Your writing in this course will take two forms. For most weeks, you will write a brief response to a question or topic that I pose and that is relevant to the issues and readings we are doing. These exercises are due in class; we will read them and provide feedback but the individual exercises will not be graded. Rather, you will receive a final grade based on our assessment of your portfolio of exercises.
In addition, you will be writing three course essays during the term that will be longer writings on broader assigned topics. We will sometimes use the weekly exercise as a way for you to submit and get feedback on partial drafts of these course essays.
Exercise #1 (Due September 10)
Your initial writing exercise deals with a controversy that broke out in the summer of 2015 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, centering on “La Japonaise,” a famous portrait painting by the French impressionist Claude Monet. Please see the details of this exercise HERE.
Exercise # 2 (Due September 17)
By now, you should finished reading the Lo ethnography and begun reading the selections from the Rohlen ethnography. Prepare and bring to class an essay response of about 250-350 words to the following question. Lo experienced work life at Brother both in an office and on a factory assembly line. How does she compare the conditions for work for the OLs and the factory women?
Please bring TWO versions of your response to class:
1. Print out one version that is your properly paragraphed essay.
2. Print separately a second version that has no paragraphing at all.
Exercise # 3 (Due September 24)
NOTE: Your first course essay will be due tomorrow, September 25. Please prepare and bring to class at least a 250-word section of your essay draft that will be the basis of group discussion and feedback.
COURSE ESSAY # 1 is due on Friday, September 25, by 4:30 p.m.
Details of this course essay # 1 are HERE.
Exercise # 4 (Due October 1)
I assume that you have been taking notes on reading assignments and lectures for years and years, and it is one of those academic skills that helped you get into and be successful at Yale. Yet we all know that “taking notes” is neither simple nor singular. Taking notes in a history course is different from taking notes in a CS course or organic chemistry lecture or art history lecture. Because so few of you have anthropology course or Japan studies backgrounds and represent a wide spectrum of majors, some of you have asked, quite reasonably, how do I take notes in this course? What should I be “getting out of the readings”?
For this week’s sections, I would like you to focus on the journal article by Rebecca Fukuzawa about Japanese middle schools. Sometimes of course you simply read an article, sometimes you underline key passages, and sometimes you make margin notes in the hardcopy or digital version of the reading. In this case, I want you to take some actual written notes on the article so we can see what you find important in the article and so we can see how you organize and record your reading experience. Bring a copy of these reading notes to section. They may be messy, telegraphic, and ungrammatical. That’s OK; notes are intended to enhance your critical reading and remembering of a work (or a lecture or film, etc.). We will use them to talk about best practices for note-taking in a course like this, and I will share with you my own reading notes of Fukuzawa’s article.
Exercise # 5 (Due October 8)
In the documentary on Fuji Film corporation, we met the Waseda University graduate and new employee, Hiroaki Shimosaka. In the documentary, The Story of Noriko, we met Noriko Otsuka, another young 20-something, who was coming from the countryside and trying to find employment in Tokyo while navigating her parents’ and her own anxieties about marriage. For this exercise, I would like to try to you to use your imagination “anthropologically.” Write a short profile of EITHER of these and what you imagine might be the next 5 years or so of his or her life from the time we meet them in the documentaries. That is, knowing what you now know about the contours of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century, give one of them a five-year biography. Doing this in a page or so doesn’t give you much space, but try to make it plausible and try to ground it in the institution possibilities.
Exercise # 6 (Due October 15)
We want to begin to focus on your upcoming second course essay in this week’s section. As the assignment states, we want you to develop a plausible portrait of an “ethnographic” subject, either a place or a person, that will convey something about the organization of Japanese society through this subject. The possibilities are multiple and that often makes getting started the most difficult part of the assignment. But for Thursday, we are asking just that. In some brief prose,
1. Sketch out your idea. What kind of a person or setting do you want to focus on?
2. Try to imagine, and make note of, one or two ways in which you would like to develop this profile. You may want to draw a portrait as you did for last week’s exercise, in a third-person analytical voice. Or you might want to try something more adventurous like a “primary” format (a dialogue, a transcript, a student diary, etc.)
3. Briefly note what it is about this subject that connects to a general theme or themes of the course.
Exercise # 7 (Due for sections on November 5)
In the outline of topics I have given you about this week’s topics, I encouraged you to look at the anthropological evidence as presented in our readings:
- Anne Stefanie Aronsson (2015) “Through the Labyrinth of Their Working Lives – Women in Their Forties”
- Lynne Y. Nakano and Wagatsuma Moeko (2014) “Mothers and their Unmarried Daughters: An Intimate Look at Generational Change.”
- Emma E. Cook (2014) “Intimate Expectations and Practices: Freeter Relationships and Marriage in Contemporary Japan”
- Kawano Satsuki (2014) “The Story of a Seventy-Three-Year-Old Woman Living Alone”
In particular, I suggested that the following broad issues are especially germane to analyzing the rising numbers of solo/single lives:
- Why is it important to distinguish between being single and living solo?
- Is singlehood an expression of autonomy and independence—or of irresponsibility and immaturity?
- Is intimacy and egalitarianism possible—and on whose terms?
- Is it possible to balance work, marriage, and family at the same time—for both men and women?
- Is it really the women who are at fault? Is really individuals who are fault?
- Are the new young singles acting as parasites or pragmatists—or idealists?
For this week’s sections, we would like you to prepare a 200-word commentary that selects one of the cases from one of the above readings and reflects on what that case reveals about any of the above issues. Write out and bring to section as basis for discussion.
COURSE ESSAY #2 is due on Tuesday, November 17, by 5 p.m.
Please see this page for details of the second course essay. It should be 2500-3000 words in length (about 10-12 pages double-spaced). A first draft is due on Friday, October 30, by 5:00 p.m.
Exercise # 8 (Due for sections on December 3)
No writing assignment, but be prepared to discuss the readings and the week’s issues in terms of the following questions:
- Can dogs or robots like AIBO redefine what it means to be human? Why or why not?
- How do keitai mobile phones reorient our senses of space and our feelings of intimacy?
- What are the differences between ramen and sushi as “Japanese” foods—in Japan and in the global food court?
Exercise # 9 (Due for final sections on December 10)
Prepare and bring to section a written outline or prospectus of the final essay that includes these three items:
- What is the issues, trends, or topics of current change/crisis that you will focus on in the essay?
- What are their likely implications for Japanese society, for better or worse?
- What evidence from the course will you draw upon in supporting your essay?
COURSE ESSAY # 3 is due on Friday, December 17, by 4:30 p.m.
Please see this page for details of the third course essay. It should be around 2500-3000 words of text, which is about 10-12 pages, excluding bibliography and footnotes.