Japanese Visual Culture and Media |
Fall 2016
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Course Information
JAPN 314
MLO 2: Culture Course Description
A focused analysis of historical and modern Japanese society through works of art and media including photography, film, maps, and other visual documents. Students learn to extract information from images as part of a visual analysis.
They will also deal with social geographical methods for understanding population density, urban flows, economic disparities, transportation, and built environments. Students will analyze and compare what they understand about Japanese culture with other, more familiar environments. Course Work
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Reflective Narrative
This was my first Japanese course back at CSUMB after returning from study abroad as well as my first culture course since freshman year. I chose to take Visual Culture and Media because of my second major: Communication Design. In this class, we learned the content through presentations and selected videos, but the main learning point was the group presentations. The content we covered included emaki, commercials, signs, anime, movies, regions, sweets, origami, religion, kimono, and more. Although a lot of the content was also covered in my previous classes, by looking and analyzing it through a different lens, it felt like a very different experience. For example, we also covered the tea ceremony in Samurai Spirit (JAPN 212) as well as in Japanese Culture (study abroad), but both times the context was very different.
We also learned general things about design, such as the difference between photography and photographs, denotative and connotative meanings, as well as Japanese and American movie industries. The denotative/connotative way of analyzing was very interesting because it could apply to all forms of media, which is seen in the first group project about North & South Carolina. We also used analyzation in our presentation on emaki and our presentation on signs. In both of these projects, we had to analyze various visual media in relation to Japanese culture. It was great to work in a group for these types of projects because everyone brought new ideas and different perspectives to the table. All of the analyzations we did in the group projects and in-class activities were practice for the final portfolio project, in which we presented our own analysis on ten areas of visual culture. This project offered a lot of freedom because we could choose any form of visual aesthetics that we thought fit the prompt; I included images of ice cream to theatrical posters to my own photos from my time in Japan—the freedom allowed for honest analysis on my part. I’m still very interested in Japanese design and aesthetics (one of the reasons that my Capstone topic is also media-related), and I look forward to pursuing this interest in the future. Another large portion of this class focused on appreciation for anime as an artform (hence the anime essay). Because I already considered animation art, this course didn’t change my opinion, but it did expose me to new films that I enjoyed, and I look forward to seeing more unique Japanese animations and designs in the future. |
Additional Course Work: Group Presentations
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