under any threat, or in the face of any danger, surrender the guarantees of liberty our forefathers framed for us in the Bill of Rights," while adding, "some degree of censorship is essential in wartime, and we are at war." Some five years earlier, Roosevelt, upon reading a secret report of Hawai`i's readiness in the anticipated war with Japan, had proposed: "One obvious thought occurs to me -- that every Japanese citizen or non-citizen on the Island of Oahu who meets these Japanese ships or has any connection with their officers or men should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble." That "special list," begun during the 1920s by the military in Hawai`i, formed the basis for those named and targeted for detention in the roundup of December 1941.

And on February 19, 1942, that same U.S. President who had lectured the world on the "Four Freedoms," signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the eviction and confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans, classified by "race," two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. Roosevelt and his men knew their culpability in this violation of the Constitution's protections. As the assistant secretary of war, John J. McCloy, put it when the Justice Department ruled that only enemy aliens, Japanese American citizens, could be held in detention: "If it is a question of the safety of the country [and] the Constitution.... Why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me." And the President, in a conversation a few days before EO 9066, instructed his secretary of war to "go ahead and do anything you think necessary," even if it involves citizens, as long as it is dictated by "military necessity." Although, he added, "be as reasonable as you can."

That myth of "military necessity" was the essential message of the 1943 short, "Japanese Relocation," put out by the Office of War Information. The OWI, it should be noted, controlled the news the American public received of the war, and its primary purpose was to promote patriotism and present the U.S. war effort in the most favorable light. "Japanese," in the film's title, blurred the distinction between the Japanese enemy and Japanese Americans, while "relocation" implied a temporary "mass migration," which was framed in the spirit of the mythic West and frontier. Because the "Japanese," the film's narrator states, proved "potentially dangerous," living and working as they did along vital harbors and near airfields, their "relocation" was prudent and necessary. The job, perhaps offensive to some, was made easier knowing that it was being conducted "as a democracy should" and involved cheerful and cooperative "Japanese." Further, the land upon which those "pioneer communities" [concentration camps] were situated was "raw and untamed but full of opportunity."

In fact, of course, the military forcibly evicted Japanese Americans from their homes and farms based upon their "race," without proof of espionage, sabotage, or even disloyalty, and confined them behind barbed wire in horse stalls and fair grounds and in some of the most inhospitable deserts and swamps of the American West and South. As the Army general in charge of the defense of the West Coast quipped, "The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become 'Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted." And the director of the Office of Indian Affairs offered Native American land for the "colonization of the Japanese" like his plan to "colonize 10,000 American Indians" to develop an irrigating system to make the reservation self-supporting. His office, he noted, had "long experience in handling a minority group," and was thus well equipped "to provide for the Japanese aliens the type of treatment and care which will make them more acceptable as members of the American population."

By 1944, the release year of the second short, "A Challenge to Democracy," the OWI, War Relocation Authority (which administered the ten concentration camps) and Office of Strategic Services no longer needed to explain the necessity of the camps to the American public and world but were faced with a glaring contradiction among the principles of the "Four Freedoms," the conduct of the war, and U.S. democracy. No contradiction, the film's producers contend, the camps were, in fact, schools in American democracy, transforming the "Japanese" into "Japanese Americans," indeed, into real "Americans" so they could reenter American life after the war, as was suggested by the Office of Indian Affairs' director. America's concentration camps had rendered them safe for democracy. See how "American" the dislocated people are, the film shows, how they've converted barracks into "apartments," they've made the desert bloom with produce, they play baseball and football, they exercise democracy and enjoy religious freedom, and above all, they enlist in the U.S. Army and wish Japan's defeat. This is "their" country, the film intones, where freedom prevails regardless of race, creed, or ancestry.

Besides the coercive and undemocratic nature of America's concentration camps and martial law Hawai`i, the wartime period saw in the drive for unity an intolerance of the freedom of speech, the rise of propaganda and press censorship, segregation in the military of African and Japanese Americans, and violent race riots directed against Filipino and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Diego and against African Americans in Beaumont and Evansville, Texas, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, and Philadelphia. The June 1943 Detroit riot was one of the costliest of the century in which twenty-five African Americans and nine whites were killed, and property worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was destroyed. Clearly, whatever the war rhetoric and OWI "news" propaganda, U.S. democracy failed to embrace all of the nation's peoples.

Amidst the pervasive intolerance and illusion of freedom for all, many Americans maintained a belief in their country by holding it to its ideals and not their lived realities. As an African American mother, "Georgia," wrote in 1943: "I have faith in the goodness of America, because I'm an American.... I believe that America will eventually wipe out this challenge to her democracy, and that the time will come when no person need fear that he cannot become a truly great American because of race, color or creed." In that same spirit, about 25,000 Japanese American men and women from martial law Hawai`i and from America's concentration camps served in the U.S. military during the war, while in 1944, seventy Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain concentration camp refused to enlist and were convicted of draft evasion and conspiracy to violate the law. "We would gladly sacrifice our lives to protect and uphold the principles and ideals of our country as set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights," those patriots explained. Their resistance, thus, was directed at restoring those rights and guarantees, because the Constitution was more than "just a scrap of paper" to them, "for on its inviolability depends the freedom, liberty, justice, and protection of all people including Japanese-Americans and all other minority groups."

The Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan was asked to comment on President Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" in a March 6, 1943 Saturday Evening Post essay: "We do not take democracy for granted," the labor organizer promised. "We feel it grow in our working together -- many millions of us working toward a common purpose.... What do we want? We want complete security and peace. We want to share the promises and fruits of American life. We want to be free from fear and hunger. If you want to know what we are -- We are Marching!"

Gary Y. Okihiro is Professor of International and Public Affairs and Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books including The Columbia Guide to Asian American History. Written for Japan Focus, October 26, 2005.

The Value of Attentiveness

2005-11-12T11:24:00.000-08:00

Our discussion of Norma Field's From my Grandmother's Bedside got off to a great start thanks to your sincere engagement. I'm looking forward to working through the rest of the book with Ivan as our "guide" at the beginning of each class.

From my Grandmother's Bedside deals with language and vocabulary, the words we have available to us to describe feelings and experiences. This is a familiar theme for us after Uchida's Father Fucker . In addition to specific words, Field also writes about the two languages that help her name her feelings and experiences. This is one example of how she demonstrates (and maybe models for us) a kind of attentiveness. She’s attentive to her grandmother’s nods, the “flicker of an eyelid." She's attentive to conversations she hears and her friend’s mother’s kindness. She's also, as I mentioned last time, attentive to politics and the larger events framing her private life and her own family history.

Last time we talked about how the personal-ness of her story provides a "way into" certain political conversations and ideas that some readers might otherwise resist. Remember how some of you weren't "as bothered" by critcisms of the U.S. as you suggested you might ordinarily have been? What can we draw from this experience?

One common theme we can find in both FMGB and Ôe's HF is that the personal and the political are connected, that they overlap or are intextricably linked. Ivan and Cory are working on final projects for our class that place their own lives and experiences in larger political and historical contexts, so I know they are already thinking through this question. This week, I want us all to reflect on where and how we fit in bigger stories. For starters, I want us to think about what it means for us to be studying Japanese literature in Iowa in 2005, what it means for me to be teaching the class, and what brings us together and makes our course possible?

Please don't forget your extra credit assignment on Aung San Suu Kyi. We will talk about her on Monday.

Extra Credit Reminder

2005-11-07T10:53:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, November 9, 2005

Public lecture: "Japanese American Evacuation out of Tokyo, Japan"

Julie Otsuka, author of When the Emperor was Divine

7:30 pm

Buchanan Auditorium, John Pappajohn Business Building, the University of Iowa

Anime with SWAMP Tomorrow

2005-11-05T11:32:00.000-08:00

Hey Kids,

Bettina reminded me that there is a SWAMP meeting tomorrow at 1. It's in the Pappajohn Business building (flyers on both doors will direct you to the room).

Also a reminder for the address of the Yahoo! Group:
groups.yahoo.com/group/SWAMPanime

No Office Hours Today

2005-11-03T08:18:00.000-08:00

Must conserve voice for class.
Sorry!
I will make appointments with you, so holla if you need something.

Saipan

2005-11-02T20:54:00.000-08:00

We all hope Bettina feels better soon! We miss her!

Don't forget the map quiz on Monday! I also want to direct your attention to the last link on the right. It's been there all along, waiting for us to get to this book.

Have a nice weekend, kids.

Some (of the MANY) reasons why I love our class!

2005-10-31T14:24:00.000-08:00

1. You are all brave. Some of you are venturing into tough projects that involve emotional courage. Some of you are brave when it comes to speaking your mind in class. And all of you embody a certain kind of courage just being who you are, and I am humbled by that.

2. You always surprise me. Even when I think I have a fairly "set" plan in place for any given class, you take me in unexpected directions, and I invariably learn something new in the process.

3. You are smart. Each one of you brings insights, ideas, and talents to the class that make our discussions so productive and meaningful.

4. You all care. You even care enough to disagree, to express frustrations, and to allow us to work through different crises.

5. No matter how much you might pretend, you all care about each other, and I really love that.

6. You are all studying Japanese and Japanese literature, and that is just plain cool.

7. You all have, at different points in the semester, made empathic leaps. That isn't always easy.

8. Most of you have teased me. I tend to think that's a sign that the class is working and that we've established a good level of trust.

9. You all are incredibly honest. I'm continually blown away by that.

10. You look good. If you don't believe it, check out the photo on my office door.

You Don't Want to Miss This!!!

2005-10-20T11:24:00.000-07:00

あさま山荘事件

The Media,
the New Left,
and Women’s Lib in Japan:
The Production of Fear and Loathing

A Center for Asian and Pacific Studies talk presented by

Setsu Shigematsu

University of California Regents Postdoctoral Fellow (2005)
Stanford Institute for International Studies Postdoctoral Fellow (2006)
Asst. Prof. in Comparative Studies at Ohio State University (2007)

Dr. Shigematsu will describe how the media has played a pivotal role in the production of a culture of “fear and loathing” by examining how the mass media (NHK in particular) televised a political crisis in Japan. She will explain how the New Left, the mass media, and members of the women’s liberation movement responded to the production of this crisis. In doing so, she will also address the intersecting histories of feminism, leftist demise, media, and historical memory in the context of the early 1970s in Japan.

302 Schaeffer Hall
at 12:00 noon on Thursday, October 27

If anyone needs an accommodation in order to attend this event, please call 335-1305 or email: caps@uiowa.edu. For more information on this event, please email: adrienne-hurley@uiowa.edu

Breaking News for Extra Credit Events

2005-10-17T14:23:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow at 4pm, Danyan Chen (a novelist) from Shanghai will be speaking in 302 Schaeffer Hall. If you attend and write a 1-page response, you can earn extra credit!! Because of this event, I will NOT be holding office hours tomorrow! Please let me know if you would like to schedule an appointment.

Also, on Oct. 27 at noon in 302 Schaeffer Hall, Setsu Shigematsu, the hottest Japan Studies scholar around, will be speaking. You can earn MAD extra credit for attending her talk, which is described in more detail on my faculty blog (linked to the right).

Today, Bettina told me about the Swamp Anime film series. If you go to yahoo groups and check out "swampanime" (groups.yahoo.com/groups/swampanime), you can see more. The next screenings are November 6 and 13. I'm sure Bettina can give you more info too. If you attend and write about any of these films, you can earn a little extra credit.

"Keeping it Real"

2005-10-16T11:39:00.000-07:00

We really are hitting the diversity of family experience in this transition to the last part of the semester. Social class is merely one example. We've seen family as a site that engenders pain and destruction, and I think we can all imagine why Uchida wouldn't want to maintain a relationship with her family. And we'll see a family that deals with tough issues and a dad who sometimes isn't perfect, but who sure seems to try. And unlike Mishima, Oe is willing to expose his faults as a father – his lapses, his weaknesses, his imperfections.

By the way, Bettina and Cory wrote some good comments below the Uchida post. We'll talk about them in class.

FYI: a rare opportunity tomorrow afternoon

2005-10-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone,

I checked out the House of Aromas, and I think it'll be great tomorrow. See you there.

Afterwards, you might wanna check out the following event, which really complements our topic for Wednesday on sexual abuse and sexual violence. I'll be there. =)

Monday, October 10, 5:00, Boyd Law Building.

Reception from 6:30-7:00 on Monday, October 10 at the Latino Native American Cultural Center (Melrose Avenue across from the Law School).

Professor Andrea Smith, Native American scholar and co-founder of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, the largest grassroots, multiracial feminist organization in the country, and author of CONQUEST: SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND AMERICAN INDIAN GENOCIDE will be speaking on topics related to her book.

ファザー　ファッカー

2005-10-06T18:45:00.000-07:00

The following is your blog reading for NEXT Wednesday, the class session AFTER the midterm on Monday. We are still on for meeting at the new House of Aromas Bubble Tea shop across from the Old Capitol Mall for our midterm on Monday. I will let you know if anything changes, so please check the blog before Monday for any updates. Also, feel free to use the blog comment space under the Datura Day post to discuss your midterm prep, etc.

On Wednesday, we'll start the second half of the course with what may be the toughest material we encounter this semester. It gets easier after this. But this post and what we'll watch include graphic representations of sexual abuse. We'll watch clips from the film based on Uchida Shungicu's (her romanization) 1993 novel Fazaa Fakkaa (Father Fucker). Uchida’s decision to call her autobiographical novel Father Fucker warrants some discussion. The use of two widely known English words, one of which is a vulgarity, for this Japanese novel helped to attract attention – obviously. The eponymous protagonist is described as a “fucker” – not a survivor, victim, or even a girl. This phrase also feeds into some existing myths about sexual abuse. For example, in Japan, children sexually abused by family members are misassigned agency as soon as the abuse is rendered into language (as soon as it's "named"). The word for “incest” (a term that is problematic in its associations in English too, as is evident in the use of the words “between” or “with” in many dictionary definitions) in Japanese is kinshinsôkan, a word meaning “sexual relations WITH close relatives” and which contains the character (sô or ai) for “mutuality” or “reciprocity.” If you keep reading, you'll get a better sense of why I'm singling "with" out as a problem. In Japanese, the word is this: 近親相姦｛きんしんそうかん｝

That a well-known cartoonist would publish a novel based on her own experiences of childhood sexual abuse and call it Father Fucker, invoking the linguistic and cultural myths that assign agency to sexually abused girls, could not have been a marketing accident, and the myth of consent will remain a problem in our class discussions. Uchida’s deft marketing sense has contributed to what was (at least in the 1990s) a diverse and lucrative business bearing her name. Uchida “goods,” such as comic books, essay collections, music cd’s, and nude photos (taken while she was pregnant), along with periodic television appearances, have made hers somewhat of a household name in Japan. Given the notoriety of its author and the escalation of the marketing of Uchida goods following its publication, many readers may be more prepared to see the words Father Fucker as shocking or provocative than to recognize the irony in such a title.

In a book of essays, Uchida Shungicu describes the origin of this title, shedding some light on how she (and Shizuko) came to be called “father fucker”:

***“If your stepfather hadn’t done you, you never would have become such a great manga [“comic book”] artist, huh?” About four years ago, my boyfriend at the time said this to me. “Father Fucker!” is what that same boyfriend cruelly accused me of being one year later. I wondered what I was if even my boyfriend would call me that, and I could not stop crying. But about six months later, I ended up thinking, “If I’ve cried this much, I’d better figure all this out,” and with that I began to feel better.*** [all these translations are mine, by the way, which I write because this is on the web]

For Uchida, “figuring out” and feeling better meant writing, but once she had brought her completed first novel to the publishers, she saw how the emphasis on maximizing profit would determine the way her story would be marketed.

***Every single day [at the publishers] I was asked the same question over and over again to the point where it was all I heard: “Is all that true?” And then when they’d say, “Well, we’ve got to sell copies, so let’s go ahead and put ‘autobiography’ on the jacket cover,” I realized how it works and replied, “Sure, go ahead, since you are publishing it for me, I don’t want to risk all the hassle of the book not selling. Do it.” But I hadn’t expected that everyone would be so interested in whether or not it was true.***

In this moment not only her work, but Uchida’s life became a commodity subject to the dictates of the marketplace. In interviews and essays, Uchida has discussed aspects of her childhood and indicated that the novel is, indeed, based on her own childhood. The following is an example of the elliptical descriptions of her early years Uchida often provides in her nonfiction writing:

***My stepfather came into the home where I lived with my mom and my younger sister and created a paradise for him and only him, which I kicked down and left for rubble when I ran away. But . . . I am not “poor little sexually abused Uchida-san.”***

In light of the dynamics of trauma we discussed earlier in the semester, it is not surprising that much is left unsaid in her discussions of her own trauma and that those gaps take shape only in fiction.

Father Fucker epitomizes the complexities of “survivor discourse” in that not only are barriers to telling represented in the story, the book itself was received with considerable hostility and outrage, and she was rebuked for “telling” her "unpleasant" story publicly as a novel. Publishing house exploitation did not protect Uchida from the harsh criticism that her novel was untruthful and distasteful. Rather, the novel’s promotion exacerbated certain criticisms (according to the “any publicity is good publicity” model of profit-generation).

Telling stories of childhood abuse, sexual abuse in particular, can be so threatening to those who would wish to ignore and deny it that even a practice as immaterial as demonstrating “good manners” and filial piety can be picked up as a justification for dismissing the disturbing reality of abuse. Uchida expresses frustration with this kind of criticism:

***After publishing Father Fucker, I was criticized for “disclosing my real parents’ faults,” but I just wondered what that was about. People even believe that in romantic or married relationships anything a man does to a woman should be kept secret. What the hell is that? I don’t know.***

I want to tell you a bit about the book itself. As was the case for Uchida herself, derisive name-calling serves as the protagonist’s reason for reflecting on her childhood and deciding to “figure it out” by telling her story. Father Fucker begins with her description of her journey back to childhood:

***People often tell me I have a face like a prostitute. When I tell them that I have had all sorts of job experiences that involved hostessing, they often ask, “Did you also do, um, you know,” implying selling my body. They ask in a lighthearted tone as if it were only natural. I haven’t let it show on my face, but I have hated that. Soon after I turned 16, I ran away from home and started out homeless, and I frequently thought that the one thing I wouldn’t do is sell my body. Even when it looked like someone would ask me to just try it, I would refuse. Still, without having any mean intentions, people will ask me in complete earnest, “Did you do it?” I got asked this so many times that more than getting angry, I thought it was strange. The people asking me this were not particularly cruel or callous people. So, for them to ask me like that must mean I really do look like I've hooked. I truly hated having people say that to me. I had lived my life thinking that was the one thing I would never do. I don’t care what other people think about me, but why do I have that kind of face?

Yesterday, I finally remembered. I was a prostitute. [...] My pimp was the person who raised me up until the age of sixteen, and furthermore she was my biological mother. My customer was her lover, the father who raised me.***

In addition to being labeled a “father fucker” and an apparent prostitute from the outset, the protagonist’s very name, Shizuko, which literally means “quiet child,” is connected both to the way she is denied a voice and her struggle to later claim it. One can hardly say “reclaim” in the case of one silenced before she can speak. Readers learn that while still a toddler of three or four, Shizuko was already conditioned to accept injustice and physical pain through repeated acts of violence and neglect, groomed, as it were, by her mother and biological father for the sexual abuse she later suffers by teaching her to anticipate assault and ridicule.

The adult narrator’s earliest memory of physical abuse – which occurred prior to her entrance into kindergarten – is having been hit in the head by her biological father with a dresser drawer “because” she asked him to bring home money at the instigation of a neighborhood adult who knew Shizuko’s mother was supporting the family. In concert with this training to expect violent punishment, she is taught by her father to keep secrets, a lesson which deforms her developing ability to communicate what she knows and what she sees. When one of her father’s girlfriends accompanies Shizuko, her sister, and her father to a beach outing, he tells Shizuko that she must not tell her mother (the implied punishment being further violence). The adult Shizuko includes these early lessons as part of a picture of her childhood prior to the years in which she was violently sexually abused by her stepfather, but it is up to the reader to think about how such early experiences limited, or perhaps determined, how Shizuko would interpret and organize her subsequent daily terror and pain.

There is a lot that happens in this novel, and I want to focus on some key themes and scenes that are most relevant to our class on "family fictions." The first is related to the story Shizuko's family tells about themselves. In this story, Shizuko is blamed for her abuse. She is the "bad" kid, the problem child, and the outsider in the family fiction. We'll see examples of this in the film version.

Bombarded by criticisms that she was “weird” and “disobedient” and that her troubles were her own fault, the young Shizuko struggles to think against or out of the distortions imposed on her, but her attempts to disentangle herself from those distortions are constantly sabotaged. It is not until she turns sixteen that Shizuko can run away from the dangerous stories and her dangerous home. At sixteen, she describes her home life to a new boyfriend, whose sympathetic reaction assigns blame to her family, providing her with the first corrective reading of the abuse. It's like, "Hey, that's messed up. You don't need that." Soon after he says this, she is raped and beaten by her stepfather despite her repeated protestations. She describes finding the courage to leave after this brutal attack as epiphanic, born of a sudden realization that propels her to break away: “That’s right. I don’t really have to be here," she says. As pivotal as the boyfriend was, however, we should see her decision to run away as the culmination of years of struggling – carried out very much alone.

Throughout the novel, Shizuko clearly signals to the reader that there is a significant disparity between her mother’s interpretation of events and her own perceptions even before she begins recounting memories. She even relates how this disparity led her to disavow relations with her mother and sister:

***Even if I try to line up my memories with the stories I heard from my mom, they don’t match up very well. Eleven years after I ran away from home, I decided to cut all ties to my mother and sister once and for all at the end of an argument we had.***

Beyond warning us that she and her mother do not share the same views as to “what happened,” she positions her “memories” (kioku) in opposition to her mother’s “stories” (hanashi). Although throughout the text many of her mother’s stories are qualified with grammatical signals that indicate that Shizuko’s memories differ from what she remembers her mother having said, these clues are frequently very subtle, such as the use of quotations, paraphrase, or words that attribute information to other sources. Peppered everywhere, yet never calling attention to themselves, these clues can be easily missed if a reader does not heed the narrator’s warning.

The marked difference between the way the narrator describes her mother’s treatment of her and her sister as well as the mother’s insistence that Shizuko’s own behavior causes the abuse is connected early on to the mother’s feelings about her first husband (Shizuko’s biological father), to whom she frequently compares Shizuko. She had hoped that giving birth to Shizuko would transform her husband from a philanderer into a devoted husband, but, instead, he urged her to have an abortion and continued his relationships with other women. One could imagine that, being unable to express her resentment and anger directly at the absent father, the mother instead aims it at Shizuko, whom the mother always describes in the harshest terms. Significantly, when her younger sister demonstrates the good penmanship that their father had, their mother does not compare Chie to their biological father; “[...] on no occasion did my mom ever comment on the ways Chie was like our real dad. All she always ever said, like she was chanting the nenbutsu, was that I was like our real dad.” Such comparisons (“chanted” by her mother like a nenbutsu mantra, “namu amida butsu,” to Amida Buddha) are, for Shizuko, examples of how she was an outsider even in her own family, positioned beyond or away from home with her absent father.

There are lots of other examples of this sort of thing. With the division already firmly in place by the time her stepfather moves in, the script, as it were, for what would transpire is already partially written.

Shizuko’s role as the “bad” daughter and family outsider is quickly picked up by the stepfather, who, as we see in a scene in which he leads Shizuko and Chie over a condemned bridge, uses the mother’s schema to distort and twist events in ways that continue to blame Shizuko for that over which she has no control. Shizuko knows they should not cross this bridge, and she hesitates while her stepfather and Chie go on ahead, leaving her behind. She recalls being worried for Chie, “as her big sister,” but Chie was “unbelievably [...] enjoying the thrill.” Shizuko was left to decide whether to stay behind and incur his wrath or traverse the bridge, both options carrying the risk of physical danger. After the stepfather and Chie reach the other side, Shizuko is spotted on the bridge, and a crowd tries to coax her safely across. When she reaches the other side, she searches the crowd in vain for her stepfather and Chie like “Rocky looking for Adrian.” When she does find them, she is met with hostility and reprimand. Her stepfather calls her an “idiot.” She is “in trouble” (for getting caught) when, in fact, she was coerced into a dangerous situation by the very man who now rebukes her.

Her parents tell Shizuko that to be a “good daughter” and avoid further “punishment” she must be more compliant and “obedient.” When her stepfather touches her breasts in front of her mother, Shizuko protests, but her resistance is met by her stepfather’s complaint that she is not “obedient” (sunao), and her mother follows this up by admonishing her in a similar way: “Shizu-chan, please be more obedient.” This pattern escalates to the point where her mother routinely sends Shizuko off to be raped, warning her not to disobey or “go against” her stepfather. The message here is not to obey so that the abuse will stop; it is to obey and endure so that the abuse can continue. The confusing message that Shizuko needs to accept abuse obediently in order to be a “good daughter” is never challenged. Being “obedient” means to repress any instinct to protect herself. Shizuko struggles to understand just what the word “obedient” means in these moments, which signals to the reader that even as a child, she was able to recognize that something was wrong with her family’s vocabularies and stories.

In the film based on the novel, we will watch her mother wash rice noisily and intently, rhythmically rinsing the rice against the metal bowl as if to drown out the sounds of her daughter being raped. In the novel, the mother not only actively avoids acknowledging the abuse, she acts as “pimp” to avoid becoming the abused herself. For example, she asks Shizuko to find out what her stepfather does on Sundays and holidays that keeps him away from their home all night. (He is with his other family at these times.) Her mother relies on Shizuko to voice the question about his other family that she herself is afraid to ask. When Shizuko asks the question, she bears the brunt of his anger in her mother’s stead. Her mother’s use of Shizuko to say what she herself will not say (and endure what she herself will not endure) is inextricably linked to another aspect of her family fiction, one which involves a considerable amount of what Shizuko describes as “melodrama.”

In her representation of her first marriage, the mother portrays herself as having been battered and neglected by a philandering and seldom employed husband who spent their money on gambling and other women. Shizuko describes her mother’s relationship with her stepfather less sympathetically. For example, when her stepfather beats her mother and then threatens to leave her while walking away, Shizuko describes her mother pleading with him, “Please come back!” Shizuko describes her mother as looking like a “character in a melodrama.” This story raises the problematic relationship between battered women and their children. While not vilifying battered women as participants in their abuse, a myth that continues to impede domestic violence prevention, we cannot overlook the difference between inequality of power in adult-adult relations and the dependency characteristic of adult-child relations.

Without denying the difficulty involved in escaping a violent spouse or the trauma suffered by battered women whose children are also abused (and who may, in fact, also abuse her children), it is still possible to argue that Shizuko’s perception of her mother’s participation in a “melodramatic” moment reveals what can be read as missed opportunities for “good enough” parenting, to refer back to a concept I mentioned when we studied "Still Life." Without hammering the message in readers’ heads by telling us, “She could have saved me, but she didn’t,” Shizuko’s narration demonstrates it. For example, when the mother calls her lover, the stepfather, back after he has beaten her (as if his presence were the sole means of attaining the distorted dream of a “family” for which she yearns), we see the meaning of her pleas from Shizuko’s perspective. Her mother’s “melodramatic” desperation seems fake in Shizuko’s retelling – not in the sense that it did not happen; it was artificial (like play-acting) in comparison to the materiality of Shizuko’s own pain. Her mother’s “melodramatic” story does not tell the truth of how Shizuko was made to suffer. The mother’s version masks the terribly disfigured and tortured face of abuse with melodramatic pathos and stock characters: the suffering wife, the violent womanizer, and the two daughters, one good, one bad.

Shizuko’s assigned role as the “problem” child (“sick in the head” according to her stepfather) masks the role thrust upon her to maintain her mother’s relationship with her stepfather at all costs. The narrator describes feeling as if she were being manipulated and abused by her parents for their amusement. For example, after Shizuko had written a letter addressed to them in honorific language “To Mother Dearest and Father Dearest” (Okaasama, Otôsama e), her stepfather gets angry that he was not shown the proper deference by having his name written first. Her mother sends her to talk with him, and when she asks what he wants, he replies, “I don’t know! What a pest!” Shizuko describes feeling like an “ingredient” or “material” (zairyô) necessary for such exchanges:

***My stepdad and mom even smirked like they were enjoying themselves by sending me back-and-forth like that. And this kind of thing happened over and over again. Even as a child, I could sense there was something creepy going on with them. It wasn’t long before I realized I was being used as an ingredient for that environment.***

Although her stepfather insists Shizuko call him “Father Dearest” otôsama, her mother tells Shizuko that she herself chose to use this honorific term of address. She recalls how her mother told her that in kindergarten she declared that from that point on she would refer to them as otôsama and okaasama. However, Shizuko remembers several conversations in which her stepfather did, in fact, insist on this method of address, and she describes not having liked using it. To see past the distorted “double-talk” (which was also used to enforce and maintain the story that Shizuko was “bad”) requires that the reader trust in Shizuko’s perceptions, just as she herself struggles to come to trust her own perceptions as an adult narrator.

In addition to casting Shizuko as the “bad daughter,” her mother (and later stepfather) find fault with those on the “outside” who challenge the myth of the “good” family, such as the woman who told Shizuko to ask her biological father to bring home money when she was a toddler and the teachers who later try to foster Shizuko’s developing talents and dreams. When she decides she wants to write manga, Shizuko tells her elementary school teacher who gives her a drawing pad to encourage the young girl. Happy with this gift and excited about her new dream, Shizuko eagerly returns home to tell her mother, but she is not met with the kind of encouragement she anticipates. Her mother angrily objects to Shizuko’s wish to draw manga and insists that she return the drawing pad. When the stepfather arrives home and learns of Shizuko’s manga writing aspirations, he is even angrier. Having already determined that Shizuko will become a doctor, they perceive manga writing as frivolous and “stupid.” The direction their conversation takes, however, reflects the need they have to disparage differing opinions or practices in order to maintain the myth that their family is “good.” Instead of looking at the meaning of how fostering a child’s interests might encourage her to excel in many areas, they see the teacher as having acted inappropriately by giving Shizuko a drawing pad. Her stepfather exclaims, “What idiots. All these damned teachers are complete idiots!” Shizuko goes on to tell us that “no matter who the teacher was, he’d put them down, calling them cheapskates,” and that both her mother and stepfather even spoke ill of her teachers’ “personal lives.” Their litanies of other people’s problems are described as increasingly frantic and desperate in proportion to the escalation of the horrors at home.

Toward the end of her eighth grade year (when she is fifteen years old), Shizuko begins having sex with her boyfriend and classmate, Hiroki, and soon after fears she is pregnant. Her mother also becomes suspicious, noticing signs of pregnancy such as morning sickness, and she warns Shizuko that if her stepfather were to find out, he would “kill” Shizuko. Shizuko recalls maintaining the daily hope that her period would finally come. It becomes increasingly difficult to deny her pregnancy, and her mother eventually reveals Shizuko’s condition to her stepfather, whose first reaction is to call Shizuko a “whore.” Shizuko tells us that she “did not know the meaning of that word.” He then beats Shizuko “more times than [she] could count,” and eventually demands to know with whom she had sex. He takes Shizuko and her mother in a taxi to Hiroki’s house ( this was Shizuko’s first ride in a taxi), and “typically” worried about what “people” (the taxi driver) might think, he remains silent and composed for the duration of the ride, but upon arriving at Hiroki’s house, he blows up again, unable to contain his rage, screaming at Hiroki’s father, “You want me to do it to your wife? Huh? What do you think?” Shizuko remembers thinking that this was a very curious question, perhaps because it conflated the categories of “wife” and “stepdaughter.” Her stepfather proceeds to attack Hiroki, and after Hiroki runs off, he begins beating Shizuko again. Before leaving for home with her mother, the stepfather turns to Shizuko and says, “Don’t bother coming home. I’ll let this family have you!” You'll notice this scene is quite different in the film version we'll watch. This still photo comes from the film.

Shizuko’s initial reaction upon being left at Hiroki’s is one of relief, of being “lucky.” And she soon witnesses an entirely different way of expressing anger, when Hiroki’s parents sit the two of them down and ask if they understand the gravity of their situation. His mother asks Shizuko if she would like to take a bath. For Shizuko, who had been effectively isolated and unable to make friends, this was a new experience. “Raised with the warning that I was not to make friends, I had never bathed at another person’s home before.” Restricted social interactions and limited experiences with people outside the family are characteristic of abusive homes as Judith Herman (the woman who wrote the book Trauma and Recovery that I told you about) explains:

***[F]amilies in which child abuse occurs are socially isolated. It is less commonly recognized that social isolation does not just happen; it is often enforced by the abuser in the interest of preserving secrecy and control over other family members. Survivors frequently describe a pattern of jealous surveillance of all social contacts. Their abusers may forbid them to participate in ordinary peer activities or may insist on the right to intrude into these activities at will. The social lives of abused children are also profoundly limited by the need to keep up appearances and preserve secrecy. Thus, even those children who manage to develop the semblance of a social life experience it as inauthentic.***

The contrast between her parents and Hiroki’s leaves Shizuko feeling envious. Hiroki’s response to witnessing some of the culture of Shizuko’s home, on the other hand, predictably leads to retreat. She remembers that after her bath, she saw Hiroki studying at his desk and guessed that he was still intending to go to school the next day. Sensing an immediate shift in their relationship, Shizuko feels distant from the boy to whom she had grown so attached, and tellingly, their awkward discussion about a homework assignment proves to be their last conversation.

Shizuko describes her return home and how she was bombarded by questions from her stepfather – such as “Where did you do it? Did you do it here?” – and asked by her mother to “apologize to your father.” Her stepfather also accuses her of “doing it” with her homeroom teacher, a teacher Shizuko liked a great deal, and then he “examines” and “punishes” her.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING PASSAGE IS TOUGH

*** “Lie down.”
My dad stretched me out and rubbed and poked at my belly.
“When I kicked you around before, I was hoping it would make you miscarry, but no such luck ... the damned position is wrong, it’s a breech.”
[...]
My stepfather was gradually getting excited by this bogus medical examination, and he took off my underpants and started poking around my genitals.
“Don’t you ever do that again for the rest of your life. Never again for the rest of your life.”
I was silent.
“To make sure you can’t, I’m going to sew you shut. And I’m going to do it to you right now. You can still have a baby by Caesarian section, so don’t worry.”
As if I wouldn’t worry.
So, my stepfather actually started making preparations to sew up my genitals.
[...]
“You’re only kidding, right? Are you serious? Are you really going to do it?” My mother sobbed and pleaded with him over and over again, but my stepfather quietly continued on with his preparations. I just blankly watched on. As usual, I shut down and did not feel anything. After a while, he commanded me to “wash yourself in the bath,” and he stood up. ***

Shizuko recalls frequently “shutting down,” being “silent,” and “staring at the ceiling” in her recollection of this episode. The previous night she had been beaten by her stepfather in front of Hiroki and his parents, and no one intervened to stop the abuse. The abuse expanded outside the confines of their home, making it increasingly difficult for Shizuko to imagine that her survival could involve physical escape from pain. Like many victims of repeated torture and abuse, Shizuko describes her ability to survive the abuse in the moment as stemming from her desperate attempts to see herself as powerful. She imagines herself to be “strong” and unaffected by fear, and she promises herself that no matter what he does to her, she will not be broken. Certainly no one in her immediate surroundings gives Shizuko any cause to think that she does not deserve to be abused or could be saved. As the “surgery” scenario unfolds, Shizuko’s portrait of her mother’s limitations indicates why imagination provided a necessary function for her.

WARNING: MORE TOUGH STUFF

***Although my mom seemed frightened that my stepfather would really sew my genitals shut like he said, she never once said “Stop.” To me, it seemed like that’s what she wanted too. From the beginning I had never thought she would save me, and I solemnly washed myself in the bath tub. I opened my legs wide and leaned back down on the “operating table” my stepfather had made by spreading out some newspaper.
My mom no longer questioned him. And, of course, she didn’t stop him.
[...]
I was silently staring at the ceiling. The surgery never got underway.
My stepfather said, “Your pulse is too high. I can’t perform surgery like this.
I took this to mean, “I have scared you,” which made me angry. Because no matter what my stepfather tried to do to me, I believed I could be strong and not get scared, plead with him, or kiss his ass.
“Nope, it’s useless with your pulse so fast. You will sleep here. Because I have something to discuss with you in a bit.”
My stepfather didn’t take me to the kids’ room, but to his and my mom’s room, and he put me on their bed. Because it wasn’t my usual bed, I couldn’t relax, but I thought he’d brought me in here because my sister was in the kids’ room.***

Shizuko does eventually fall asleep until she is awakened by movement and the smell of pomade and is raped by her stepfather. The next morning, she asks her mother, “Why did Dad do it with me?” Her mother tells Shizuko that he thought he might induce a miscarriage.

A particular word Shizuko uses in the question above and in many other passages related from the vantage point of the adult survivor to describe being raped requires some discussion. Her use of the conjunction meaning “and” or “with” (to) to describe the sexual abuse in Father Fucker as “sex with my stepfather” – as opposed to a grammatical pattern that would more accurately reflect the unidirectionality of rape – is a distortion that stems from the myth that she was somehow a participant in her stepfather’s violence. We can look at this “with” as both a discursive expression of the stepfather’s power and a signal reminding the reader of the discrepancy between the consent implied by the “with” (her stepfather’s version of the story) and Shizuko’s own experience as the abused. Unlike other competing interpretations of events in the text, such as how her mother’s “stories” differ from her “memories,” Shizuko does not attribute this particular phrasing (“sex with my stepfather”) to another source, providing some insight into the way in which the impact of repeated rape by her stepfather differs from her earlier experiences of abuse and discrimination. By looking at what is communicated by this word choice and how its functions in a particular point in the narrative, we can see how, even as an adult survivor, Shizuko has yet to extricate herself completely from the distortions so brutally imposed on her. For while she does, at times, use grammatical constructions that indicate an awareness of the unidirectionality of rape, the “to” appears more often.

Shizuko’s frequent use of “with” to describe the sexual abuse reflects how the family cover-up skews the lopsided nature of parent-child relations, as if Shizuko could consent to “sex with her stepfather” – a fiction most clearly illustrated when her stepfather is upset that her vagina is “not wet” and accuses her of “thinking about something else” instead of sex “with” him. This discursive absolution of his responsibility is similar to what occurs with the use of “sô” (“reciprocity” or “mutuality”) in kinshinsôkan (“incest”) in that by introducing the language of consent, attention is deflected away from the sexually abused child’s inability to consent. By using the “with” to describe rape as “sex with her stepfather,” the adult Shizuko reveals the extent to which she has internalized her parents’ distorted portrait of her as an active participant in her abuse. Our job, as has been the case with reading CLB, is to notice such remnants of the abuse and its traumatic effects, to undo the “with” and its distractions, and to see past the “stories” and words to the truth of the trauma.

Shizuko’s early attempt to undo the “with” is strongly discouraged by her mother, who is portrayed as policing Shizuko’s resistance. This scene is a critical moment in that she attempts to express her rage and drive toward self-preservation directly. We might even call it something like her "datura" moment. Having been called to the bedroom by her stepfather in what had become a pre-rape ritual, Shizuko finds a KNIFE. As narrator, she lets the reader know that she fully intended to stab her stepfather and bring an end to her abuse!! But she is stopped by her mother, who makes her put down the knife. Although her mother claims to be acting in Shizuko’s best interest, the immediate circumstances reveal the limits (and irony) of such “parental” concern. For in knowing that her daughter has been summoned to be raped, the mother says, “Since you are still a child, you probably can’t understand this, but I am thinking about your own good in saying this to you. That is the one thing you can’t do. If you do, it will be the end.” Her mother’s “concern” for Shizuko not to kill her stepfather is expressed at the same time that the mother watches her daughter walk away to be raped by him. Taking the knife will be the “end” of something the mother does not want to end. The confusing message that her mother is “thinking about [Shizuko’s] own good” at the same time that her mother is acting as Shizuko’s “pimp” triggers a return to a dissociative state, which Shizuko describes as her “usual” feeling as if she were looking at herself from a far-off and disconnected space.

The memories she can recall and piece together for the reader must stand for other memories left unsaid, because, as I have discussed in class, profoundly traumatic memories are fraught with proportionally profound gaps. Seared into her memory is the rape that led to her decision to run away, and it is also the most detailed memory of being raped that Shizuko (Uchida) shares with readers. In the scene when the stepfather admonishes Shizuko for “not being wet,” the physical pain of rape is so severe that even her highly developed ability to “check out” cannot numb it. The severity of the pain propels her to break out of her usual state of “feeling nothing.”

*** “Please, it hurts. It hurts,” I said.
“You can take it.”
My stepfather continued his actions.
“I’m serious; it hurts, it hurts, it hurts,” I kept saying.
But my stepfather still kept at it, and then he suddenly yelled, “Shut up!”
And he smacked me down with all his might. He kept beating me like that, and I never said a word.***

She goes on to describe her head hitting a glass door and being beaten with a guitar and a dresser drawer, the same “prop” her biological father had used to beat her when she was a toddler. Her mother and sister come home, and her mother, seeing Shizuko lying on the floor, asks her, “what did you do?”

The severity of this attack for which she is blamed leads Shizuko to what she recalls as her “sudden” decision to run away from home. Her growing capacity to challenge the “bad” daughter story is accelerated by the escalation of the abuse, and she stays up all night planning her escape. Shizuko’s discovery of her agency and how very different it is from the false agency imposed on her by her parents disrupts the pseudo-logic of the “with” and the rhetoric of consent that pretends she is a participant in or otherwise responsible for her own abuse. Her ability to run away from home and escape is severely hindered by a number of forces, not the least of which is her stepfather’s surveillance. Allowing the possibility that she can leave and act upon that new idea demonstrates extraordinary courage in the face of extraordinary adversity. (I hate to say so, but in the sequel to Father Fucker, the hope we feel after she runs away is quickly crushed when her family finds her and pulls her back into a world of routine abuse for a while longer. The sequel makes clear how running away from home did not guarantee the certainty that the knife might have. Not that this blog advocates murder or anything, but ...)

One last thing I want to say is that the stepfather in the film is really different from the stepfather in the film. In the book, he comes across, at least to me, as rough, kind of macho, threatening, and phsyically intimidating. You'll see how the anal character in the movie gives a very different impression, one that I think conforms to a certain stereotype of the "perv."

Undergrad E. Asian Studies Conference

2005-10-05T20:15:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone,

Below is info on a really neat opportunity for undergraduate students! If you are planning a final paper, you should really consider going for this, especially considering the funding possibilities (and chance for publication)! For those of you pursuing translation projects, you might also consider presenting a paper on your translation process, the text you're translating, etc.

UNDERGRADUATE EAST ASIAN STUDIES CONFERENCE
Denison University
Granville, Ohio
(near Columbus, Ohio)
February 17-18, 2006

CALL FOR PAPERS

SUBMIT ABSTRACT BY OCTOBER 15, 2005

Individual student paper proposals are invited for an Undergraduate Academic Conference on East Asia. Faculty discussants provided for each panel. All disciplines are welcome. Students should submit your name, College or University, your address, paper title, and a 200- word abstract of the proposed paper, and any equipment you would need to present the panel paper.

Send this information by October 15, 2005 to:
Ms. Deborah Bennett
Bennettd@denison.edu

Acceptance emails will be sent two weeks later.

Keynote Speakers:
Professor Peter Bol, Harvard University
Professor Thomas Kasulis, The Ohio State University

Final copies of those papers selected should be from twelve to twenty-five pages in length.
Submit by January 10, 2006, to: Bennettd@denison.edu, and they will be forwarded to designated panel chairs.

TOP CONFERENCE PAPERS WILL BE PUBLISHED

The top papers from the conference will be published in The Wittenberg University Journal of East Asian Studies, the only undergraduate journal of East Asian Studies. The editorial board of that journal will independently judge and select the top papers submitted from conference panelists, and a special issue dedicated to the conference will be published. The special issue will be distributed nationally.

Conference Coordinator:
Barry Keenan
Keenan@denison.edu

Up-dated information will be listed on the following website
http://www.denison.edu/eastasian/

(Please send all questions and replies to Bennettd@denison.edu)

FUNDING FOR STUDENT TRAVEL

Student panelists who are accepted will receive free housing as well as dinner and lunch without personal expense. If the student's home institution has funds available from a Freeman grant, students will be expected to apply to their home institution. Travel costs for any student coming from further than 175 miles from Columbus, Ohio without home institution travel funds will be reimbursed up to $300.00. Receipts must be submitted to Deborah Bennett/411 Fellows Hall/ Denison
University Granville, OH 43023.

Important: Wednesday's Class

2005-10-03T19:14:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

On Wednesday, we will meet at the UI Museum of Art to see the exhibit by Leighton Pierce that Tiffany mentioned. It sounds like the theme of the exhibit, as well as the particular installation she described, will complement the reading. Don't forget to finish the novel too! After we see the exhibit, we'll find a place nearby to sit down and discuss the book and the exhibition. Please read the rest of the informal notes I gave you all, and be prepared to ask questions and discuss them. Also, this will be a good time to ask general questions or make comments about the novel, which you are free to do on the blog too. In fact, you might use the blog to study for the midterm together!

Museum location:
150 North Riverside Drive

PLEASE comment on this entry so that I know you all received this info!!!!

October 3, 2005: Datura Day

2005-10-01T13:32:00.000-07:00

Murakami Ryû obviously did his research, not just in terms of combing through news stories to flesh out the lives of his characters and find inspiration, but also in terms of the kind of archival work involved in learning more about datura and its effects. In order to better appreciate just how layered and involved this narrative is, we'll spend all day on Monday talking about drugs – psychopharmaceuticals and others. Datura remains an issue in many regions of the world. For example, according to the CDC's MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) of August 22, 2003:

**During October 11- November 20, 2002, the Cincinnati Drug and Poison Information Center (DPIC) received notification of and offered treatment advice for 14 adolescents in the Akron/Cleveland, Ohio, area who became ill after intentional exposure to toxic seeds that DPIC identified as Datura inoxia (Figure). All became ill shortly after eating the seeds or drinking tea brewed using the seeds. All patients recovered fully after treatment. This report summarizes these cases, discusses the characteristics of the various plants known commonly as "moonflowers," and underscores the need for awareness of the potential toxicity from recreational use of a plant.**

Also, according to "Prevention Colorado," a drug abuse prevention center, some "common effects" of datura include:

Flushing of the Skin
Dilated Pupils
Dry Mucous Membranes
Thirst
Difficulty Swallowing and Speaking
Blurred Vision
Phobia and Panic
Confusion and Agitation
Violent Behavior
Very Vivid Hallucinations (hearing colors or seeing sounds)
Delusion
Attraction to Water

I think we can see that Murakami took many of these "common effects" to heart when writing CLB.

NEET news

2005-09-29T21:40:00.000-07:00

NEETful things

09/30/2005

By TAKASHI KIYOKAWA and TAISEI SAITO

The Asahi Shimbun

When Toru, now 26 and a working family man, dropped out of high school, he holed up in his room and became a hikikomori recluse.

``I was in despair,'' he says. ``I didn't care whether I had a future.''

He was a NEET, a young person not in employment, education or training. There are now 640,000 such people aged 15 to 34, according to a labor ministry white paper.

In 10 years, if nothing is done about the problem, there will be 1.09 million NEETs, according to Dai-ichi Life Research Institute Inc.

So many jobless freeloaders could bog down the welfare and pension systems later, possibly plunging society into a crisis, analysts fear.

Solving the NEET problem has become crucial.

In July, a 980-million-yen labor ministry project began outsourcing NEETs to 20 nonprofit organizations. The organizations receive 300,000 to 400,000 yen in subsidies for each NEET-up to 20 at a time-and are supposed to help them find jobs in a three-month training camp kind of program.

Government expectations are high, with their target set at 70 percent of the NEET population successfully finding work within six months after completing the program. Bureaucrats want to see results by the end of fiscal 2005.

But will a three-month program do the trick?

For Toru, it took intervention and years of help to get back on track.

When Toru was 16, his parents took him to the ``Haguregumo Peaceful House'' in Toyama Prefecture. The Peaceful House is a nonprofit organization that helps young people become independent through structured activities and dorm-style living-a sort of boot camp for slackers.

At the Peaceful House, Toru had to get up at 6:30 a.m. and wipe down the floors before he left to work in the fields. He ran away twice.

It was up to guardian Naoshi Kawamata to decide when the participants were ready to find part-time work outside the facility.

Even though Kawamata said Toru was ready to work, Toru kept quitting jobs. Each time that happened, Toru had to start over, back in the fields.

Toru eventually returned to night school when he was 20 and earned his high school diploma.

He left the dormitory after graduation, found a job and got married. He now lives with his wife, who is working, and a 1-year-old daughter. These days, Toru is up at 5 a.m.

He packs his lunch and goes off to work painting sheet metal till 8 p.m.

``The job is demanding, but I was well-trained at the dorm farm,'' he says.

Every time he looks at a cellphone photo of his daughter, he tells himself, ``I'll never have my child go through what I had to go through.''

The Peaceful House began operations 18 years ago, and about 250 young people have graduated from the facility.

Kawamata commented: ``Usually it takes an average of six months before a new arrival can venture out on a first part-time job. It is not that unusual to see young people who need a few years for the transformation.''

Meanwhile, the Budget Bureau at the Finance Ministry has not shown much enthusiasm toward the labor ministry's NEET support project.

Why, the bureau asks, set up a budget for young people who don't even want to work, when there are 3 million unemployed people out there looking for jobs?

Because, the labor ministry argues, the NEET problem could balloon and create massive social welfare expenses.

According to a survey conducted by the Japan Institute for Labor Policy and Training, three of four NEETs live with their parents.

If the parents retire or die, money for their children might dry up and they might go on welfare.

Also, if NEETs fail to pay their social security premiums, due to lack of income, that will affect the pension program and the long-term care insurance system that support the lives of the elderly. It will rock the foundation of the government's social security system.

Michiko Miyamoto is a sociology professor at the University of the Air-a long distance education system available through TV and radio.

Miyamoto says: ``In reality, it's too late to start offering support after there is a big pileup of NEETs in their late 20s and 30s. Schools and support organizations should make plans to collaborate and share their data as a way to tackle the NEET issue from an early stage.''(IHT/Asahi: September 30,2005)

Extra Credit Opportunity

2005-09-26T22:15:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

If you attend the following event and write a 1-page response (any thoughts at all you have about the presentation), you can earn some extra credit for this class!

Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Public lecture: "Twenty Pages of Madness: The War and Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country, 1940-1948"
By Miho Matsugu, Assistant Professor of Japanese studies, Grinnell University
4:00 pm
302 Schaeffer Hall

酒鬼薔薇聖斗: 1st World Chickens Coming Home to Roost?

2005-09-25T14:42:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

Over the next few weeks, I will frequently refer to the "Sakakibara" incidents in Kobe. Just as the late 1990s series of school shootings in the U.S. continue to send shockwaves in the form of "zero tolerance" school policies, etc., Japan is still reeling from and responding to the defining "incident," as they are called, which catapulted the problem of "today's violent youth" into the center stage of public discourse, eclipsing for a while government scandals, international news, and stock market developments.

In May of 1997, the head of a boy named Hase Jun was found outside a school entrance gate in the city of Kobe. Two handwritten notes were stuffed inside the 11 year-old's mouth.

The handwriting was uniform and even, as if the characters had been written against the edge of a ruler, which police and reporters initially took as a sign that the killer was attempting to disguise his handwriting. (The longer letter pictured here was sent to the Kobe newspaper.) They imagined the killer to be an adult, but it turns out that he was only 3 years older than the victim and had the writing style one might expect of someone his age.

The struggle to explain why a child would kill another child continues to return to this incident. We will discuss various theories and stories that have been attached to this case in class.

For now, I'm posting the following article, which comes from Japan Today (July 7, 2005)

"Nobody knows where released Kobe serial killer is"

Eight years ago, the nation was horrified when a 14-year-old boy was taken into custody in Kobe for murdering a 11-year-old boy and then severing his head. He also killed another child and reportedly attacked 5 or 6 others.

The boy, who used the name Sakakibara in taunting letters to authorities, was sent to a reformatory. Now 22, he is back in society, having been released on parole in March 2004. However, no one seems to know where he is and concerns are growing among the victims' family members.

While he was still in Kanto Medical Juvenile Training School, he told counselors: "If possible, I would like to visit the victims' graves and pray, when I get out. If I could do anything for the families, I'd try my best." But so far, the families have received no apology, nor has the man made any inquiries as to where his victims' graves are.

What is known is that he was released on parole after spending 6 years and 5 months in the reformatory. Authorities said he was living with a host family in the Kanto area and working part-time in a factory nearby.

"From last July, he started sending 5,000 yen to his father every month, asking that it be forwarded to his victims' families as consolation money. In August, he got a new full-time job and that's the last I heard of him," said one man who worked with Sakakibara.

During this period, he had spent some time together with his father. They kept in touch and had a constructive relationship until the end of last year.

On Jan 1 of this year, his parole ended and he was free to go wherever he liked without supervision. He moved into a temple in eastern Japan and wrote thank-you letters to those who had supported him while he was on probation. However, he had to relocate himself again soon after because people around him, who knew about his past, suggested that the postmark on the letters might reveal his whereabouts. Soon after, he moved out of the temple and his current whereabouts are unknown. Even the Ministry of Justice doesn't know where he is.

Koichiro Horikawa, father of one victim, says, "After his release, I was to meet with his parents every three or four months to monitor his progress. However, in January, the father told me that he had not been able to get in touch with his son. I believe that even today, they cannot get a hold of him."

In its Dec 24 edition last year, the Asahi Shimbun ran an article on "Sakakibara." In it, his father said that his son was working full-time for a company and that he felt great sorrow for what he did.

But apparently, "Sakakibara" read the article, and confronted his father, urging him not to tell the media every detail of what he does. His father says that his son has refused to keep in touch.

"Now that I hear he is not seeing his parents, I am concerned about his mental stability," said the mother of one of the victims. "It makes me worry that he might kill again. There is a tremendous fear growing inside of me, since I do not receive any updates on him."

"Having the support of family is the most critical element for rehabilitation in a case such as this," said a psychiatrist. "If this man is not able to create a relationship with his parents, there is a big chance that he is mentally unstable, and that he will relapse."

The court's initial ruling to send the boy to a reformatory was in part due to his unstable relationship with his mother. The court ruled that physical abuse by his mother in the early stage of his life had shaped his extreme personality.

In fact, when he was on probation, the Ministry of Justice focused upon rebuilding the relationship between "Sakakibara" and his parents. Although he met with his father, he refused to meet with his mother.

While he was on probation, the ministry kept an eye on him 24 hours a day, but now "he is completely free and the law no longer requires us to keep tabs on his whereabouts," said a spokesman for the Ministry of Justice.

So the man is completely on his own. However, another psychiatrist comments: "I personally think that he is headed in a good direction now that he is no longer seeing his parents. If he had been put back into the same circumstances as before, he might have relapsed. He is 22 now. There is a bigger chance that he can see the 'problematic' personality of his parents, which he wasn't able to see when he was a young boy. Now that he is able to see things in perspective, it is only natural that he tries to get away from his parents."

Youth Employment in Japan

2005-09-21T20:52:00.000-07:00

I just got this press release, and some of you might wanna check this out for your final papers or projects.

The September, 2005 issue of Social Science Japan is now available online. The .pdf file of this and past issues can be
downloaded by following the links available at: http://newslet.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/.

The theme of SSJ 31 is "Youth Employment" and the Introduction and Contents are below:

Introduction

Five years after our "Young Workers in Japan" issue (April, 2000), Social
Science Japan revisits the employment situation of young Japanese.
Although the Japanese economy currently seems to be showing signs of
recovery, the employment system of Japanese youth has undergone changes
since the 1980s and early 1990s, and, as Kosugi Reiko points out in our
second article, economic recovery alone will not solve the employment
problems faced by Japanese youth. Genda Yuji introduces us to a new
category of young person, the "NEET" (Not in Employment, Education, or
Training), and compares their situation with that of "freeters," while
describing the differences between "job-seekers," "non-seekers," and
"discouraged" among the non-workers. Hori Yukie describes the nonprofit
organizations which have been established to help young people find jobs,
due to the increasing numbers of young people failing to make a smooth
transition from school to work, and Kudo Kei, the director of one such
nonprofit organization, gives us a first hand account of how they work to
reach young people, especially "NEETs," and help them to reenter society.
Sato Kaoru points out the importance of taking regional variation into
consideration when thinking about solutions to the employment problems of
young people. Finally, Genji Keiko shows that gender role attitude is
closely correlated with the educational aspirations and life course
expectations of Japanese female high school seniors. We end this issue of
SSJ with a Research Report by Liv Coleman, a visiting researcher here at
the Institute of Social Science.

With this issue of Social Science Japan we welcome three new editorial
committee members: Professor Ishida Hiroshi, Professor Hirashima Kenji,
and Nakamura Mayumi. I would like to thank Ishida-Sensei, Hirashima-Sensei, and
Nakamura-San for their help on this issue, as well as extend my thanks in
advance for their cooperation on future issues.

Contents of SSJ 32: Youth Employment

Genda Yuji   The "NEET" Problem in Japan
Kosugi Reiko   The Problems of "Freeters" and "NEETs" under the Recovering
Economy
Hori Yukie   Characteristics and Problems of Youth Support Agencies in Japan
Kudo Kei   Outreach: Helping "NEETs" Become Active Members of Society
Sato Kaoru   The Employment of High School Graduates in Miyazaki Prefecture
Genji Keiko   What Do Female High School Students Think of Their Futures?
Educational Aspirations, Life Course Expectations and Gender Role Attitudes

Research Report

Liv Coleman   Social Risk, Value Change, and the Life Course: Japanese
Shoshika Taisaku and Global Norms

Karaoke Workshop

2005-09-21T12:04:00.000-07:00

KOLORS Film Festival this weekend!!

2005-09-19T19:29:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

I decided not to inundate you with Mishima material on the blog. Instead, I'm integrating the really important stuff into our intro to Coin Locker Babies, and that should be plenty. It was really nice to hear all your responses today. And "big up" to Cory for being the first to reply to Tiffany's wonderful post below. It's going to take more of you to keep that post off the midterm though...

The following is a press release for a Korean film festival this weekend!!
I especially encourage you to check out "The Quiet Family," which is the basis for the last film we'll watch this semester (and the source image for the course flyer), Miike Takashi's "The Happiness of the Katakuris."

[I removed the KOLORS announcement that followed. The event is over, but many of the films are in the library. 9/25/05]

午後の曳航 doesn't mean "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea"

2005-09-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

午後の曳航 means "The Afternoon Tugboat"

Mishima on the balcony at the Ichigaya Self-Defense Force HQ.

New York Times, December 12, 1970
"Forces in Japan See Mishima as Yesterday's Dreamer"

By TAKASHI OKA
Gotemba, Japan, Dec. 5--"To try to revive an Emperor-centered Japan--in this day and age people simply aren't going to go along with a scheme like that," said Lance Cpl. Nobuyuki Fujimoto.

He was speaking of Yukio Mishima, the renowned Japanese writer, who killed himself Nov. 25. He added that he thought Mr. Mishima had been born 30 years too late.

Five of Corporal Fujimoto's companions, all volunteers serving their second two-year enlistments in the ground Self-Defense Forces nodded agreement.

"Mr. Mishima was a writer," said another lance corporal, Kengo Ueno. "If he wanted to appeal to the people, he should have used his pen, not his sword."

Stronger Force Was Goal

Had Mr. Mishima heard the conversation, he might have gnashed his teeth in despair. The purpose of his dramatic hara-kiri was to arouse the 260,000-man Self-Defense Forces into demanding a revision of the Constitution that would restore to them what he considered their rightful place as a proper army, navy and air force, dedicated to reviving an Emperor-centered nation.

The very men to whom he directed his impassioned appeal rejected it almost unanimously. They booed and heckled him at Camp Ichigaya in Tokyo when he harangued them from the central balcony of Eastern Command Headquarters.

Here at Camp Fuji, where Mr. Mishima and his Shield Society, a private army, learned the martial arts of bayonet and target practice or went tenting on the broad slopes of the majestic snow-capped mountain, the men with whom he had trained shook their heads and said that his suicide, in the office of a Self-Defense Force commander, was incomprehensible.

Emphasis on Skills

To an outsider there is a kind of Boy Scout atmosphere about the Self-Defense Forces. The emphasis is on teaching skills and building character. The effort is to give the enlistees--all volunteers ranging from their late teens to their early twenties; there is no conscription--a variety of tasks to keep them interested and occupied.

Col. Masatada Yagi, commander of the Fuji Regiment, said: "Our modern Self-Defense Forces requires so many different skills that two years is barely enough to learn them all. We try to get our men to stay in two terms--four years--so that they are of some use to us, not leaving just as they become able to stand on their own two feet."

A lot of time is spent practicing the three martial arts--shooting, long-distance running and jukendo, a sports version of bayonet drill using wooden rifles and padded clothing.

The commander of Company 3 of the 1,700-man regiment, Maj. Masahiro Horimura, who was a staff officer when Mr. Mishima came here to train said:

"He never showed the least sign of wanting to propagandize us, into getting us to agree that an Emperor-centered Japan should be restored. I was bowled over Nov. 25 when I heard he had invaded Camp Ichigaya with four followers. I couldn't believe it--I thought that radical leftist students were to blame and that Mr. Mishima had gone to persuade them to give up."

Still another corporal, Katsuyuki Yamashita, alluding to the fact that the Self-Defense Forces are not equipped with offensive weapons and that the Constitution forbids "war potential," said:

"In his appeal, Mr. Mishima wanted to revise the Constitution so as to turn the Self-Defense Forces into a proper army. I wish we enjoyed a more clear-cut legal position, but I'm against revising the Constitution. I wish that instead of doing what he did, Mr. Mishima had tried to help us in a more long-term sense, to get public opinion to favor a better position for us.

Said S. Sgt. Takaji Amma, an 18-year veteran of the Self-Defense Forces:

"I met Mr. Mishima four times--the last time just a couple of weeks before his suicide--when he came up here to Camp Fuji with his Shield Society students. The first time, he was here almost a month. He loves Japanese fencing, and so do I. We often fenced together. I was most impressed by him.

"He never put on airs, never acted as if he were a famous novelist. When we put on our masks and measured sword against sword, we were just two devotees of kendo, opening our hearts to each other in the unspoken language of Budo, the way of the samurai."

"Why did he have to do what he did?" the sergeant asked. "Was there no other way? We are a democratic nation. If you want to change the system, you should do so peacefully, through elections."

Sergeant Amma is from a village in Shizuoka, some hundred miles south of Tokyo. He joined the Self-Defense Forces as an 18-year-old, he said, because "I came from a rather poor family and my brother had been killed during the war."

He said he had found happiness and fulfillment in the force. He deeply respects Emperor Hirohito, and his family still cuts pictures of the Emperor from newspapers and magazines to paste up in a special album.

But, the sergeant added, he feels that the Constitution, which calls the Emperor a symbol of state rather than a living god, as before, is right.

Asked if he would join a coup d'état, Sergeant Amma thought a moment.

"That would depend," he said. "If one commander, say my colonel, asked me, I would refuse. If it were the whole Self-Defense Forces moving as one, I would go along. But that kind of a situation is not going to arise suddenly. We would all see it coming--for instance, if it looked as if some Communist regime were about to take over."

Questioning of Orders

Younger members were more categorical.

"I see no need to obey an order I think is wrong," said 22-year-old Lance Cpl. Ryuichi Sasaki. "We'd make our officers stop such a thing right away."

Corporal Sasaki, who is from Niigata on the Japan Sea coast, enlisted at the age of 18, after finishing high school. Of 350 boys in his graduating class, he said 25 entered the Self-Defense Forces. He will quit next year when his second enlistment will be over.

"I've learned a lot from the experience," he said. "I've learned discipline, and how to get along with others. Now I want to go into some kind of job in the service field--a department store, or a travel agency, or something similar. The Self-Defense Force is helping me find a job."

Combat Experience Lacking

"We think we're as good as any other army in this region," said a staff officer, "but of course the one thing we lack is actual combat experience. I know the Koreans think they are stronger than we are. I don't agree, but there's no way we can prove this.

"All I can say is that I think we have a force capable of performing the mission assigned to it-- which is to defend the homeland but not to go on expeditions to other countries."

"We don't want to be anything other than what we are," he added, "and until Nov. 25 we never dreamed that Mr. Mishima wanted us to be anything else either."

"Graying Japan"

2005-09-13T08:33:00.000-07:00

From today's Asahi:

Japan to have record-high 25,606 centenarians
09/13/2005
The Asahi Shimbun

A total of 25,606 people will be 100 or older by the end of September, an increase of 2,568 from the previous year and a record high for the 35th straight year, a health ministry report showed.

By Sept. 30, 21,820 women will have reached the century mark, accounting for about 85 percent of all centenarians. The total is an increase of 2,305 from last year and exceeds 20,000 for the first time since such statistics were first gathered in 1963, the report showed.

The number of men 100 years old or more will be 3,786 by Sept. 30, up by 263 from the previous year, according to the report.

The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare released the report Tuesday, prior to the Sept. 19 Respect-for-the-Aged Day.

In 1963, when the law concerning welfare for the aged took effect, the ministry started keeping track of those aged 100 or more. In that year, Japan had 153 centenarians.

It took 35 years for Japan's centenarian population to surpass 10,000, but the figure has doubled in only five years since then.

The oldest person in Japan is Yone Minagawa, 112, in Akaike, Fukuoka Prefecture, according to the government. Nijiro Tokuda, 110, in the city of Kagoshima, is the nation's oldest man.

According to the ministry's report, there were 20.05 people aged 100 or older per 100,000 people in the general population, an increase of 2.0 from the previous year.

Prefectures with warm climates tend to have more centenarians, the report showed.In Okinawa Prefecture, 51.43 of 100,000 people were centenarians. It was the 33rd straight year for the nation's southernmost prefecture to lead in this category.

In second place was Kochi Prefecture, at 48.57, followed by Shimane Prefecture, at 44.46.On the other hand, urban prefectures tend to have a lower rate.

Saitama Prefecture ranked last for the 16th year in a row. Its ratio was 9.81 centenarians per 100,000 people in 2005. The second lowest was Chiba Prefecture, at 12.25, and Aichi Prefecture, at 12.28.(IHT/Asahi: September 13,2005)

Korean Hibakusha

2005-09-11T07:39:00.000-07:00

This comes from the Asahi link to the right:

09/10/2005

By AKIRA NAKANO

The Asahi Shimbun

SEOUL-The only traces that Yun Chom Pun, 66, has left of her brief time in Japan when she was 6 years old are the memory that she was called Fumiko-and a raised, shiny red scar that encircles her abdomen like a sash.

When Yun was pregnant for the first time, she suffered agonizing pain as her growing belly pulled the scar apart.

Growing up, her child would ask her, "Mommy, what happened to your tummy?"

Yun did not know.

She would experience throbbing pain on rainy days, an ache which continues to this day.

Then about 10 years ago, Yun's dying father suddenly spoke out on his deathbed, and surprised her with the truth behind her injury: It was caused by the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

"I think he kept the information from me (until immediately before his death) because he wanted to prevent me from recalling painful memories," she said.

Under Japan's colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula between 1910 and 1945, many South Koreans were forcibly relocated to Japan and given Japanese names. After World War II, many returned to South Korea.

South Korean hibakusha are entitled to receive medical treatment in Japan under the atomic bomb survivors assistance law

.

But like more than 400 other A-bomb survivors in South Korea, Yun does not have the hibakusha kenko techo, a booklet that certifies its holder is a victim of the bombing.

She went to her father's hometown in search of a witness, but to no avail: all those who could remember the colonial days had already passed away.

Yun sighed deeply and told herself, "I'll just have to give up obtaining the certificate."

As of June 30, there were 2,361 hibakusha registered with the Red Cross Society of South Korea.

Of them, 431 did not have the hibakusha booklet, and thus remained ineligible for support.

Sixty years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many of these aging victims cannot prove that they are hibakusha because of insufficient evidence or memory loss. Others suffer from ill health and are unable to travel to Japan to apply for the certificate.

Nearly 600 hibakusha live in the mountainous area of Hapchon, Kyongsangnamdo province, in southern South Korea. Under Japanese occupation, many residents crossed the Sea of Japan and landed in Hiroshima.

One of those who survived the atomic bomb attack is Kim Yun Yong, 85, now hospitalized in Hapchon. Her eldest son, also an A-bomb survivor, received a hibakusha booklet, but Kim is without one. She has spent so much time in and out of hospitals that she was unable to travel to Japan to apply for one.

Chong Oi Son, 65, is also a Hiroshima A-bomb survivor. Her leg still carries the scars from her burns, and now she complains of chest and stomach pains.

Sixty years ago, on that unforgettable day, she was climbing a hill in Ujina district in Hiroshima, holding her mother's hand. The air-raid shelter was up the hillside.

Then came the blinding flash. Her entire family of six was exposed to radiation.

Soon after returning to her father's hometown in Kyongsangnamdo province, Chong's parents died. Chong lost whole clumps of her hair.

It was only three years ago that Chong heard that South Korean hibakusha seeking health-care allowances from the Japanese government had won a lawsuit.

It was the first time she had heard about the existence of the hibakusha kenko techo booklet.

Chong sought advice at the Atomic Bomb Victims Relief Association in Seoul. She was told she needed a witness who could vouch for her status. So far, she has been unable to find anyone.

None of her siblings has received the booklet, either.

The Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Relief Association has been pushing Japan to allow A-bomb victims to apply for the hibakusha booklet from South Korea.

It is also asking the Japanese government to revise its screening standards, so that more South Korean A-bomb survivors can receive the certificate.

Nevertheless, Chong sounded bitter. "Obtaining the booklet is almost like reaching for the stars in the sky."(IHT/Asahi: September 10,2005)

Tiffany's Thoughts on Habitual Sadness

2005-09-09T10:02:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

The following was written by your classmate Tiffany. I hope you all respond with your own thoughts, comments, reactions, etc.

The film Habitual Sadness was very much like one of the books I had read for my report. The book had personal interviews from comfort women and I believe some of the women from the movie were in the book. Watching this movie is the best thing for learning about comfort women. You can read all the technical history in the world and it will never say as much as five minutes of this video did. Even if a book has pictures, it can not convey the sadness of crying or the conviction in a survivor’s voice.
The movie was very bittersweet. It was funny at times but there was so much sadness. It was strange because I was expecting it to be a series of interviews about being a comfort woman. Instead I saw a movie about the after effects, about the lives of comfort women now. Though it talked of their hard times it focused more on their every day. Out of all the women that were in those camps those women were there to talk about their experiences. I think showing their every day life was a tribute to them, it honors their strength. I think one of my favorite scenes is when they insist on being taped during their farming. It was like a challenge, they had created their own lives, and they had survived.
It’s sad to know that so many of these women dreamed of marrying and having kids. Its something that a lot of people take for granted. If you ask someone today what their dreams are they would probably give you a career based answer. They probably don’t even consider marriage because it is almost a given in our society. These women just wanted to do what was normal, to be loved. It was so sad to see them saying they were all alone. Out of this loneliness they formed a family in their little community. Although they sometimes don’t act like it they rely on each other heavily. It was so hard to watch Kang Tok-kyong die.
However, there were laughs in the movie too. Mostly from my favorite granny, Park Tu-ri. I know that a lot of times telling jokes is a way to deal with pain, because I do it. She may have acted like she wasn’t affected by what had happened but you know she is. Her jokes are her defiance. It takes the power away from what is hurting her. I noticed that they were all about men, because that is what has hurt her in the past but still something she yearns for.

Study/Review Questions

2005-09-08T17:47:00.000-07:00

All of the answers to the following can be found in the last 2 readings in your coursepack (except for the first).

1. What happened to Shôno Junzô's college class in 1943?

2. What story does the son tell his father in the bath in "Still Life"?

3. How does the daughter in "Still Life" cope with the scary movie?

4. What funny story does the daughter tell about her music teacher?

5. What was the first sketch the father made of his daughter?

6. True or False: Many Japanese couples refer to themselves as "Mother" and "Dad" even after their children are grown.

7. How is discrimination against "illegitimate" children legally expressed in Japan today?

8. True or False: Many young people in Japan make use of private marriage advisory outfits.

9. What was the attitude towards male homosexuality in pre-modern Japan?

10. True or False: Because parenting is considered such a key cultural value, Japanese courts aggressively go after those who are delinquent in making child support payments.

The questions on the post below would be very good midterm study questions too!

Still Life (静物)

2005-09-06T21:25:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

I sure missed seeing you all on Monday. Hopefully you've read "Still Life," an interesting story which is sure to leave you with some questions. My plan is for us to answer as many of those questions as possible tomorrow. I also wanted to give you a vocab word and some questions, all of which we'll discuss in class. You might want to start thinking about these questions ahead of time if you check this.

私小説 (shishôsetsu) = the "I" novel

1. How is the daughter’s use of the picture book during the scary movie similar to how she experienced the “accident” according to the father? (pp. 184-85)
2. Where do the children play in the home? What kinds of games do they play? (p. 178)
3. What kind of storyteller is the father? What kinds of stories does he tell?
4. What kinds of stories does the older son like?
5. Why does the father want the lilac bush to grow big and full? (p. 192)
6. What is the significance of the father’s belief that making doughnuts is like homework for girls? (p. 203)

I still hope to see more of you write your thoughts about Habitual Sadness, especially while it's still fresh in your mind.

Our Grannies

2005-08-31T16:59:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

Happy to see Ivan tested the waters. =)

I thought you might like this list to help you as you write about the film:

Kang Tok-kyong (granny who died from lung cancer)
Park Tu-ri (granny who likes to drink, sing, and joke about having lovers)
Yun Tu-ri (Christian granny with fighting skills)
Shim Mi-ja (white-haired granny who wishes she'd been married and had kids)
Kim Sun-dok (the serious, hard-working granny)
Yun Kum-rye (granny with an attitude)
Park Ok-ryun (granny whose chilis died)
Kim Pok-tong (granny who married the divorced man)

There are others, but I think these were the grannies who appeared the most in our film.

Byun Young-joo (the director)

Our film is called "Habitual Sadness." The first in the series is "The Murmuring," and the last is "My Own Breathing." All 3 are really good. You can watch them in the Media Services area of the Main Library while they are on reserve this semester,

I'm looking forward to reading your thoughts on the film!! And please ask questions if you have any.

Thursday

2005-08-31T10:20:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

A few announcements I will also mention in class:

1. I won't hold office hours this Thursday, but I'm happy to make appointments with anyone who wants to see me!

2. Thursday at 8pm in E205 AJB (upstairs from our classroom on the other side of the building), I'm screening a film, Atarashii Kamisama ("The New God"), for my other class, but you all are invited too. It's a documentary on a right-wing punk rock singer, her journey to North Korea to meet with Japanese Red Army "terrorists," and her relationship with the documentary film maker. In terms of our class, you might be interested to see how she describes her childhood (running away, being bullied, etc.) without saying much at all about her family. Feel free to bring a pal. (Kids under 15 would probably be bored by it, and there are scenes with vulgar language, smoking, and drinking. The film is subtitled.)

Blogging Trouble Fixed

2005-08-29T20:35:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

We didn't get much time to discuss the readings today, and Thursday will be pretty packed, so please feel free to post comments below if you'd like to share your thoughts or ask questions. You are a really smart and engaged bunch, and the relatively short class times just don't do you justice. I feel very fortunate to have you all in one of my very first U of I classes.

Richard pointed out a problem with the blog that was preventing comments earlier today! My apologies. I corrected the error, and it should be good to go.

And welcome to Roberta and Tessa, our new members!!

I also will honor a request that came via email tonight to tell you more Japanese folktales from time to time. It was a good idea. Folktales are part of what makes up family experience after all. Many of us first hear stories like that from older family members.

Also, don't forget to contact Sakai-san at the library if you need any help with your assignment for Thursday!

Happy researching!

Iron Fish

2005-08-25T21:43:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone!

Can you believe we had a sing-along in class on Wednesday? You all are fun! Next month, I'll be giving a Japanese "Culture Workshop" in Phillips Hall. Our little songfest got me thinking that a Karaoke Workshop might be fun. I should probably have you all give me ideas. What kind of culture workshop would you want to attend? You can blog-comment me your suggestions and requests.

"Iron Fish" will have its surprising moments too, and I'm excited to hear what you all will think of this story. Please don't forget to read the Janice Mirikitani poem too! Our first week introduced us to two families (one real and one fictional) in the immediate aftermath of the war. The next two will feature people looking back on the war and family relationships from a later date. Memory is going to be the big topic for us this coming week. You might want to think of ways in which memory matters or can matter in families.

To your right, you'll find a link to a bio for Janice Mirikitani (with a photo).

Have a great weekend!

Snow

2005-08-23T05:59:00.000-07:00

By now, I hope you've all started reading "Snow." If you have the chance to read it twice, I think you'll see that there are lots of interesting "clues" related to Hayako's past peppered here and there throughout the beginning of the story, and these clues might not seem significant the first time you read the story. Even if you can't read it twice, pay attention to when certain things happen and any statements characters make that might seem strange or curious. I also wanted to direct your attention to one of the links to the right. You'll see a link to "Koseki on Rootsweb." In "Snow," there are several references to the koseki (or the "family registry" or "family register"). We will talk about the koseki system in class, but that link, which is designed for people with Japanese ancestry in the U.S. who are looking for family information, has some useful background information, especially for those of you who have never heard of a koseki before.

Feel free to post your questions or thoughts about the reading to the blog.

Finally, congratulations to Bettina, who is our big winner! Her prize will be announced in class!

Welcome to our class!

2005-08-22T14:37:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

It was great to meet you all today! Make sure to read "Snow" before Wednesday's class. It's a very interesting story, and we can talk about what we all think about the ending. If you don't get the coursepacket at Zephyr, you will have to get the book Toddler Hunting, which is on reserve, and "Snow" is in that book.

The big prize is still available to the person who posts a comment on this blog first! Feel free to share your thoughts about Miyakoshi Asae's testimony or explore some of the links on the site and write about them. (Each site corresponds to a topic we will study at some point this semester.)

See you Wednesday!!