Introduction to general issues of gender and language use, specific gender-related differences in the Japanese language, and gender roles in Japan.

Qualified students working on an individual basis with professors who have agreed to supervise such work.

Qualified students working on an individual basis with professors who have agreed to supervise such work.

This course explores the history and mythology surrounding one of the most iconic symbols of premodern Japan: the samurai. Comprising only six percent of the Japanese populace, the cultural prestige and historical memory of Japan's warrior elites far outweigh their undersized ranks. Yet much of samurai lore has also been romanticized, embellished, or even made up. Were the samurai loyal retainers or pragmatic power-grabbers? Were they stoic swordsman or struggling bureaucrats? Why do we care so much about the violent social world of the samurai, and how do our impressions of them diverge from what we know about the history of their rise, reign, and fall? How do ideas of the "Way of the Warrior" get reinterpreted and recycled in Japan today? This course investigates these questions in two broad units: The History of the Samurai in War and Peace; and Remembering and Reinventing the Samurai in Modern Japan. This course welcomes undergraduates of all interests and majors, and no prior knowledge of Japanese language or history is required. Additional materials in East Asian languages will be made available upon request.

How do we know what is good for us, who gets to decide, and how does "healthy" change over time? This seminar explores these basic questions through the lens of Japanese food culture: the dietary trends, choices, and ideas of proper consumption that help shape the relationship between people's bodies and the world around them. We will discuss how and why "eating right" became such an important issue in Japan from the seventeenth century to the present and ask what the everyday experience of eating can tell us about the core themes, concepts, and events in Japanese and East Asian history. By putting Japanese foodways in conversation with global gastronomy, we will investigate what makes food cultural and what makes it historical. This course welcomes undergraduates of all interests and majors, and no prior knowledge of Japanese language or history is required. Additional materials in East Asian languages will be made available upon request.

Throughout the contemporary era, the United States' popular culture has spread abroad, including to Japan. After the American Occupation of Japan, Japanese popular culture began to spread to the United States, notably in film and animation. From this point onward, both nations' popular cultures have mutually influenced each other and in some cases created crossovers, where Japanese popular culture would be recreated in the United States and United States' popular culture would be recreated in Japan. This course takes a cultural studies approach to the rich exchange of these pieces of hybrid popular culture and the social, political, cultural, and sometimes violent forces that undergird them, along with the real lives affected by these forces. It will reflect on the original context of the popular culture in the United States or Japan, its recontextualization and translation in the other country, and in some cases further iterations of this process. Themes include war, Orientalism, horror, the radical Other, and entertainment industries. Media include film, theatre, animation, toys, haunted houses, and origami.

Megacity Tokyo combines diverse perspectives in history, geography, anthropology, and cultural studies to analytically engage the myriad ways that infrastructure, traditional arts, and modern social life intermix in Japan's fascinating metropolis of Tokyo, the most populated urban area in the world.

This course provides an overview of the history of Shinto in Japan. Recent scholarship has problematized the simplistic characterization of Shinto as the "indigenous religion of Japan." The course introduces students to the on-going scholarly debate over the category of "Shinto" and dissects from a historical perspective modern appropriations of Shinto discourses in relation to modernization, nationalism, and Japan's "self-image" in the world.

This course explores the prominent tradition of monsters, wrathful gods, and ghostly phenomena related to religious beliefs, politics, wars, and environmental disasters in Japanese visual culture, literature, and historical records from the eighth century to the present. Using critical historical and theoretical perspectives, we will analyze a wide variety of literature, wood-block prints, present-day films, anime, and manga, to explore wrathful gods, terrifying monsters, vengeful spirits, and comical yokai, as well more recent cultural icons such as Godzilla, Princess Mononoke, and Sadako from the J-horror film Ringu. We will learn how these monstrous figures serve as literary and visual tropes that embody various social and cultural fears and fixations while deepening our understanding of how such figures often embody various marginalized populations. Our themes deal with relationships between monsters and politics, gender dynamics, and traumatic disasters. In addition, we will also read seminal theoretical and historical scholarship on horror, monsters, gender studies, postcolonialism, and Japanese ghostly culture in order to acquire the methods and vocabulary necessary for forming our own arguments about haunting figures and the monstrous.

Everyone dies. Because death and the afterlife are unknowable, people have attempted to imagine, visualize, and write about what comes after life in order to understand or overcome fear of the unknowable and inescapable. Since the beginning of recorded time, therefore, death has found its way into religion, art, and literary expression to demystify its meaning. This course surveys the literary discourse of death and dying in Japanese literature from the 8th to the 19th centuries. It is both a chronological introduction to the literary tradition and an exploration of the concept of death in premodern Japan. Our readings include mythologies, narratives, Buddhist didactic tales, poetry, diaries, and other theatrical works, all in English translation. We will learn and practice the skills of close reading, interpretation, and literary analysis through class discussions and critical writing about representations of death. We will study important works concerned with the rhetoric and topos of death within their historical, political, religious, social, and cultural contexts, aiming to establish connections across time and between writers and readers. The most important, yet paradoxical, lesson of this course is that focusing on death leads to reconsidering and celebrating the value of life.