In what is quite possibly the greatest testament to the combined power of technology and popular culture in the past few weeks, the full-scale model of an RX-78-2 Gundam that was once in Odaiba has been rebuilt in Shizuoka. Lot’s of pictures of the statue in its original home here. Source (uh, it’s Sankaku Complex, you have been warned)
We were asked to present some questions here for today’s presenters on Mirror of Modernity. Sherry, Allison, Michael, Robby, Andrew and Eunki presented their chapters from the book, so I here are my questions for them:
Sherry: Your presentation focused on how the employee-employer relation in Japan is based on a false premise of community and a loving relationship – rather, is basis is on a resistance by employers to regulation and legislation. However, it does show that, though their intentions may have been nefarious, they used compassion to reach them. Does this not mean quite a bit for the Japanese character?
Allison: The quote on the front of the book is “harmony is to be valued” (以和爲貴), the first article of the Jūshichijō Kenpō. Do you think this is a good summary of the idea of Wa (和) post-WWII?
Michael: You talked a lot about how the modern tradition of Japanese people having a “weak legal conscious” may come from the idea of harmony – settling things out of court maintaining balance, etc. Do you think this has its roots in the idea of Wa (和)?
Robby: I’m still not quite sure how the failed Marxist `revolution` had much of anything to do with the invention of the Japanese village as a unit. It seems this chapter was more about society than city structures?
Andrew: Really, I have no questions to ask you…
Eunki: The Meiji period was the time when Western influence truly affected Japan. How was the feudal society able to change so quickly into a modern family-oriented state?
… is a terrible book if you are not a historian. I would highly recommend not attempting to read this book, ever.
It’s full of big words and extensive allegories to obscure psychology studies, none of which you will be familiar with unless you have a background in psychology. If you do have a background in psychology, the references to further obscure Japanese political entities will undoubtedly take you to your knees, as each of the book’s many authors seems to delight in filling paragraph upon paragraph with what seem like nothing more than comma-separated lists of names of people you have never heard of.
Mirror of Modernity by Stephen Vlastos is available, in part, on Google Books.
For our Japanese Culture course, we were assigned an excerpt from Mirror of Modernity – specifically, the first seven pages.
The book describes the way social scientists view”tradition” in two ways: the indistinct period of time before the “modern” era; and the cultural aspects that persist through multiple generations and remain part of the modern culture. Neither properly attributes the changing but timeless nature of tradition and culture.
The book’s description of tradition as “the past” considers tradition as normative – traditions exists to “reproduce patterns of culture”. In this way, tradition is the pieces of past cultures that are maintained by modern society and keep modern culture from crumbling from external elements.
Not all traditions are truly tradition – that is, though they may represent elements of the cultural past, many modern traditions are precisely that: products of modern society. Societies invent traditions “to structure [...] social life” and not always to reflect the past. A typical criticism of this belief – as noted by Vlastos – is that tradition is seen as rigid, as opposed to customs which are flexible and changing. Traditions are, however, part of a larger social structure and continually changing.
All in all, the book’s title seems to reflect its main point as presented in this first chapter: traditional elements in Japan are a vision of modern society, the mirror that lets us see the past through a modern culture.
The Anthropological Lens a book on culture. The basic premise of the excerpt we read (chapter 1: Substance) was that culture can survive in harsh environments. Generally, the argument is well supported by the examples given, but the text implies a greater statement that it fails to fully support: that culture simply survives. Whether “culture” can be maintained in a poor, war-ridden world is far less important that whether culture can survive in a society of wealth and peace.
The Anthropological Lens is also available on Amazon, but you can read this particular excerpt in this PDF from Cambridge.
Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) is an interesting book about how people think and see the world around them. The basic idea behind the excerpt we read is that people tend to come into new experiences with preconceptions that they can not shake. Our prompt was “does this relate to your experiences in Japan?” – the question being, do we, as Americans in a new and foreign culture, feel that we came here with preconceptions that change the way we view the culture of Japan. Personally, I know that there are some things I will never be able to accept and truly see about how I view a foreign culture, but nothing so far has surprised me, and I don’t believe I’m being too rigid in my believes (or lack there of). Japan is a very different society from my suburban American roots, but I have not seen any differences I’m inclined to believe are negative based on my upbringing. My final word: I really can’t find a way in which the topic of this excerpt reflects my experiences so far in Japan, limited though they may be.
Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) is available on Amazon and has its own website.
Since I have Internet access on my own laptop, I can finally start upload pictures and narrate through my first few days here in Japan. We flew from Chicago to San Francisco, and then flew from SFO to Osaka.
Flying over California.
We had a short layover in SFO – we went to Burger King to get our last truly American meal before leaving the country. On our outgoing flight, President Obama was also flying out of SFO so were delayed for a few minutes before taking off.
Waiting at SFO.
Today we finally got all of our personal computers on the wireless in the dorms, so I can start posting updates here. I found a nice little GTK app that lets me record video from my webcam at the full 720p resolution it advertises (and at a full 24fps), which is nice because Cheese always froze up and nothing under Windows worked either. I’ll be doing my first video installment tomorrow morning, and hopefully posting a bunch of pictures (our upspeed is notably slow in the dorms, as we’re on DSL, going at about 75KB/s to `miku` and I have over 500MB to upload).