The Sea Shepherd Incident The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is an international organization whose goal is stop whaling. They do this primarily by sinking whaling vessels. In January, their new “stealth” speed-boat, the Ady Gil, was split in two when they parked it in front of a moving whaling ship (the Japanese 第二昭南丸 Shonen Maru [...]
See the article Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Wikipedia for a background on this assigned posting. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been the subject for extensive academic discourse since August of 1945. Both sides of the debate hold have compelling arguments and it seems as if the view [...]
Vocaloid is a software voice synthesizer developed by Yamaha. Since the release of Vocaloid2 and the character vocal set (voice set) “Hatsune Miku” 【初音ミク】, Vocaloid has become immensely popular in Japan. From manga doujins to video games to plastic figurines, Miku and her friends have spread far and wide. As an audio engineer and human-computer-interaction [...]
Over the past two weeks, we’ve covered a lot of ground in Japanese Culture. We’ve explored, extensively, what culture is and isn’t, how culture is studied, and how all of this applies to Japan. We’ve seen pieces of the established culture of Japan – from modern martial arts to tea ceremonies and histories – and [...]
My presentation this Friday is on the mixture of technology and culture in Japan. Specifically, I’ll be focusing on how the Japanese language has affected technological development. I was inspired to do my presentation on this from an article I read a few years back on why Japan did not create the iPod. Japanese Language [...]
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 [...]
… 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 [...]
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 [...]
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” [...]
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 [...]