Browsing by Subject "Japan"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
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    Community design/building in Japan & China: From Participatory Design to Co-design
    (2024-05-13) Liu, Xiaotong
    Community design is always a crucial component of architecture design. And a crucial factor that should be taken into account in the community design process is resident involvement. Today, "co-design" is growing in popularity. "Co-design" refers to the inclusion of locals in the designing and building process of the project. Architects should engage community members and get feedback from them continuously. In Japanese community residents are highly motivated to participate in the planning and construction process. The community's participation in design and construction has a lengthy development history, beginning with rehabilitation projects that happened as a result of the periodic earthquakes and tsunami (Jiang, 2023). This essay documents six Japanese community design cases, analyzing their histories, current status, benefits, and involved parties. A matrix examines the various participant kinds, behaviors, and levels of participation. Inferences are drawn about how to move the current participatory design process to the co-design stage, and with a Chinese case as an example, how to apply Japanese participatory design techniques to Chinese community design.
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    Essays in macroeconomics and financial economics.
    (2011-06) Narita, Futoshi
    This dissertation is composed of two essays that examine how financial factors affect real economic activities. The first investigates the role of agency problems in financial relationships in an economy with uncertainty shocks. The second examines how much misdirected bank lending accounts for the observed inefficient labor reallocation in the manufacturing sector in Japan's 1990s. A common goal of these essays is to shed light on economic mechanisms that may lower aggregate output and employment in financial crises.The first essay explores a new mechanism through which an increase in uncertainty interacts with agency problems to destroy matches between principals and agents. This is in contrast with inactive waiting predicted by real options theory. To demonstrate the mechanism, I develop a continuous-time dynamic matching model between principals and agents with long-term optimal contracts. In the model, a principal and an agent form a team to run risky projects and adjust their level of risk-taking. Because the agent can divert project payoffs, this agency relationship becomes hard to maintain when higher uncertainty increases the variance of the risky projects and generates more fluctuations in project outcomes. Teams close to termination break up instantaneously when uncertainty increases, causing an immediate reduction in aggregate output since it takes time to set up new teams. In addition, the average level of risk-taking declines among remaining teams because teams with a history of low output take less risk in response to the exogenous increase in project riskiness, in order to reduce the probability of costly separation. This further reduces aggregate output because low-risk projects have low average returns. In the second essay, my co-authors and I investigate the efficiency of resource reallocation in Japan during the 1990s, a decade of economic recession, by measuring aggregate productivity growth (APG) using a plant-level data set of manufacturers from 1981-2000. We find that resource reallocation contributed negatively to APG, mainly due to inefficient labor reallocation. A possible reason for the inefficient labor reallocation is misdirected (or zombie) bank lending to failing plants. To quantify its impact, we develop a model with plant-level heterogeneity, calibrate it based on the results of plant-level productivity estimation, and conduct a counterfactual exercise, in which there is no zombie lending. We find that, without zombie lending, aggregate productivity would have grown by 1.6% more during the 1990s, mostly due to more efficient labor reallocation.
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    Fashion Speaks: A Process Paper for WEARING JAPAN, an installation of fashion art
    (2014-12) Koster, Kelly
    Japan and the U.S. share a history of pulling in “outsider” ideas to reinvent their cultures. In the mid-to-late-nineteenth-century, Japan ushered in a market economy and American technology while the West developed an obsession with kimonos, woodblock prints, and anything "oriental." More recent cultural exports like anime, sushi, and kawaii (cute) fashion continue to shape American culture while America continues to influence Japan. Because both countries have powerful consumerist economies, their contemporary interactions produce vibrant cross-pollinations. I created an installation of fashion art to show what this looks like, and position globalized fashion as theatrical and wearable. As the world engages in international trade, and as cultural aesthetics are blended and reinterpreted, national and individual identities may shift. In an interconnected world, how do we fashion ourselves?
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    “Foreign language activities” in Japanese elementary schools: negotiating teacher roles and identities within a new language education policy
    (2012-12) Horii, Sachiko Yokoi
    In 2008, a new language education policy called "Gaikokugo Katsudou [Foreign Language Activities]" was issued by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science, and Technology (MEXT) in Japan. Effective 2011, foreign language education became mandatory in all Japanese public elementary schools for the first time. With this dramatic shift in policy, all fifth and sixth graders in public elementary schools must be provided with 35-credit-hours of English activity class per year. This qualitative study documents language policy processes at two elementary schools in Japan--Seto Elementary School , a neighborhood school in a local city area with three Japanese homeroom teachers and Satsuki Laboratory School, an elite, laboratory school in a metro area with a novice, Japanese teacher of English. Drawing on the ethnography of language policy that acknowledges the critical roles that local practitioners play at "the epicenter of the dynamic process of language policy making" (García & Menken, 2010, p. 262), this study examines the core of the policy process, pointing to multiple, local, dynamic, de facto policies that teachers create in their classrooms. In particular, I examine how local teacher identities and their practices interact in class to form their de facto policies. I analyze how the macro-level, socially constructed, imposed, and idealized category of teacher identity in Foreign Language Activities is locally negotiated and reconstructed in teachers' day-to-day discursive practices. My ethnographic and micro-discourse analysis suggests that at Seto Elementary School, the textbook served as a de facto policy that shaped the school's curriculum, lessons, and instruction. The teachers' limited conditions including having absolutely no time to plan lessons with their English-speaking teacher and their low English proficiency were critical factors in their views and practices that did not allow them to explore, access, and make use of their expertise. Although my micro-discourse analysis identified evidence of negotiation in their interpretations and practices of the policy, overall, their exercise of agency remained limited within the top-down policy context. In contrast, at Satsuki Laboratory School, the top-down policy was not dominant but selectively and partially implemented in a teacher's classes. She was given time, space, and language competency to fully exercise her agency in negotiating and recreating the policy while exploring and developing her professional identity and expertise as an English teacher. By providing empirical insight into the dynamic nature of identity construction in interaction, this project reconceptualizes and reconsiders mechanisms of language policy by highlighting the linguistic, cultural, and professional dimensions of local teacher identities in the language policy process.
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    Japan - Sustainable horticulture crop production
    (2010-11-28) Ahl, Derek
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    Kabuki as a Women's Performing Art
    (2021-06) Larson, Trae
    Kabuki is a performing art that originated in Japan and this art is probably best known for being performed exclusively by males. Despite the fact that this perception of the kabuki is prevalent in not only mainstream sources but also academia, it is simply not an accurate reflection of the history of kabuki. Thus, before diving into the actual contents of this paper, it would first be helpful to understand the research that currently exists in the field of kabuki in relation to women’s involvement. To begin, an already existing literature review by Frank Episale called “Gender, Tradition, and Culture in Translation: Reading the ‘Onnagata’ in English” had the goal of analyzing the last 50 years of English-written kabuki research in relation to gender and culture.1 In this literature review, it cites that Earle Ernst, Faubion Bowers, and A. C. Scott are three authors who were critical to the establishment of kabuki studies within the post World War II United States.2 Episale then goes on to exemplify how these three highly-influential authors made many unreferenced claims and debated historical assumptions with a specific relation to how women are unable to perform kabuki.3 It is likely because of these widely-cited texts that it is also quite common for articles to utilize phrases such as “kabuki, the all-male theater” or “women’s participation in kabuki ended in 1629” to further the point that women are uninvolved in kabuki. Even articles that do not focus on women’s involvement in kabuki tend to dismiss women’s involvement with these quick phrases. These sorts of phrases and/or arguments are seen in the works of Donald H. Shively, Faith Bach, Andrew T. Tsubaki, Mette Laderrière, Yoshinobu Inoura, and Toshio Kawatake just to name a few.4 By no means am I trying to claim that all of these scholars actively attempted to exclude women’s involvement in kabuki, but rather that they simply utilized rhetoric that did so. Additionally to these authors, there are those such as Katherine Mezur and Laurence Senelick who recognize that kabuki is an art that plays with gender, but still reinforce the ideas that being male is necessary to kabuki.5 Nevertheless, in some recent scholarship over the last 20 years, cases of women’s involvement in kabuki has been getting fleshed out as exemplified in the works of Maki Isaka, Satō Katsura, Loren Edelson, Galia Todorova Gabrovska, Barbara E. Thornbury, Hideaki Fujiki, and Ayako Kano.5 With this being said, let me share how this very paper will fit into this existing research. One of the main motivations behind this paper is to help contribute to the existing research by specifically tackling these discourses that exclude women and portray kabuki as being “all-male.” More specifically however, this paper aims to answer the following questions: How has women’s involvement in kabuki shaped the art as a whole? What is the frequency of women’s involvement? How have women been discriminated against in kabuki? How have conceptualizations of sex/gender contributed to the discrimination of women in kabuki? How have these dialogues sought to exclude women from kabuki change over time? These are the main questions I aim to discuss in this paper. With this being said, this paper has two goals: (1) The first goal of this paper is to exemplify that women have been involved in kabuki since its origin and this will be accomplished by presenting a timeline of events of women’s involvements starting from the Edo Period (1603-1868) to the modern periods of Meiji (1868-1912), Taishō (1912-1926), and a little after. This timeline section of this paper will be divided into three parts: one part dedicated to women’s involvement in the Edo Period, a second part will be dedicated to women’s involvement the early Meiji period, and the third part will focus on women’s participation in what I call “kabuki-blended spaces. Although women’s involvement in kabuki does not end after these moments, the scope of this paper will be limited to these points. Next, (2) the second goal of this paper will be to analyze how varying conceptualizations of sex/gender have influenced the discrimination of women’s involvement in kabuki. This second section will be divided into three sections with each section focusing on a major idea that have contributed to the discrimination of women in kabuki. The first related conception that will be analyzed is cultivation, the second related idea will be that of sexology, and the third will be that of naturalism. While I am not claiming these are the three sole ideas that contributed to the discrimination, they are nonetheless three that will prove to have been influential. Now, with the paper now being briefly outlined, let us examine how women were involved in kabuki during the Edo period.
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    Nightmares from the Past: 'Kaiki eiga' and the Dawn of Japanese Horror Cinema
    (2015-08) Crandol, Michael
    While the global popularity of Japanese horror movies of the past twenty years such as Ring (Ringu, 1998) and Ju-on: The Grudge (Ju-on, 2002) has made these films the subject of much academic attention, the previous nine decades of popular Japanese horror cinema remain an understudied area of film history. Known as kaiki eiga or "strange films," domestic horror movies based on classic Edo period (1603-1868) ghost stories, as well as imported pictures like Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), were a mainstay of commercial genre cinema in Japan from the silent era through the 1960s, and wielded an influence on the so-called "J-horror" pictures that achieved worldwide success at the turn of the millennium. This dissertation examines the history of kaiki as a category of popular film, the similarities and differences between kaiki and the English-language concept of "horror film," and the large body of kaiki cinema produced in Japan during the prewar and postwar era that has, until now, remained virtually unknown to Western scholarship. I trace the development of the kaiki aesthetic and the discourse of kaiki eiga in Japan and its relationship to American and European horror cinema as well as native traditions of the fantastic and grotesque. Attention is given to the role of actress Suzuki Sumiko, the nation's first horror movie star, in establishing the visual portrayal of kaiki monsters onscreen, and the work of the Shint?h? studio and director Nakagawa Nobuo, who brought the domestic kaiki film to the pinnacle of its critical respect and anticipated much of the style of the later J-horror pictures. The dissertation concludes with a brief look at the ways in which the kaiki genre influenced the J-horror movement, and the ways contemporary filmmakers like Kurosawa Kiyoshi retain kaiki elements like the vengeful spirit in the creation of the unique aesthetic known as J-horror.
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    Personal and professional characteristics of Japanese Master therapists:a qualitative investigation on expertise in psychotherapy and counseling in Japan.
    (2010-09) Hirai, Tatsuya
    This qualitative study explored the characteristics of Japanese master therapists, extracted particular experiences conducive to optimal therapist development, and examined similarities and differences between Japanese and American master therapists. Data collection was conducted through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 10 Japanese master therapists who gained the largest number of nominations from Japanese psychotherapists and counselors. Qualitative data analysis was processed utilizing grounded theory approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) and CQR method (Hill et al., 2005). Data analysis was jointly conducted by four Japanese psychologists through group consensus. Results clarified important characteristics of Japanese master therapists. First, as a foundation, they possess positive personality traits, such as modesty, warmth, sincerity, absence of self-centeredness, and resilience. Based on these characteristics, they are able to build trustful relationships with their clients, both at an early stage, and throughout the therapy process. Second, they possess exceptional ability to perceive and process various cognitive (i.e., case formulation, objective monitoring of the therapy process, keen observation of the client's verbal and non-verbal cues) and emotional (i.e., accurate empathy, use of the therapist's feelings during the session) information from the client, from the therapist him/herself, and from the therapy process. This perceptive capacity of understanding makes it possible to perform at a high level of therapeutic effectiveness, maintaining a flexible therapeutic stance depending on the client. Third, master therapists are able to continuously learn from their experiences, stimulated by their curiosity and creativity, as well as their sense of responsibility and discipline as professionals. Finally, cross-cultural comparison of Japanese and American master therapists was discussed, a model of master therapist development was proposed, and suggestions for future research and therapist training were offered.
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    Stakeholder view congruence on cross-border graduate double degree program implementation in Japan, Australia and the United States.
    (2011-08) Yefanova, Diana
    This comparative multiple case study research focuses on Japanese university efforts in establishing cross-border graduate double degree programs (GDDPs) with American and Australian partner institutions. Universities worldwide are increasingly responding to external and internal pressures to enter new educational markets abroad and establish strategic partnerships. The number of GDDPs is still small, but the proclaimed individual, institutional, and national benefits are significant. However, due to multiple academic, administrative, and recruitment challenges, double degree programs often fail to attract significant student numbers. Research shows that international collaborative program success or failure is closely connected to stakeholder acceptance and support. The study examines how staff members, faculty, and administrators at four selected universities in Japan, Australia, and the U.S. view double degree programs. Each case study university unique characteristics are described and taken into consideration. The central study focus is on the extent of stakeholder view congruence on the issues of double degree program benefits and rationale, challenges and success factors related to program implementation. Additionally research data indicates a high degree of view congruence among staff, administrators and faculty on program rationale, benefits, and major challenges in both of the case studies and across national borders. The key findings illustrate that there are common areas of congruence within and across case studies, primarily on program goals and benefits. The study also identifies common areas of disagreement among stakeholders within individual case study institutions on program challenges and success factors that indicate (1) lack of faculty motivation to participate in GDDPs, (2) lack of clarity regarding program goals and academic value among faculty, (3) lack of staff motivation to work with GDDPs, and (4) lack of student participation. The resulting explanatory model of GDDP implementation addresses these target areas. Recommendations for program leadership are also suggested to address the pervasive challenges, thus improving the program prospects of survival and sustainability. Recommendations for universities involved in cross-border degrees are timely, as the higher education sector worldwide is working out a common understanding of double degree programs in varying national regulatory frameworks and cultures.
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    Weaving Innovation into Tradition: Factors Influencing Campus Internationalization at a Japanese University
    (2018-12) Mizumatsu, Mina
    With rapid globalization, competition among universities around the world has been increasing. In the case of Japan, the government initiated the internationalization of higher education by offering grants to selected universities for internationalization. Those universities have been making extensive efforts to promote internationalization in unique ways. Among the many universities in Japan, Tohoku University is a compelling case as the only national university corporation that has received all the major government grants to promote internationalization in the past decade. The purpose of this qualitative single-case study was to identify the factors influencing internationalization processes at Tohoku University, a research-oriented world-class university in Japan. Data for the study was collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews, conducted with 40 individuals who are involved in internationalization initiatives in multiple ways at Tohoku University. The interviewees were chosen from four different stakeholder groups: senior administrators, faculty members, domestic students, and international students. In the interviews, the researcher asked five main questions based on the research questions, including the definition of, rationales for, and the process of internationalization to examine the institutional and individual factors influencing internationalization at Tohoku University. In this study, the researcher used Bourdieu’s forms of capital, which include cultural, economic, and social capital, to organize and analyze the concepts that emerged in the interviews. The results are presented in detail to provide an extensive impression of stakeholders’ perspectives, and key topics are extracted and categorized for each stakeholder group. Furthermore, to answer the research questions, comparisons of the key topics of each stakeholder group are provided for each research question. Ten findings were generated from the interviews, based on the application of Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts. The results indicate that stakeholders’ definitions of internationalization vary, largely based on their past international experiences; both international and domestic stakeholders’ perspectives on rationales and the process of internationalization can be viewed in the framework of Bourdieu’s theory. Furthermore, using Bourdieu’s theory allowed the researcher to identify and describe institutional and individual factors promoting internationalization at Tohoku University. Finally, based on these findings, the researcher presents six suggestions for the policy and practice for the university, three recommendations for the Japanese government, and implications for future research, to further promote internationalization at the university.