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

Creating Connected Identities Among Japanese Company Employees: Learning to be Members of Department Store Work Communities

This paper looks at the meanings, values, and idioms associated with work for members of Japanese permanent employment jobs in a sector of society where this has not previously been well explored - large-retailing organizations. It discusses the boundary markers that distinguish members from outsiders and marginals, and explains the ambiguous identities of part-timers and "helper clerks." The initial year in a Japanese permanent employment job is presented as an intense training period and also a liminal period involving the creation of new social persona and their aggregation into corporate work communities. The paper shows how new department store employees are socialized through training programs, company retreats, and other practices, then discusses the ongoing channeling of employee identities into structured networks of senpai-khai (senior-junior) and entry-year cohort relationships. It also discusses cases of "individualists" who do not fit easily into the company as community ideology. Based on research conducted from the mid-1980s to early 1990s, the paper provides a comparative update to earlier ethnographies of Japanese work in the permanent employment System.Cet article examine les significations, valeurs et idiomes associés au travail par les employés des compagnies japonaises, dans un secteur social peu étudié jusqu’à maintenant: celui des grandes entreprises de vente au détail. On étudie les marqueurs qui distinguent les « membres » des étrangers et des marginaux, et on explique l’ambiguité identitaire des employés à temps-partiel et temporaires. La première année de travail permanent dans une compagnie japonaise est pour tout employé, une période intense de formation, qui se vit comme une période liminale au cours de laquelle de nouvelles « persona » sociales sont créées et intégrées dans la communauté de travail. Cet article montre comment les nouveaux employés de grands magasins s’intégrent à la compagnie par le biais de programmes de formation, de « retraites » organisées par la compagnie et par d’autres pratiques. Il montre ensuite comment l’insertion dans les réseaux structurés de senpaikhai (senior-junior) et les relations entre employés qui ont pris du service ensemble, moulent l’identité de l’employé. L’article présente également les cas d’« individualistes » qui n’acceptent pas l’idée de la compagnie comme communauté. Basé sur une recherche en entreprise effectuée entre le milieu des années 80 et le début des années 90, cette analyse offre une mise-à-jour des travaux ethnographiques antérieurs touchant au système d’emploi permanent japonais

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