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10 Remembering the Japanese occupation massacres: mass graves in post-war Malaysia Frances Tay The violence visited upon British Malaya during the Japanese occupation of December 1941 to August 1945 has prompted several historians to evoke comparisons with the atrocities that befell Nanjing.1 During this time, numerous civilians were subjected to mass killings, summary executions, rape, forced labour, arbitrary detention, and torture. In particular, the shukusei (cleansing) or daikensho (big inspection) operation of February to April 1942 – known locally as the
Waka and ryūka are short poems originating in Japan and the Ryukyu Islands, respectively. Waka has a very long history and flourished during the Heian period, which began around the year AD 800. The waka studied here belong to Ogura Hyakunin Isshu , a collection of 100 waka compiled around the first half of the thirteenth century, and the karuta game based on it. Waka – nowadays often referred to as tanka – is widely used in contemporary Japan, from the New Year recital at the
of years. Compared to its division from biomedicine, TCM shares terms and ideologies, via Chinese characters, with other examples of ‘oriental medicine’, such as Japan's kampo and Korea's dongyi . Even so, the resemblance of these components does not make these medicines more similar. Shaped during the period when these countries were seeking modernization, these medical traditions are often claimed to be highly original and distinct from other traditions in this region. The landscape described above challenged Needham's titration thesis
The looking machine calls for the redemption of documentary cinema, exploring the potential and promise of the genre at a time when it appears under increasing threat from reality television, historical re-enactments, designer packaging and corporate authorship. The book consists of a set of essays, each focused on a particular theme derived from the author’s own experience as a filmmaker. It provides a practice-based, critical perspective on the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, questions of aesthetics, and the intellectual and emotional relationships between filmmakers and their subjects. It is especially concerned with the potential of film to broaden the base of human knowledge, distinct from its expression in written texts. Among its underlying concerns are the political and ethical implications of how films are actually made, and the constraints that may prevent filmmakers from honestly showing what they have seen. While defending the importance of the documentary idea, MacDougall urges us to consider how the form can become a ‘cinema of consciousness’ that more accurately represents the sensory and everyday aspects of human life. Building on his experience bridging anthropology and cinema, he argues that this means resisting the inherent ethnocentrism of both our own society and the societies we film.
. Old age and American culture: apotheosis of independence I grew up in Japan in the traditional three-generation family in which my widowed grandmother lived with my parents, my sister and me. The neighbourhood was full of older people who also resided with their children’s family. Young children were taught that elders deserved special care after
relationally, from when old technologies and techniques were new, to how new technologies and techniques become their mirror. The third reason is, bluntly, self-interest; I have been in regular contact and conversation with the authors for fifteen years, and count our many conferences, dialogues and Basilicata recording collaborations among the most stimulating of my forty-five years of experimental sonic, visual and textual inter-media collaborations in Papua New Guinea, Europe, Japan and West Africa. That leads me to say that one of the most productive dimensions of
starting point was a conference on endangered languages and musics, Humanities of the Lesser-Known , organized in Lund in 2010, which brought together those who came to be the members of the Borderland project. 1 The material is intercultural and includes a variety of language and music contexts: Kammu (Laos), Akha (Thailand), Seediq (Taiwan), Tanana (Interior Alaska), and Ryukyuan (Okinawa, Japan). A long-term aim has also been to play a part in the revitalization of such oral traditions and to contribute to
Rebellion, which began in October 1930 and formed an uprising against the Japanese forces in Japanese Taiwan. 2 The Seediq language and vocal expressions Though there are some studies of the music of ethnic groups in Taiwan, and some of those incorporate linguistic aspects, there are very few descriptions of the music of Seediq. Our main objective has been to study vocal expressions of the form that contains repetitions of phrases, in order to see to what extent the concept of the performance
were doing. In the grip of such a powerful system, viewers could be forgiven for not worrying too much about where they were situated in the film or how they got there. In Japan, Yasujiro Ozu found a different solution to the problem of cinematic space, creating what might be called a ‘cinema of familiarity’. By confining his scenes to a few essential places – the home, the bar, the office – he made these into known environments to which his characters repeatedly returned. Filming consistently from a low camera position added another degree of familiarity. Spectators
otherwise have been left unexplained. Once this is done, a researcher could, if necessary, continue studying details of the performance, individual variation, intonation, tonality, and so on. The most time-consuming task for us has been to explore if and how performance templates can be applied to the Kammu and Athabascan material. In the case studies of the Akha, Seediq, and Ryukyuan/Japanese material, in which the performance template as a method is merely tested, it was easy to see that the method would be