{"id":6686,"date":"2016-03-05T13:10:57","date_gmt":"2016-03-05T13:10:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/frog\/?p=6686"},"modified":"2016-03-05T13:10:57","modified_gmt":"2016-03-05T13:10:57","slug":"teaching-japan-with-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2016\/03\/teaching-japan-with-films\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Japan with films"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"StrayDog\"<\/a>Next semester I will be teaching a class on Modern Japan (Meiji to the present) and I was thinking of having them watch some films. I am guessing this will be done by making a short list of 10-12 films, showing one or two as a group, and having them watch and present on one or two others.1<\/a><\/sup> Part of the problem with that is while I have some great ideas, there are lots of gaps in coverage. So I thought I would ask you all for some advice. Here is what I have now.<\/p>\n

Bakumatsu <\/b> EEEEEEEJIAAAANAAAAIIIIKAAAAA<\/a><\/u><\/span><\/span>!\u00a0 One of the films that made me think about doing this in the first place. This is a good film on the social chaos of Bakumatsu Japan. One I think we will watch together.<\/p>\n

Meiji <\/b>Then…some other stuff. Sadly I have not seen Ah! Nomugi toge (Oh! The Nomugi Pass)<\/a><\/u><\/span><\/span> but I guess that should go here and….then what? What are some good Meiji into Taisho films?<\/p>\n

Empire <\/strong>Dersu Uzala<\/a> fits here, since I think you really need one movie about Japan’s imperial encounter with the romantic primitive and this is it. (Just pretend the Russian guy is Japanese.)<\/p>\n

I really need something on Korea or Taiwan, and the more colonial colonial bits. What would be good?<\/p>\n

War <\/strong>Well, this is clearly important. I figure the new Eternal Zero<\/a> movie will be one, since it brings up all the issues of war memory. Then Grave of the Fireflies<\/a>. It’s an animated movie, so it will not be a downer like so many war movies.<\/p>\n

\"Setsuko\"<\/a><\/strong>One of these two will probably be another one that we will watch together.<\/p>\n

For postwar\/Occupation <\/strong>Stray Dog<\/a> seem good for this, Maybe use Stray Dog as a movie to watch together, since while they may not know much about postwar Japan they should be able to deal with a cop buddy movie.<\/p>\n

Salrima<\/b>n<\/b> society<\/b><\/p>\n

The Bad Sleep Well <\/a>(Although I would like this class not to be a Kurasawa Festival)<\/p>\n

Ozu’s Good Morning<\/a><\/p>\n

Boy<\/a> (1969) Mostly just because I like it, and I can’t think of anything else to show the ‘working’ class in this period<\/p>\n

I am probably missing a lot here. Maybe God Speed You Black Emperor<\/a>?<\/p>\n

The boom years<\/b> Taxing Woman’s Return<\/a> Since I don’ t have enough comedies and I like the movie. If you want a parody of every bit of corruption in Japan in the 80s, this is it.<\/p>\n

Japan since <\/b>the <\/b>boom<\/b><\/p>\n

I probably need something here. Probably some Anime too. You can sort of see my problem from this list of films I don’t have a lot of good historical films before 1945, things like Eijianaika that are good as movies and also do a good job with a period. After 1945 there are quite a few \u201ccontemporary\u201d films they can use. I will probably have some students who are pretty serious film buffs, and could do a nice class presentation on, say, Momontaro’s Divine Sea Warriors<\/a>. What I really need are more movies that are fun to watch and help you think about history without requiring you to know much about film or to be willing to sit through a silent movie.<\/p>\n

If you were picking out two or three good films for this class, what would they be?<\/p>\n

\n

  1. If all students remember about your class 10 years from now is that they saw 3 or 4 good films (or read some good books) then that is not a bad result.  ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Next semester I will be teaching a class on Modern Japan (Meiji to the present) and I was thinking of having them watch some films. I am guessing this will be done by making a short list of 10-12 films, showing one or two as a group, and having them watch and present on one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[63,163,199,83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan","category-teaching","category-video","category-visual-culture"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-1JQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6686"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6705,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6686\/revisions\/6705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}