Wasuren! ---We Won\u27t Forget! The Work of Remembering and Commemorating Japan\u27s and Tohoku\u27s (3.11) Triple Disasters in Local Cities and Communities

Based on estensive Fieldwork, this paper explores the needs of people and communities in hard hit areas of Japan\u27s 3.11 triple disasters including Sendai, Fukushima, Ishinomaki, Kesennuma, Kamaishi, and Yoriage to commemorate the event and their dead, while redirecting efforts to the future. It discusses the activities of Sendai\u27s Wasuren! (We Won\u27t Forget!) Center to document the disaster and Project Fukushima! organized by Fukushima residents to consider the city\u27s future after the nuclear disaster as well as examining memorials (as memoryscapes and mourning work) created by other communities in the region where the disaster occurred. It compares local narratives of the disaster by those who experienced it as Tohoku\u27s disaster, with national narratives of it as Japan\u27s disaster, including differences in calls to gambaru or gambatte (persevere), discourses of sōteigai (what is unimaginable ) used following the disasters, and the new national special tax (tokubetsu zei). The article problematizes the distinction between natural and humanmade disasters. It argues that policy makers need to consider the diversity of communities involved and the thoughts and feelings about what local people find meaningful in terms of rebuilding and reclaiming their communities and lives

Life is beautiful: gay representation, moral panics, and South Korean television drama beyond Hallyu

Critical attention on Korean popular culture, particularly outside of Korea, has focused upon the Hallyu cultural phenomenon at the expense of sectors of the Korean creative industries that have sought to actively engage with their social and cultural environment and challenge the status quo. Politically charged, countercultural or just distinctive and/or original, non-Hallyu cultural artifacts have been and continue to be born out of a desire to be creative, to comment on or to create social change. This article focuses upon one such critically overlooked South Korean cultural artifact, the audacious and genuinely groundbreaking television drama "Life is Beautiful" (SBS 2010), which motivated an immense amount of critical and social reaction within Korea and yet has barely featured in English language analysis of Korean drama because it has not been classified as Hallyu. This is in spite of it being a finely produced and performed series and one written by the most prolific, longest serving and commercially successful of all Korean writers of Hallyu drama, Kim Soo-hyeon. In addition to its impressive production credentials, "Life is Beautiful" is also notable for being hugely controversial at the time of its broadcast due to its boldness in tackling the subject of Korean prejudice towards homosexuality

Japan and the Special Olympics and Obama and §: Re-Circulating Minorities, Margins, and Mainstages in Modern Japan

Webcast Sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Sociology at UBC. The Winter Olympics–as occurring in Vancouver, Canada in 2010, and the 2008 election of Barack Obama–as President of the United States, reflect globalizing insights on movements surrounding minorities and marginalization in Japan that contest hierarchies of people and of space and place. This talk explores dynamics involved when Japan, a society where the disabled were once hidden (relegated to the “back recesses”), took the lead in being the first (and still only) country to host the Special Olympic World Winter Games at the same sites as the Olympic and Paralympic Games. This is discussed in reference to other “coming out” movements of people with disabilities in Japan, and to President Obama’s comments on Special Olympics in a US popular culture television interview. The linkage of Obama and the Special Olympics circles back to Japan, through analysis of how, why and to what extent the US Presidential election of Obama (the “Back Horse”) coverage in Japan reflected a momentous change from prior projections of racial hierarchies and previously presented images of Blacks.Arts, Faculty ofAnthropology, Department ofUnreviewedFacult

Meiji at 150 Podcast, Episode 013, Dr. Millie Creighton (University of British Columbia)

In this episode, Dr. Creighton revisits the Meiji Period through the lens of tourism, exploring the way the Restoration is repackaged and resold at local tourist sites from Kagoshima to Kochi today. We discuss the popularity of “historical theme parks” such as Meiji Village and Nikko Edo Village, the UNESCO designation of Meiji-era industrial sites, and the recent boom in TV dramatizations of the Meiji and Showa periods.Arts, Faculty ofHistory, Department ofAnthropology, Department ofUnreviewedFacult