Race, colonial history and national identity: Resident Evil 5 as a Japanese game

Resident Evil 5 is a zombie game made by Capcom featuring a White American protagonist and set in Africa. This paper argues that approaching this as a Japanese game reveals aspects of a Japanese racial and colonial social imaginary that are missed if this context of production is ignored. In terms of race, the game presents hybrid racial subjectivities that can be related to Japanese perspectives of Blackness and Whiteness where these terms are two poles of difference and identity through which an essentialised Japanese identity is constructed in what Iwabuchi calls “strategic hybridism” (Iwabuchi, 2002). In terms of colonialism, the game echoes structures of Japanese colonialism through which Japanese colonialism is obliquely memorialised and a “normal” Japanese global subjectivity can be performed

Making it your own by adapting it to what’s important to you”: Plurilingual Critical Literacies to promote L2 Japanese users’ sense of ownership of Japanese

The dichotomy between native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS) remains ubiquitous across different language-learning contexts despite increasing mobility and multilingualism of society. L2 Japanese learners in particular may find themselves positioned as subordinate to NSs because of the myth of Japan being a homogeneous nation of one race and one language. To help L2 Japanese students counter such positioning and gain a sense of ownership, we implemented “plurilingual critical literacies” in a Japanese language course in the U.S. Critical literacy aims to cultivate students’ awareness that power relationships are at play in language use, and plurilingual pedagogy valorizes students’ multilingual resources. Eleven high-intermediate-level Japanese students mobilized their linguistic and cultural resources to read and discuss authentic texts by transcultural or “culturally mobile” writers (Dagnino 2015). These writers expressed resistance to the status quo and made meaning creatively, as mediators between two languages and cultures. Reading, analyzing, and discussing texts by transcultural writers motivated students to counter ideologies of NS superiority, and to own Japanese in the ways that best suited their transcultural identities

[En]gendering the norms of customary inheritance in Botswana and South Africa

The article responds to the article by Weinberg in this issue. She traces the trajectory of court hearings concerning the contested inheritance of land in Botswana, which, after several prior judgements eventually resulted in a positive outcome for the woman litigants. I acknowledge the author’s key argument, which concerns the impact of power relations on the construction of customary law and the reproduction of knowledge in the courts. Certain versions of “custom” were promoted and others stilled to the disadvantage of women. I argue that the normative patterns of landholding are indeed gendered, but do not result in a binary structure of men and women. “Gender” should be disaggregated to take into account a range of status criteria within and across the categories of male and female in order to understand the differential impact of social relations on the outcomes of property struggles. The normative lines of property transmission frequently follow a logic of “family property” that allows for qualifying women to rights of property. Family property has vastly different social and legal consequences to private, individualised property rights. The corollary is that it is misleading to speak of the processes of succession to rights of access to, and control of customary property in terms of one-to-one “inheritance” of land. The concept of “living law” inadequately reflects these social dynamics.IBS

Type 1 Achilles tendon rupture caused by grooming trauma in a young dog

Achilles tendon rupture is uncommon in small animal practice. A 9-month-old, female, mixed breed dog (weighing 2.2kg) was referred to our hospital with a primary complaint of right hind limb lameness. Complete right Achilles tendon rupture was diagnosed by physical examination and radiography. The tendon was surgically repaired the next day by using a three-loop and single near-far-far-near suture methods. Complete healing was achieved by 97 days post-surgery. This report describes the surgical technique used for complete Achilles tendon rupture repair in a young dog.Keywords: Achilles tendon, Dog, Ruptur