28th JASIAS Conference

Aaron Gerow gerow
Wed Jun 5 23:54:49 EDT 2002


>Did anyone go to this that could report?

Hard to give a report, especially since I was involved. The symposium was 
pretty good this year. The Monkasho has changed the curriculum for lower 
and middle schools to include "sogo gakushu" in which eizo (image 
studies) is supposed to be included. In other words, all Japanese 
children are now supposed to be learning how to "communicate" in images. 
The Monkasho's Terawaki Ken (also famous as a film critic) gave a talk on 
the Ministry's thinking behind the change. Then there was a 4 person 
panel discussing what all this means for film and image studies. One 
presenter, obviously not in film studies, showed off software that 
teaches beginners how to properly express a written meaning in 
image--something which some of the audience really did not like. 
Mizukoshi Shin gave an interesting talk on activists efforts to get 
children to participate in and think critically about visual media.

>Is it my imagination, or has it shrunk in size?

Not that I can tell. This year didn't have the usual excursion and they 
concentrated the papers in one day, but the number of papers was about 
the same. Film papers again dominated, with some interesting work among 
the papers I saw. Seems research on chanbara is popular these days.

Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171





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