The Melting World

I came across T-chan, age 7, reading Robert Bly’s book, Morning Poems. He read silently, his mouth shaping out the words. It’s the first time I ever noticed him reading one of my books. It makes me wonder what else he has been reading when I wasn’t around. I am so proud of him. A […]

anonymous artist – Outsider art exhibit at local library I haven’t had the chance to get to this place lately. Been traveling about and reading books on the treatment of the peasant class during the pre-modern and modern era of Japan. Once again, I am opening my eyes wider to what is in the hidden […]

This is the first book-length work in English I’ve found to comprehensively explain Wajin-Ainu power relations: Siddle, Richard. (1996). Race, Resistance, and the Ainu of Japan. London: Routledge. And what a book! It details the complexities and contradictory historical records about the Wajin conquest of Hokkaido and the impact on the Ainu, who are Hokkaido’s […]

For the first time in late September I saw a place where hot spring waters are harvested for the many hotels dotting the Mt. Fuji landscape. The scene looked like my Catholic childhood imagination of Hell: yellowy scarred stains next to smoldering thick pools of spoiled oatmeal, yellowish-white fumes twisting and groaning like ghosts, the […]

I am finishing up a book by John Lie (2001), called “Multi-ethnic Japan.” I plan on using much of its argument to teach Identity and Culture here at Hokkaido U of Education. Fascinating stuff, and I learned much about the hybrid character of Japanese culture, or rather it opened my eyes to what is already […]

I finally had the chance to sit down and watch a film I had read about in my New Media class discussions.: What the BLEEP do we know?, which is a sort of self-help film but also a film about quantum physics, too, and I liked it, and this is not without a critical eye, […]

I spent some time today reading some works by Giorgio Agamben, a contemporary philosopher. He talks about finding the Entivicklungsfahigkeit in a work as his vocation as a scholar. This, he explains, is a term coined by Feurerbach that means the philosophical element in any work is an element that allows the capability of it […]

This week we read about cyborg theory, a recent view that life as we thought we knew it (as the individual animal/human as a separate cohesive entity) is a myth and that all life forms are really collectives: we are each composed of many living organisms (cells, bacteria, amoebas, etc.), chemicals, electricity, and now technologies […]

This cyborg theorizing appeared when we reach for ways to make our machines/technologies more like us: we begin to investigate what a human being is, and discover that DNA sequencing and electrical synapse (information looping) are the Human machines we will need to understand to replicate or mirror life. This then brings us to question […]

I agree that there are complex intricacies of power and how those who are oppressed become numb (or accepting) of what is happening to them, to see it as ‘normal’ and to even self-regulate and peer-regulate continued oppression. Too often, these days, I think I blame the ‘rich powerful white guys,’ but I think Foucault’s […]

In my current class, Cultural and New Media Studies, we have begun to explore the theoretical frameworks people tend to use when they discuss the relationships or the collision-intertwining of humans and technologies. It is all quite overwhelming and academic and so, from my class notes, and my own interpretations, I wanted to sound out […]