A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the New Wave of Cinema in India since the world plunged into a global pandemic. Today, I’m going to write an autoethnography analysing my initial reflection on this topic. I discussed the detrimental impact the Covid-19 pandemic, and its subsequent lockdowns, has had on the Indian film […]
Reflecting on the New Wave of Cinema — Establishing Emily
This week we watched Asia Rising: The Next Generation of Hip Hop (2019), a documentary delving into the rise of Asian hip hop music. As the internet has gained prominence, the assimilation of cultures has been widespread (Athique and Baulch, 2019). In Asia, as more people started to use the internet to explore different genres […]
When Cultures Integrate — Establishing Emily
BCM320 was a confronting subject for me. It interested me due to the technological advancements a lot of Asia hold over the western world, however having to essentially perform a study of myself and my own experiences isn’t something I’m particularly familiar with.
Because of this, the first few weeks of the subject were essentially a learning experience for me, discovering how to reflect on my own experiences and compare them to a culture being represented on screen through our live-tweeting experiences.
I was certainly no expert, but I did manage to find a way to compare experiences from my own life to those being shown on screen, and interact with my classmates through the hashtag during the live-tweeting exercises.
By the time our viewing switched to Akira, a film I had previously…
View original post 182 more words
My Auto Ethnographic Analysis of Blog Post 3 – JAPANESE IDOLS
It is quite safe to say my reaction to Japanese Idol culture, which is exhibited in my Blog Post 3, was one of a shocked and somewhat appalled student.
Why did the culture that surrounds Japanese Idols have this effect on me? Why did I take the mistreatment of these people thousands of miles away somewhat personally?
The notion I will focus on draw from Blog Post 3 as an auto-ethnographer, according to the Ellis et al (2011) reading is how my ‘epiphanies’ have shaped my perception and reaction to this culture. This refers to “remembered moments perceived to have significantly impacted the trajectory of a person’s life (BOCHNER & ELLIS, 1992; COUSER, 1997; DENZIN, 1989), times of existential crises that forced a person to attend to and analyse lived experience (ZANER, 2004), and events after which life does not seem quite the same” (Ellis, 2011.) Earlier in the blog I referenced American teen Idols to draw comparison between these Idols and Japanese Idols. These celebrities were idolised by me in my younger years when I was impressionable and searching for belonging. They are familiar to me and I feel comfort if I am to think of them.
To draw a comparison between something comforting, familiar and warmly nostalgic to me and a culture and movement that I have only learnt about in the last week presents insight into my confused and shocked reaction. The examples I drew to attempt to outline distinct differences between the two cultures actual reveal quite the opposite. For example, my explanation of Japanese Idol fanbases being “brain washed” and “naive” in a very judgemental tone. Analysing this from an auto-ethnographic stance, my tone was caused by my own naivety. I gave Justin Bieber as an example of Western teen Idols, with the knowledge of this Idols history with fans and cult followings, which is extensive. However I still used this very strong language when sharing my opinion on Japanese Idol fan followings. This could be construed by my failure to accept a culture that is unknown to me although major similarities can be drawn between it and a culture I know very well.
I draw no memories from Japanese Idol culture as I have never had any encounters with it, making it new and strange to me. Perhaps it was my lack of epiphanies that lead to my understanding of this culture to be absurd and foreign.
Ellis, C., Adams, T.E., and Bochner, A.P. (2011) ‘Autoethnography: An Overview‘, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12:1. Available at: http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095
Hey all!
Ultimately, I’ll be changing my DA because I understand Japanese gaming too well. However, I actually really enjoyed realising just how much I understood about Japanese Idol and gaming culture- and then realising that it was making this game easier for me to understand and interpret.
Here’s my podcast:
And as always some helpful links:
Upon embarkation of analysing the propaganda of the Duterte administration in my previous autoethnographical post, I have been immediately taken back to many conversations and realisations of how his election campaign and presidency have affected me personally within my own social and cultural framework.
Ellis et al’s ‘Autoethnography: An Overview’ describes autoethnography as ‘an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)’. Thus, in order to assist insiders (cultural members) and outsiders (cultural strangers) in understanding the political culture of the Philippines, I must analyse my own experiences (epiphanies) and consider the way others may experience similar epiphanies.
One of my most impactful moments trying to understand the excitement around President Duterte was on a deserted island in the Philippines at 3am after an 18th birthday debut. We had just swum to shore from accidentally hijacking a sailboat, and may or may not have had a little mix of tequila, Tanduay, and San Miguel beer (sorry mum). With this liquid courage, I was able to instigate a political discourse with young Filipinos that I would not normally feel comfortable talking about due to potential differences in ideology stemming from geographical upbringing and education. From what I had already witnessed in glimpses in international media, I pondered how a person in such a position of power could speak so casually with profanities, unapologetic rape jokes, and profess themself as a mass murderer, whilst still maintaining such strong public support. Surprisingly, some of these students agreed with my distaste of the President’s language, indicating that they preferred the representative of their country in the global sphere to possess eloquence and higher respect. The majority, however, saw him as the embodiment of the unfiltered, anti-corruption ideals that many of the marginalised did not have the voice to express themselves.
Historically, with the country’s struggles of presidential corruption (Ferdinand Marcos, Ninoy Aquino, Jejomar Binay, etc.), celebrity (Joseph Estrada and Manny Pacquiao) and nepotism (Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo), it can be argued that Duterte’s attitude of populism (that is, the support for the concerns of the ordinary people) secured him as a front-running candidate in the election.
Sociologist, Nicole Curato, and editor of ‘A Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on Rodrigo Duterte’s Early Presidency’ describes this portrayal as ‘Dutertismo’ – ‘a brand of leadership that [scholars agree] has elements that the country has never seen before’. Howie Severino discusses this further by appreciating Duterte’s role as an ‘underdog outsider’, and I think this perfectly reflects the thoughts of the young Filipinos I spoke with around the beach bonfire. For them and the majority of the country (as indicated by the 2016 election being the highest electoral turnout in decades at 81.62% and Duterte’s overwhelmingly high Trust rate of 91%), the President represents an appeal to the people, to the provinces, and to the anti-elite. Duterte speaks like the people in a ‘gutter language [that] lends credibility to the urgency of saving the republic. By rendering the visceral rejection of the status quo visible, he gives voice to the people’s frustration’ (Curato, 2016). Further, his determination to speak in English, his roots in the South (Visayan), and refusal to live in the Presidential Malacañang Palace heightens his position in populism, demonstrating a dismissal of the traditional, Manila-political-elite lifestyle associated with past corruption.
It cannot be denied that Duterte has changed the nature of public political discussion. I have in my research realised – why is it that this particular presidency has caused so much international debate and uproar amongst citizens and foreigners? Curato in ‘Flirting with Authoritarian Fantasies? Rodrigo Duterte and the New Terms of Philippine Populism’, attributes Duterte’s success in contemporary populism to ‘an age of communicative abundance’ with ‘a reality that politics today is predominantly conducted in televised and digital media’ and in a time when 94% of Filipinos have access to these platforms.
In turn, this rise of dialogic outlets has made it so ‘the issue is no longer the lack of information but the deficit of attention among audiences saturated with various messages’ (Curato, 2016). Thus, for Duterte, the media has become his stage, and his theatrical performance has been dubbed the #DuterteSerye. Due to this communicative abundance, I have found through my personal interactions, that there is an obvious tension in his supporters between justifying his policies as necessary measures to ensure strong domestic stability, and straight-up denying the existence of these policies. These students on the beach, normal citizens, were becoming increasingly heated in the conversation of Duterte’s presidency arguing that outsider news outlets were “twisting words” and “did not understand the country we live in”. And honestly, sometimes this discussion scares me. I have read examples of online thuggery where people have received death threats for expressing their concerns with Duterte’s administration. This discourse has driven normal, everyday people to make comments defending rape jokes saying, ‘better a bad joke than a bad government’, or ignoring the statistics of record-high murder rates in favour of believing claims of safer streets.
This discussion of President Duterte’s political propaganda and context has always been a heavy topic, with scholars only now really emerging to publish strong expressions of discontent and critique. And as much as I would love to continue this post’s analysis of Duterte’s power, I will save myself for my next post.
Severino, H (2017), ‘Scholars weigh in on a disruptive presidency’, GMA News Online Available at: http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/opinion/content/625558/scholars-weigh-in-on-a-disruptive-presidency/story/
Curato. N (2016) ‘‘Flirting with Authoritarian Fantasies? Rodrigo Duterte and the New Terms of Philippine Populism’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Volume 47, Issue 1). Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00472336.2016.1239751?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Ellis, C., Adams, T.E., and Bochner, A.P. (2011) ‘Autoethnography: An Overview‘, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12:1. Available at: http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095
Desker, B. (2016). President Duterte: A Different Philippine Leader. (RSIS Commentaries, No. 145). RSIS Commentaries. Singapore: Nanyang Technological University. Available at: https://dr.ntu.edu.sg/bitstream/handle/10220/40765/CO16145.pdf?sequence=1
Heydarian, R. J. (2016). What Duterte Portends for Philippine Foreign Policy. (RSIS Commentaries, No. 123). RSIS Commentaries. Singapore: Nanyang Technological University. Available at: https://dr.ntu.edu.sg/bitstream/handle/10220/40774/CO16123b.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
After experiencing the Japanese visual novel and dating simulator game, Hatoful Boyfriend, I have found myself intrigued by the popularity of these types of video games. Before playing Hatoful Boyfriend, I had never heard of a visual novel. While it is true that most video games do hold an element of ‘visual novel’, this game in particular purposely lacked a lot of gamer control that I’m used to. This surprised me as it technically is categorised as a video game, yet your options to manipulate the game itself is very little. Now and then there would be an option to choose, for example, which High School Club you were going to join, which would essentially shift the story’s direction. This means to uncover every aspect of the novel the game would have to be played at least ten times, revealing each possible play. Personally, unless you were invested in the game’s storyline the whole thing can become a bit tedious at the start. Wondering if it was just me finding the game boring after reading several reviews online I turned to Reddit where users shared their own Hatoful Boyfriend perspective. Each user’s experience actually differed from one another depending on the route they followed. While some ended up with the expected outcome- a boyfriend- others ended up down a darker path. This path involved the protagonist’s murder and player’s having to continue the story through the eyes of one of the pigeons trying to discover the truth. Reading each player’s experience made me reinvest in the game and its surprisingly complex structure and storyline.
After so many Reddit users taking an interest in the game and sharing just how unique the storyline actually is, I found an interview with the Japanese creators, Hato Moa and Damurushi, to uncover the intent behind the pigeon dating simulator. It was actually created as an April Fool’s Joke, a parody of another Japanese dating simulator, which explains the game’s humourous tones. The creators met through an internet community and were both highly interested in creating their own JRPG (Japanese role playing game). There was less thought behind the choice of using pigeons, as it was discovered Hato Moa has quite the fascination with birds.
The overall interest of the game has made me fascinated in the popularity and history of visual novels in Asian culture, specifically Japan. My initial idea for this blog post was to research both visual novels and dating simulators in the Asian market, however, after finding out that majority of dating simulators are in fact rated X, I’ve decided it best to just focus on the visual novel element.
The history of visual novels backtracks to 33 years ago when the Japanese video game publisher, Enix came out with an interactive mystery game called Portopia Renzku Satsujin Jiken. It follows the murder of the highly prominent banker Kouzou Yamakawa. The game relied on text-based inputs and dialogue scenes essentially introducing the visual novel format – onscreen visuals and dynamic character interaction- to the Japanese industry. From this, most visual novels still remain mostly in Japan however the introduction of the platform to the western world has increased. One reason for this introduction is the fan groups that have pushed the transition of certain games into the western world. Fans contacting game creators for an official translation and localisation making it available for western countries.
Regardless of visual novels in western society, in Japan they are still hugely popular. One reason for this is because the Japanese tend to be huge on reading. In a lot of their games text is already very much integrated. This is another aspect which I’m interested in. For my research project I hope to further examine the key characteristics that make up typical Japanese video games. At the moment my experience with them is still limited so I hope to also branch out into different genres. My starting point could be the mystery game Portopia Renzku Satsujin Jiken. I do not know yet how difficult this 33-year-old game will be to get my hands on but I have already found YouTube How to Play videos on the game. Along with this I still hope to investigate the visual novel trend in Japan further.
Reference:
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/video-games/255200/the-rise-of-the-western-visual-novel
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2016-03-30/.100434
thanks imgflip
“…romance movies is a genre that is always easy to watch”
-me, two weeks ago
In retrospect, this quote was a glaringly, poor oversight. Not only was I forgetting about the plethora of terrible, Western romance films (ever seen that one with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock who sent letters to each other in the past/future via a magical letterbox at a lake-house? I erased it from my memory for a reason and you should too), but I also forgot that poor writing and poor film making would be a universal concept. And that trying to watch a movie from another country, that you have no personal connection to, is probably not the best way to watch a new romance movie.
“Easy” was certainly true for the most part of “The Stolen Years”, but enjoyable….used only marginally. My anecdotes of the trip that was my first Chinese Romance Film can be found here, and no I wouldn’t recommend watching this film either. That isn’t too say it was bad, in fact i’d say it was quite similar to any trashy romance you’d pull out of Netflix, with only a few errors in its entirety (it was way too god damn long).
So, why did I not enjoy it? I had thought that if it was a romance, and had the essential story of two people falling in love, whatever else around it wouldn’t deter it from its essential element. Maybe understanding and enjoying fictional love is not a universal concept to me.
Two weeks ago I blogged my first serious attempt at Japanese calligraphy. As mentioned by Ellis et al (2011), I must compare and contrast my personal experience from my previous blog post with already exisiting research. The main point from my previous post is that I found it much easier using a brush, ink and a piece of paper than using an app to teach myself the different strokes and techniques that are needed to learn how to write Japanese calligraphy.
I think this ideal correlates directly with how I, as an individual, learn. I’ve always been a very kinesthetic and spatial learner. Audio books and people talking directly towards me when they’re trying to teach me something new is completely useless. I’ve found that I always need something to follow along with, or a book to take down notes. The physical act of writing something down has always made it much easier for me to remember particular techniques when learning a new skill.
Everybody obviously has a more dominant learning style but I put mine down to how I was predominately taught in school. Laptops/ computers were rarely used at both my primary and high school. It wasn’t until we were given laptops in year 9 that I really relied on technology to learn in the classroom. In primary school, we were lucky to have a computer shared between two classrooms and we had two computer labs in the whole school. One in the library, and one next to it. The only time I ever remember using either was when we were learning to type without looking at the keyboard, and to make a very basic website. We used the labs in high school a little bit more, but not much. Our classroom learning relied very much on pen, paper and a textbook. So, I believe that by learning like this during the majority of my primary and secondary education, I still find it much easier to learn in a hands-on way compared to using an app on a hand-held device. I bet if you looked through the bag I take to uni, you’d find a handful of pens in the bottom of it and a notebook – I write down notes and ideas for every single assignment I’ve had to do during my four years of UOW.
In 2014, a UK based printing and mailing company called Docmail conducted a study that determined that one in three of the 2000 respondents hadn’t written anything by hand in the previous six months. Edouard Gentaz, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Geneva and an expert on writing argues that “Handwriting is a complex task which requires various skills – feeling the pen and paper, moving the writing implement, and directing movement by thought…”. Claire Bustarret, a specialist on codex manuscripts agrees with Gentaz by saying “Paper allows much greater graphic freedom…”. She further describes the ability to write on both sides of a sheet of paper, manipulating and utilising it’s potential three-dimensional form and being able to physically track any changes made (Bustarret, 2014). These are all practices that can’t be achieved through apps and other software. It has also been found that drawing a letter by hand improves subsequent recognition (Gentaz, 2014). It takes years to master the motor skill. While this argument relies more on the handwriting vs typing debate, I found it very beneficial when it came to comparing the two different methods I tested out. Even though I was still technically writing on the app, it was so difficult to control the pen strokes as things like pressure aren’t at the forefront of your mind.
When starting my research on traditional Japanese calligraphy, almost every article outlined the importance of the brush, ink and even paper you should use. Hardly anybody spoke about mixing technology in with such a worshipped form of traditional art. The video below explores the idea of a robot mimicking its masters brush work. The video details that as the Japanese population is ageing and birth rates are slowing down, there’s a risk of traditional practices like calligraphy not being passed down as the gap between the young and old continues to expand.
All-in-all, the autoethnographic style of writing has allowed me to narrow down why I favour the analog technique when compared to the technological one. Ellis et al (2012) state that writing can be therapeutic as it allows for authors to make sense of themselves and the experience they are detailing. This explanation allowed me to understand that there wasn’t anything wrong with the app I used, but more so with how I take in and understand actions and processes.
References:
Chemin, A. (2014). ‘Handwriting vs typing: is the pen still mightier than the keyboard?’. The Guardian. <https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/16/cognitive-benefits-handwriting-decline-typing>
Ellis, C., Adams, T., & Bochner, A. (2011). ‘Autoethnography: An Overview’. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1). < http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/fqs-12.1.1589>
Hays, J. (2013). JAPANESE CALLIGRAPHY | Facts and Details. Factsanddetails.com <http://factsanddetails.com/japan/cat20/sub129/item2886.html>
I was at a bit of a loss when deciding on a topic for my digital artefact. We were asked to try not to look at anything we were familiar with, and for me that ruled out a lot of the ideas that had come to my mind for my topic. I’m not saying I’m an expert in Asian culture or anything, far from it. I’ve just dipped my toe into more aspects of Asian culture than the average Joe. What was I going to look at then? My first idea was to look at Japanese cooking shows, I like cooking so why not. One night though, while watching a Hannibal Buress stand up special, I had an epiphany. Why don’t I look at Japanese stand-up comedy?
So I did.
I guess I’ll start by letting you know that I love stand up. I’ve been watching stand up since before I should have been watching stand up. The first time I can remember watching stand up is when I was about eleven or twelve, and I was watching Billy Connolly on a VHS tape that we had at home. I thought he was hysterical, and from there my love for stand-up has only gotten stronger. Now at twenty one, I probably watch five or six stand up specials a week. It is safe to say that I have watched a lot of different stand up, but never stand up from Japan.
So, it was time to find some Japanese stand up, and not really knowing where to go, I went to my old faithful Youtube. Something I quickly realised when looking through the search results, is that I had a picture of what ‘Japanese stand up’ would look like in my head, and I didn’t see it, nor could I find it. I don’t know where the image I had in my head came from, but what I expected to see was that Japanese stand up was just, the stand-up that I’m used to, but with Japanese comedians performing in Japanese, to a Japanese audience. What I found was a whole different range of stuff, so let’s look at some of it.
One of the things I saw a lot of was Japanese comedians performing stand up in English to either, a majority foreign audience in Japan, or Japanese comedians performing overseas, mostly in America. I was the most familiar with this type of routine. It followed the same formula I was used to, and besides a few little things like the use of a clip board in a routine, it was the same style of comedy that most of us would be familiar with. I didn’t feel like I was seeing ‘actual’ Japanese stand up watching these. They were admittedly funny shows, but it felt like the stand-ups I watched were just copying what they had seen other foreign comedians do.
The other type of act that made up the majority of the videos I watched was the double act. My experience with double acts in stand up is definitely not as extensive as with single performer acts, and I think I’d be right in saying the reason for this is that there just not as popular in our culture. There are certainly some great comedy duo’s in stand up, I mean even in Australia we have the likes of The Umbilical Brothers, Lano and Woodley, Sammy J and Randy, there all amazing acts. I just think there are less double acts than there are singles, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in Japan, at least from what I’ve seen.
The acts and how I watched them were all different as well. There’s one duo named Gamarjobat which seem to have done both in Japan and internationally. I’m just assuming this because a lot of their videos show them performing on different television shows from around the world. Gamarjobat remind me of The Umbilical Brothers in their routines. They don’t use their voices as much, for speech or noises, but the use of props and their bodies is very similar. The other acts were a little more foreign (please excuse the pun) to me. They did use some techniques I’d seen before like one guy playing the straight man and the other the zany/stupid/different character. Most of the double acts also seemed to use slapstick in their routines. Watching these acts, I felt like I was getting something different to what I was used to, and I think it was because I could see the audience was Japanese, it also helped that some of the acts were in Japanese, which was interesting when some of them didn’t include subtitles.
It was an interesting experience watching and then writing about Japanese stand up, reading over I feel a little slack saying one didn’t feel authentic, who am I to say that? Hopefully doing some research on the topic will help me understand a few things.
Digital Asia 