Course Description: An analysis of historical and modern Japanese society through works of art and media including photography, film, maps, and other visual materials. Students learn to extract information from images as part of a visual analysis, while dealing with socio-geographical methods for understanding urban flows, economic disparities, transportation, and built environments. Students compare what they understand about Japanese culture with their own familiar environments.
Course Narrative: This course opened my mind to a new culture that I never thought deeply about. The course went into Japanese culture in general and explained the reason behind the traditions and common practices seen in Japan. On top of the Japanese culture, the course focused on visual methodologies and interpretations. The course brought forward art works from different periods of time and we used visual methodologies to interpret the art works. For the first half of the class, we learned a majority of the visual methodologies, including semantics, psychoanalysis and in general what culture is and how to observe artwork objectively. We also went into general trend, traditions found in Japanese culture including religion, Tokyo, architecture, ukiyo-e and general history. A part of the general history that interested me was transition from a closed economy to opening the doors to foreign markets. This sparked the start of industrialization and capitalism that subsequently fostered the development of the fandoms we see today. For the second half we worked on a group project and individual portfolios. In my group project, I focused on the architecture of religious temples and shrines found throughout Japan and I learned about Shinto and Buddhist beliefs. It was very interesting to see the prosperity of certain religions. I decided to do my final portfolio on Tokyo and the art pieces found throughout the city and visual trends that can be analyzed with the visual modalities we learned in the class. The final portfolio can be found here. MLO 4 was met during this course.