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."
