Course Syllabuses Re: The 3.11 Disasters

Sophia University in Tokyo has assembled a fantastic list of courses being taught in Japan and the US about the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami.

Teaching 3.11 Syllabi Collection

Most are in English or Japanese, though there is a link to one resource in Italian.

Bike Ride Across Georgia 2012

This weekend I start an epic adventure, the 33rd annual Bike Ride Across Georgia. I -- and about 1,200 other people -- will travel about 350 miles (560 km) during the course of a week. I've never done anything like this before, so I'm pretty intimidated; on the other hand, I'm looking forward to what I hope will be a beautiful ride. We average about 55 miles a day, eat cafeteria-style from a mobile catering service, shower in a truck, and sleep en-masse in school gymnasiums. I'm also bringing plenty of reading to catch up on; however, considering how totally unathletic I am, maybe I should just be content to live through it.

Route map, BRAG 2012; click to embiggen

David Slater on Volunteering in Tôhoku

The Asia-Pacific recently published a short article by David Slater of Sophia University on volunteer opportunities to help survivors of the 3.11 disaster in Tôhoku.

Volunteering in Tôhoku 東北で奉仕活動をするには

If you're planning a visit to Japan soon, here's a way to do something to help people who need it.

Kentucky Foreign Language Conference

This past weekend Yumiko Nishi and I went to present our paper on the fourth-year Japanese class at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, held at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. I'd been to Kentucky before, once for the Southeast Council Association for Asian Studies conference when it was held in Louisville, and once for the fabulous Bluegrass in the Park/Pickin' & Pedalin' Bicycle Tour in Henderson, but I'd never been to Lexington. Lexington is really beautiful and the surrounding area is fabulously green and peaceful-looking. I had a very nice time.

The conference itself was in its 65th year. The majority of the presentations were related to European Languages, but there were a sizable number of papers related to East Asia also, thanks to the work of Doug Slaymaker and Masamichi (Marro) Inoue (info here).

The paper Dr. Nishi and I gave was "Teaching The Japanese Environment: 3.11 and After." It was great to work with her in writing it, because I got a lot of insight into all the planning that went into the class. I also got to hear about the amazing projects the students worked on -- 10-page papers in Japanese on some very difficult and challenging topics. All in all, Dr. Nishi's work sounded very impressive.

All the papers I heard were very interesting. I particularly want to follow up on the work of Dr. Inoue (who talked about his work on campus policing at UK and how it suggested directions for future research on Japan), Jianjun He of Western Kentucky University (who talked about literary trope of the "immortal" -- 神 or 仙 -- in Wei-Jin and Tang era Chinese poetry) and Matthew Wells of UK, who works on Taoism.

I was also fortunate to have a chance to briefly chat with Sharalyn Orbaugh of the University of British Columbia. Dr. Orbaugh's talk was "Japanese Pop Culture Tackles the Big Questions: Gender, Race and Posthumanity in Anime."

Bicycles, Education, and Women's Empowerment

Here is an article from the Guardian about how enabling girls in Bihar, India, to purchase bikes has made it possible for them to get an education.

How cycling set deprived Indian girls on a life-long journey

Reviving a freewheeling symbol of women’s emancipation

Reviving a freewheeling symbol of women’s emancipation

Visiting the 4th-Year Class II: Sustainability and Azby Brown's "Just Enough"

Following from my previous post, I'm going to talk with the fourth-year Japanese language students about sustainability in the Edo period. This is such a huge topic, and it's difficult to know what to do with it in a single class session, but I will try to get three or four major ideas across and be happy with that. So, in addition to the Edo shigusa stuff about avoiding waste and "nature is master, humans are followers," I'll take a couple of ideas from Azby Brown's Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan (Kodansha, 2009). I picked up the Japanese version in Tokyo this summer, 「江戸に学ぶエコ生活術」阪急コミュニケーションズ (2011).

The book is magnificently illustrated with line drawings and handwritten text. I hope the illustrations will be useful in ensuring students get the points quickly, to maximize the time that we can spend in discussion. 

1. Main theme:

吾唯足知 = ware tada taru o shiru: "I know what's just enough" is the phrase that gives the book its title, and I guess that's what I can start with. Brown's book has a nice illustration here to make the point graphically.

2. What is the Edo period?

a. Timeline of Japanese history - A chart (年表 nenpyô) will be useful. (I found a potentially interesting website here that I'd like to explore further, and there's a very nice site for beginners (even college students!) here, but for now I'll just use something like this:

Timeline 年表
縄文時代 じょうもんじだい 14000-300 BCE
弥生時代 やよいじだい 300 BCE-250 CE
奈良時代 ならじだい 710-794
平安時代 へいあんじだい 794-1183
鎌倉時代 かまくらじだい 1185-1333
室町時代 むろまちじだい 1336-1573
安土桃山時代 あづちももやまじだい 1573-1603

江戸時代 えどじだい 1603-1868

.........
明治時代 めいじじだい 1868-1912
大正時代 たいしょうじだい 1912-1926
昭和時代 しょうわじだい 1926-1989
平成時代 へいせいじだい 1989-

b. Map of Japan during the Edo period. Brown's book has a nice one. I will also show some pages from Nihon no kaidô 日本の街道 (Japan's historical highways ), And here's a list of links to a sampling of Edo-period maps from the University of British Columbia's library also.

World map, 1809
Map of Japan, pattern on porcelain vessel, 1826
Tourist map, 1818
Map of Edo, 1696
Kaizan chôriku zu, 1691

c. Social structure. Just Enough has some really good graphics to support this discussion, so I'll use those.

3. Commoners and elites - We'll look at the illustrations from different status groups.

a. Farmers: The discussion of the water cycle is particularly interesting.
b. Townspeople: The section on daily life in an urban neighborhood is great.
c. Samurai: Use of interior space - fascinating

4. We'll read through the assignment I mentioned in my previous post on Edo shigusa. 

5. Students' responses.

6. Followup:

i. Invite students to take my class, "Nature and Culture in Japan."
ii. Mention this fabulous museum all about life in Edo that Wangwang and I visited last summer: The Fukagawa Edo Shiryôkan that students should really try to visit the next time they're in Tokyo. This is a small museum with a gorgeous recreation of an Edo neighborhood, lovingly and perfectly put together. The guide we met there offered us a learned, lavish and patient explanation of everything we saw. I can't recommended it enough.
iii. The Japan for Sustainability website.

Visiting the 4th-Year Japanese Class I: Sustainability and Edo Shigusa

Dr. Yumiko Nishi asked me to stop by the fourth year Japanese class next week to talk about sustainability in the Edo period. I'm still planning what we'll talk about, but I was thinking about a couple of places to start the discussion, or frame it, or whatever.

The first is Edo shigusa (Conventions/customs of Edo).

"Edo shigusa" seems to a popular-culture phenomenon. I'm not 100% sure about it, but I get the impression it's a system developed by some modern people, especially Koshikawa Reiko 越川 禮子 to promote a rather modest kind of social change, mostly in terms of better manners and a more pleasant attitude. It's all explained in several books and the website Edo Shigusa. Basically, the theory is that merchants in the Edo period developed almost a utopia of peaceful cooperation, where respect for others and inoffensive, responsible behavior was the rule. The trouble nowadays is that everyone's forgotten these lovely old ways, and if we could just get back to them, things would be a lot better. (Koshikawa and her colleagues are available for seminars and workshops to train others in these classic principles.)

Setting aside the question of how historically accurate this optimistic view of Edo society is, "Edo shigusa" offers a great place to start students thinking about life in early modern Japan. The manga book, マンガ版「江戸しぐさ」入門 (Manga edition: Introduction to Edo Shigusa) is great for students of Japanese language; I'll ask our students to read a couple of pages from it, the one on not wasting resources (pp. 24-25), and the one on respecting nature (pp. 32-33).  I'm not reproducing them here because of copyright, but below the cut I've got a vocabulary list.

Bikes Empower (and Warm) Protesters in Wall Street

Here's a link to the NYT article "With Generators Gone, Wall Street Protesters Try Bicycle Power"

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/with-generators-gone-wall-street-protesters-try-bicycle-power/

From H-Japan: Fukushima Women Activists

This post comes from the listserv H-Japan (contact info after the jump) and is by David Slater of Sophia University.

A while ago I pointed out that women, and in particular, mothers, have been
quite active in radiation measurement, calls for contaminated dirt removal
and efforts to secure safe food. They have thus also been effective as
anti-nuke spokespersons. Of course, there is nothing new in women being at
the front of social shifts, as seen in work as diverse as Shell
Garon's *Molding Japanese Minds* and Robin LeBlanc's *Bicycle Citizens*
demonstrate. They are continuing on with a sit in front of METI from Oct.
29th.

Here is a link to their protest notice--you still have time to make it to
Tokyo for the start:
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/onna_suwarikomi/20111020/1319087481

And here is a Ustream of a pre-demo meeting with Fukushima Women against
Nukes.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/18140229#utm_campaign=synclickback&source=http://blog.livedoor.jp/amenohimoharenohimo/archives/65772087.html&medium=18140229
Notice in the immediate ritual of the event, that women are not limited
here to speaking as mothers (if that is a limitation), they are not
hesitant to engage emotionally, and the staffing and seating arrangements
makes gendered confront almost inevitable.

Genocide in the Americas = Little Ice Age in Europe

This is very disturbing. (Repost from PhysOrg.com.)
 ...................

Research team suggests European Little Ice Age came about due to reforestation in New World
(PhysOrg.com) -- A team comprised of geological and environmental science researchers from Stanford University has been studying the impact that early European exploration had on the New World and have found evidence that they say suggests the European cold period from 1500 to 1750, commonly known as the Little Ice Age, was due to the rapid decline in native human populations shortly after early explorers arrived.
 ...................
While the content is horrifying, the emphasis in the title is troubling also.  Its focus on climate change seems out of proportion with the tragedy of the genocide. Of course, the Little Ice Age brought about its own share of death and disaster.


Very, very grim findings indeed.