Learning Bushidō From Abroad: Japanese Reactions To The Last Samurai

Hollywood, struck by a case of Japan "fever" in the early 21st century, churned out a crop of Japan-oriented films such as Lost in Translation [Coppola 2003], Kill Bill Vol. 2 [Tarantino 2004], Memoirs of a Geisha [Marshall 2005] and Letters from Iwo Jima [Eastwood 2006]. But among all these, The Last Samurai [Zwick 2003] received the most positive Japanese audience reaction. This film, about an ex-Civil War American soldier who takes up arms to fight with the last of the samurai, played to mixed reviews in the U.S. but enjoyed a wildly popular reception in Japan. Judging from Japanese online discussion posts and media articles, many Japanese audiences read the film differently from the American critics. Why and what do these reviews tell us about Japan in the beginning of the 21st century? By being a foreign film, The Last Samurai allowed Japanese audiences to celebrate the nationalist messages taboo in a domestically produced film

China media research: The trans-disciplinary challenge

This paper addresses the permeability of the field of China media research, its openness to new ideas; it argues that we need to adopt a wide angle view on research opportunities. Expansion of China’s media during the past decade has opened up possibilities for broadening of the field. The discussion first identifies boundary tensions as the field responds to transdisciplinary knowledge; in the second part the paper addresses challenges faced by Chinese researchers or visiting scholars in ‘Western’ media environments. Finally the paper addresses what a wide angle perspective might include

E-politics from the citizens’ perspective. The role of social networking tools in influencing citizens

The progress of civilization, supported by the development of new technologies, has led to a series of social, economic and political changes. The information society, in its expectations and through access to knowledge, has significantly affected a change in the model of democracy, causing a kind of return to the original forms of communication in citizen-government relations. This has been accompanied by a shift of social and civic activism from the real to the virtual world. In literature, the use of information and communication technologies in the democratic system is named electronic democracy. One of its forms is e-politics, which is implemented at several levels: institutional, system and civil. A good example of the last type are the new social movements that in recent years have had a significant impact on politics. The basic research problem in this paper concerns e-politics from the citizens’ perspective, through the activities of the new social movements, especially of a political nature. The main research goal is therefore to present the role of social networking tools in influencing citizens and their subsequent activities that have triggered changes in the political system. The methods used in the paper are case study and comparative analysis

To be myself and have my stealthy freedom: The Iranian Women’s Engagement with social media

The objective of this research is to explore the development of digital social and social movements at the local level through Iranian women’s engagement with social media. In this article, I delve into the cultural and social background of a Facebook page named “My Stealthy Freedom” and the practices of “cyber feminism” in Iran through an anthropological perspective. This online movement finds its value in that it has become a new platform for the women to raise their voices in public online sphere about their human right and freedom. By examining the online and offline discourses about Iranian hijab policy, I aim to understand how Iranian society is creating new spaces for the formation of public discourseThis work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2013S1A5B5A01030162

Suffolk University Newsletter (SUN), vol. 34, no. 4, 2008

https://dc.suffolk.edu/sun/1021/thumbnail.jp

The Invisible Mass

Founded on clientelism, Philippine politics was crafted to pass a single political corridor, none other than the formation of clans and dynasties more powerful than political parties and ideologies. In a patron-client relationship, the exchanges of favors transcend generations of voters and politicians laying the foundations for perpetual indebtedness. It is in this endless stream of favors —sought and gained— that the politicians and the masses, form a reservoir of dynastic bonds and obligations. Competition, as an essential feature of democracy, manifests itself in granted favors and welfare provisions among power-wielders, transforming the elections into a dole-out contest for local elites. Political kindness breeds an enduring image of good statesmanship and public service. Through interviews, this qualitative study seeks to create a solid understanding of political participation in Aklan's political environment. The data were collected from a congressman, a vice governor, board members, mayors, and key informants. The interview transcripts were coded and subjected to analysis in order to learn more about the nature and customs of political engagement in Aklan. There were twenty (21) responders in total for the study. Finally, this research proposes the different forms of political dynasties and their distinct characteristics. It recommends a cordial reception of all forms of political dynasties except the failed dynasty and argues that prohibiting the appearance of a political dynasty through the passing of the Anti-Dynasty Bill (ADB) is unjust, inhuman, and undemocratic

The Politics of International Large-Scale Assessment: The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and American Education Discourse, 2000-2012

The number of countries participating in large-scale international assessments has grown dramatically during the past two decades and the use of assessment results in national-level education policy debate has increased commensurately. Recent literature on the role of international assessments in education politics suggests that rankings and performance indicators can shape national educational discourse in important ways. This dissertation examines the use of one such assessment, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), in education discourse in the United States from 2000 to 2012. The United States played a key role in the development of PISA and has participated in almost every international assessment of the past fifty years. Yet scholars have mostly overlooked the reception of international assessment in the United States. This dissertation seeks to address this gap. Using an original dataset of one hundred and thirty texts from American academic literature, think tanks and the media, I examine the use of references to PISA and to top scoring countries on PISA, e.g., Finland and China (Shanghai), during the first decade of PISA testing. I find that PISA has rapidly become an accepted comparative measure of educational excellence throughout US discourse. However, despite consistently middling American scores, attempts to turn America’s PISA performance into a crisis of the US education system have not stuck. Instead, I suggest that both global and domestic politics play a stronger role in shaping the interpretations of student achievement on PISA than does student performance. I show how the American PISA discourse: (1) is driven by political, not empirical, realities; (2) contains few calls for policy borrowing from top-scoring countries and has not engendered any direct efforts at policy reform; (3) is framed with remarkable consistency across the political spectrum; and (4) is a profoundly elite enterprise, privileging the voices of international organizations and policy makers over those of parents, teachers and students

Amateur Citizens: Culture and Democracy in Contemporary Cuba

This dissertation studies the creative practices of citizens who use cultural resources to engage in political criticism in contemporary Cuba. I argue that, in order to become visible as political subjects in the public sphere, these citizens appeal to cultural forms and narratives of self-representation that elucidate the struggles for recognition faced by emerging social actors. I examine blogs, garage bands, art performances, home art exhibits, digital literary supplements, improvised academies, and informal networks of publication that, as forms of aesthetic experimentation with stories of everyday life, disclose a social text. I suggest that their narrative choices emphasize their status as 'regular citizens' in order to distinguish themselves from both traditional voices of political opposition and institutionally accredited cultural producers--professional artists, academics, musicians. This recasts sites of cultural production as models of alternative citizenship where the concept of the political is re-imagined and where the commonplace, pejorative meaning of the term amateur is contested. On the fringes of the republic of letters, adjacent to traditional sites of cultural production, these oblique uses of culture consequently question legitimate forms of public speech. They demand that the way in which the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Cuba has been traditionally studied be reconsidered. Read in tandem with discourses against and about them from the lettered city--in literature, cultural criticism, film, and visual arts--I also follow the trope of the amateur under revolutionary cultural politics. I suggest that these contemporary voices have a contradictory genealogy in the cultural practices of the early decades of the Cuban Revolution. I try to show that these cultural practices become politically and socially significant because they try to resist--though not always successfully--cooptation by two forces: the remnant of bureaucratic, state-capitalist tendencies on one hand, and the rapid commercialization of popular culture for a foreign audience on the other. As a result, both the reconfigurations of the cultural field and the contested meanings of democracy in post-Cold War Cuba are re-examined through a reading of informal hubs of cultural production. The functions of culture in late socialism can be then comparatively studied by looking at an institutional framework in transition through the social and political subjectivities that are both expressed in, and constituted by, corresponding aesthetic practices and forms