SIETAR Kansai meeting — April 2017 Panel: Young Voices from Iran (original) (raw)

Panel description: Some of SIETAR Kansai’s ongoing goals include involving young people and informing our members of little known topics, as well as stimulating thinking about taken-for-granted stereotypes. With that in mind, we have invited three young people from Iran, who live and work in Japan, to share their experiences and perspective with us. Rather than a usual presentation, we will have an informal panel where our guests will answer questions about why they came to Japan, what they are doing, and their views on various topics. Audience members will also be able to engage with our guests.

JPS221: Modern Japanese Society

This unit explores various aspects of contemporary Japanese society. Drawing upon a cultural anthropological approach, we will investigate Japan's contemporary society, charting its modern development until the present day. The unit contains four modules: 1) Precarious Japan (Weeks 2, 3 & 4) 2) Gender and Sexuality (Weeks 5, 6 & 7) 3) Ethnic Minorities (Weeks 8, 9 & 10) 4) Japan in the World (Weeks 11, 12 & 13) Topics covered include: cultural dynamics of the contemporary family; politics and civil society; economic cycles of boom and stress; environmental issues and tipping points; education; the pathway to adulthood; reconstructions of gender, Japanese sexual minority cultures; ethnic difference and communities; minorities and social peripheries; forms of popular culture; and Japan's place in the broader world. This unit is taught in English and no prior knowledge of Japanese language is required.

Seminar: Introduction to Japanese Contemporary Society, For PGO programme, Tübingen University

This seminar aims at introducing students to the social challenges of today's Japan. The seminar, at first, introduce students the intellectual history and the relevant theoretical approaches of Japanese studies. Then, it moves on to tackle various social challenges and social realities of the social weak. The societal challenges planned to be covered in the seminar are: 1. society with widening economic disparity 2. Reproduction of inequality in meritocratic society 3. censorship and Information society 4. precarity in Neo-liberal economy 5. rural decline in neo-liberal politics 6. Aging society and lowering birthrate 7. neo-liberal mobilization of civil society 8. the rise of nationalism The seminar has been initially planned and addressed to Master's student of PGO program, but it is also open for Bachelor's students from Japanese study department. Each session will combine a short lecture and discussion among students on the topic. In order to have a lively discussion, all the readings are mandatory. In the end of the seminar, students are expected to give an oral presentation. The seminar is provided by Dr. Kie Sanada. She is awarded her Ph.D. in Global and Area studies in 2017 from Humboldt University, Berlin. Global and Area studies is a branch of sociology, which aims at studying global challenges on the basis of observation of social phenomena as it is experienced at the locality. Among all the global challenges, her particular focus is on perpetuation of social inequality in Japan.

Contemporary Japan

2015

In recent years Japan has faced the rapid changes characterising the post-global world, vis-à-vis the economic crisis, as well as the new geopolitical equilibrium amongst the Asian countries after the economic and military rise of China. Moreover, the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster of March 2011 poses a series of questions about social solidarity and emergency management along with the problems of confidence in the national safety system that Japan has had to cope with. This volume is a collection of contributions on a project examining various aspects of such contemporary Japanese society in a period of changes in economic, political, and cultural fields. It comprises three sections: Japan's International Relations; Cultural Theory, Fine Art and Philosophy; Language and Communication.

My encounters with Japan

Article, 2023

To a Bengali born and brought up in India Japan is not a very well known country like England or United States of America but not an almost unknown one like Liberia or Lesotho.I came to know about Japan and its native name Nippon as the ‘country of the rising sun’ from my school geography book.I viewed a classic Kagemusha, a 1980 film by Akira Kurosawa a little later, which took me to the feudal Japan and real fights of the shadow warrior(a thief who was made to impersonate the warlord) in the celluloid. Modern Japan may not always be what Ruth Benedict viewed through her image of ‘self-responsibility’ as the ideal for a man who kept his ‘inner sword free from the rust’.

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