Julia Clark

The American conception of Japan is largely based on the pop culture that it exports. This is not a politically neutral process. Many of the things that we think of when we hear “Japan”—like anime and manga, ramen and sushi, Pokémon and Zelda, mecha suits and Godzilla, and kawaii (cute) culture—are products consciously pushed abroad by the Japanese government since the 1980s as part of the “Cool Japan” initiative. Many of these modern-day markers of “Japanese-ness” were also shaped by the US occupation of Japan after World War II and other transnational encounters within the Japanese Empire and its aftermath. In this course—through close examination of a range of Japanese media objects, including but not limited to anime and manga, the modern serial novel, cinema, architecture, food, fashion, and video games—we will consider how pop culture forms and circulates around the globe. In the process, we will think through issues of genre and form in transnational media reception: Why are the samurai film and the Hollywood western the same, actually? What can J-Horror tell us about the concerns of postwar Japanese society? Why are cyberpunk stories always set in Japan, and what is the state of “techno-orientalism” today? Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities that will include transition to college, research sessions, literary and media analysis strategies, and academic writing/editing workshops. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

This introduction to Japanese language and culture is designed for students who have had little or no experience learning Japanese. The goal of the course is to develop four basic skills: listening comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing (hiragana, katakana, and some basic kanji) in modern Japanese, with an emphasis on grammatical accuracy and socially appropriate language use. Students will put these skills into practice through in-class conversation, role play and group work, and daily homework assignments. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, weekly individual meetings with a Japanese language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required.

This course will advance students’ Japanese language proficiency in speaking, listening, reading (simple essays to authentic texts), and writing in various styles (emails, essays, and/or creative writing). In addition to class sessions, students will attend weekly individual tutorials with a Japanese language assistant. Individual conference work will focus on translation of literature or other media from Japanese into English.

What is “the long postwar”? For decades, Japanese intellectuals and cultural historians have been engaged in debate over when (or whether) the “postwar period” will ever really be over, and how to understand Japan’s current national, geopolitical, and culture identity in relation to the empire that came before. This discourse has been reignited with the political rise of Takaichi Sanae, elected Japan’s first female prime minister in 2025, who seems intent on radically revising Japan’s postwar constitution. This course will examine Japanese culture since 1945 through key works of fiction and film, tracing the arc from the devastation of war and the United States Occupation, through the reconstruction of social order and national community, to the development of a hyper-modern consumer culture. Some of the issues we will explore include the depiction of the war and its aftermath, the influence of the United States Occupation, the disintegration of the family system, questions of cultural and personal memory, historical revisionism and ideas about the remilitarization of Japan, radical New Left movements in the 1960s, the representation of marginalized groups in postwar society, and the culture of postmodernism. Students will connect the historically informed close reading skills we develop in the course with individual conference work on a topic related to media from postwar and/or contemporary Japan or East Asia.

This course will explore how conceptions of Japan as a modern nation state have always been entangled with ideas about sex, gender, and reproductive bodies, from the eugenicist policies of reproductive control that were foundational to the Japanese Empire (1868-1945), to the current Japanese government’s attempts to combat the depopulation crisis. In many cases, such as the “fertile womb battalions” (kodakara butai), which commended and rewarded women who gave birth to multiple children during the empire’s mobilization for total war (1937-1945), there is also an eerie resemblance to the recent surge in pronatalist sentiments within the United States government. Together, we will learn about how eugenics and reproductive rights were intertwined in early Meiji-era debates on womanhood and motherhood, reading key early feminist texts from Hiratsuka Raichō and the Japanese Bluestockings, and then trace how those ideas echo and transform through the radical uman ribu (women’s liberation) movement in the 1970s through to the present day. Other topics covered will include resistance and collaboration with the Empire among female proletarian writers in Japan and colonial Korea; Hayashi Kyōko’s literary representation of licensed prostitution under the United States Occupation; postwar depictions of the discriminatory fixation on the reproductive lives of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Pan-Asian feminism and the “comfort women” redress movements in the 1990s; and the contemporary rise of a new generation of popular writers in Japan (and East Asia more broadly) who seek to complicate prior understandings of gender, parenthood, and the human body. We will end the term by looking at techno-natalist dystopias (or utopias?) in recent Japanese science fiction. Students will complete an individual conference project related to modern Japanese media and/or the themes of the course.

What is the relationship between the language(s) we speak, the nation in which we live, and our understanding of ourselves? If language and place help shape our identity, what can we learn from those caught between borders and living in multiple tongues? This course examines transnational literary texts and films both to learn about the lived experiences and aesthetic experimentation of a variety of Japanese-language authors and directors and to explore how language, literature, and visual media are related more broadly to conceptions of “national belonging.” The works covered in this course highlight the destabilization of identity that accompanies both the act of border crossing and the geopolitical upheavals that cause those borders to shift and be redrawn, from the forced assimilation of colonial subjects during Japan’s imperial period, to the US military’s postwar occupation of Japan, to contemporary narratives of globalization, postmodern identity, and the internal borders that today demarcate Japan’s regional cultures and dialects. Through close readings of these texts and films, we will explore the ways that authors in Japan—who have historically been marginalized based on race and ethnicity, class, linguistic ability, and/or gender—have sought to challenge the Japanese national literary cannon and the very notion of “the nation” itself. Students are expected to develop a related research project over the course of the term through conference work that delves deeply into the production, circulation, and reception of some aspect of modern Japanese media.

This course examines the literary representation of urban space throughout modern and contemporary Japanese literature, considering how the figure of the city serves as a literary technique through which authors navigate issues of modernity, personal identity, the nation, and the world. Through close readings of texts written by Japanese, Korean, and Asian American authors that traverse Tokyo, Osaka, Berlin, colonized Seoul, semicolonial Shanghai, and visions of the cosmopolis of the future, we will explore the city in literature as a space that complicates and even transcends the borders of the nation in its navigation of collective histories and personal memories—with a particular focus on how representations of race, ethnicity, gender, and class intersect within the literary city. The course introduces basic concepts from urban semiotics and other philosophies of the production of space as a method for analyzing the uses of space in literature, as well as introducing recent scholarship in Japanese studies that presents new perspectives on the relationship of urban architecture, global and local geopolitics, and cultural production. We will explore a number of topics in modern, postwar, and contemporary Japanese history through the framework of “the city,” including early Japanese encounters with “the West” in the Meiji period, cosmopolitanism in the Japanese Empire, black markets in the aftermath of World War II, segregated spaces and the experiences of minority groups in the postwar period, and the social and material transformations of urban spaces in Japan after natural disasters such as the 3/11 Triple Disaster in 2011. We will also consider Japanese American engagement with the space of New York City. Through conference work, students will conduct individual research projects in service of extended creative and scholarly reflection on their own relationship to the urban space(s) they occupy and see represented in contemporary media.