Murakami’s Sheep and Post-War Japanese Ideology

Murakami Haruki is one of the most well-regarded yet controversial authors in contemporary Japanese literature. Being the son of two literature professors in postwar Japan, his writing covers a variety of topics from politics, economics, and pop culture. Before he is the author we know now, he dabbled in translation work for Western novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Murakami kept a sense of Japanese locality in his novels with a Western atmosphere which is the base of the paradoxical East-West. For Western readers, the text offers a unique read with a slight touch of nostalgia and for Japanese readers it is a familiar setting with an unexpected twist. Initially aspiring to become an international writer, Murakami soon realized that he had to find his voice in Japanese literature eventually leading him to his unique style of magic realism or whatever.

Watching a film by ear: An acousmatic approach to cinema

Sound film is commonly expressed as the interplay between the audio and the visual. Since the 1920s, audiences’ cinematic experience has been dramatically transformed owing to the synchronization of sounds and motion pictures. The silent film era highlights its narration performance mainly by the continuous alternation between moving images and intertitles (title cards) while its score is accompanied by a pianist or an orchestra. With more diverse sound elements (dialogue, music, ambient sound, sound effects, etc.) being synchronized to motion pictures, sound film delivers an immersive experience and strengthens its storytelling. Cinematic audiences are required to engage more intensively in the cross-modal perception of hearing and seeing. This progression appears as a breakthrough for filmmakers and, simultaneously, new advanced perceptual challenges for the audiences’ eyes and ears.

Stages of minimalism on Fumio Sasaki's path to happiness

In recent years, minimalism as an approach to art has given way to minimalism as a lifestyle. Used not only as a means of reducing personal possessions, it becomes a personal quest for self-fulfillment beyond material acquisition. In the Japanese scene, two names emerge: Marie Kondo and Fumio Sasaki. Kondo, often associated with the simple living movement, has a pragmatic outlook that focuses on material detachment and clutter reduction. Sasaki, with a more traditional inclination, infers a conscious insight into socio-cultural values and how some are used to assess happiness. In his perspective minimalism contradicts modern standards of happiness, which are loosely based on consumerism, such as having expensive cars and high-paying jobs and other examples of consumption for the sake of appearance rather than need. By relegating material possessions to the far back of people’s lives he disproves the erroneous idea that the sum of one’s belongings equates to self-worth. This essay explores Sasaki's transition from materialist to minimalist.

Fading morality in American Biblical film adaptations

It seems only natural that films (or any other media) devoted to retelling Biblical stories would, first and foremost, exalt their moral virtues. Like the Bible itself, they are often regarded as didactic tools with which to educate people on ethics while reasserting the Biblical god’s authority. However, this is no longer the case in American cinema. Overtime, the genre’s didactic function monopolizes what little attention it still commands from American audiences, while America’s film industry itself seems to have lost sight of the genre’s devotion to the monotheistic Biblical god. The exclusivity that makes morality in Bible adaptations “Biblical”--the willingness to proclaim God as the ultimate moral authority superior to those of every other belief--has disappeared from mainstream cinematic productions almost entirely. The result is a conflation of Biblical morality in these films with that of a more universal, humanist, and less religiously-bounded sort in the American audiences’ collective consciousness. 

An author of outsiders: Jim Jarmusch’s "Down by law"

Jim Jarmusch is an American independent film director with a dominant characteristic of his cinema; marginality. The director’s movies focused on outsiders, people who wander with no destination, at odds with themselves and others, traveling through a wasteland of modern America. This study seeks to determine how Jarmusch creates marginality via the cinematography of a film Down by Law. The primary source of this paper is the film. Secondary sources include existing interviews of the director and other related materials. The analysis part will briefly touch upon technicalities of implemented camera work and provide images from the film. The study proposed that marginality has its cycle that consists of four elements; stranger, interference stage, freedom, separation. Further analysis demonstrates the depiction of the cycle in the film. The results indicate that Jim Jarmusch employs specific camera techniques such as long shots, momentum, lighting, horizontal representation, static shots, and black and white choice of photography to underline the notion of marginality in the film Down by Law.

"A story of a bird named Bìm Bịp": Lies, violence, and meaning

“On the road, he met a bandit who was wielding a big sword. The monk was scared, but he thought the bandit would not harm him because he is a religious man. Suddenly, the bandit kneeled and asked: “The master, please accept me as your disciple. My hands filled with blood. I am ashamed and regretful. I don’t know if I can still lead a religious life or not.” The monk assured him: “You need a true heart to lead a religious life. If you are truly penitent of your sins, The Devine will know for sure. I am on my way to meet the Buddha, so I cannot accept you as my disciple.” The bandit replied: “Please send my true heart to the Buddha.” Then immediately, cut his chest open, took out his heart and gave it to the monk.”

Pacific Islander’s effect on media production

The indigenous people and culture of Hawaiʻi have been sabotaged by misrepresentation, sexualisation, and exoticisation stemming from foreign tourism and large-scale media. The increase of foreigners to Hawaiʻi in the late 1700s and early 1800s destroyed sociopolitical systems, unnecessarily reallocated millions of acres of (rightful Hawaiian) land, and lead to the illegal annexation of Hawaiʻi in 1898 (Levy, 1975; Lâm, 1989; Wilkinson, 1989). The popularization of Hawaiian culture (hula, lūʻau, surfing, etc.) has also caused an increase of “Hawaiians at heart,” non-Natives who use interest in culture to identify themselves as legitimate Natives (Hall, 2005). Media has also aided in the popularization of the paradisiacal Hawaiian image: live-action and animated movies alike have sexualized the hula, exoticized the culture, and portrayed a largely Native-free Hawaiʻi. Nevertheless, grassroots movements can be seen to this day: the current protests against the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea, a sacred mountain, show that Native Hawaiians continue to fight for their indigenous rights.

Kerouac and the Fellahin tribe of God's children

On the Road is a literary phenomenon in a conservative post-war America in the late 1950s of such rippling effects that its author, Jack Kerouac, has been baptized by the media as the chief of a generation of revolutionary artists. According to Gilbert Millstein (1957), the first established reviewer to endorse the book, the three pillars of Kerouac's writing, thinking and vision constitutes an indispensable whole, and the dismissal of any element shall break down the entire architecture. Unfortunately, On the Road has been interpreted without much confirmation of the authorial intention and remained vulnerable to sectional analysis. In either criticisms or appraisals, most scholars have disassembled the novel into its language execution, structural composition and ideological validity.
 

Murakami and music in "Sputnik sweetheart"

The Japanese writer Haruki Murakami is renowned for his unexpected mystical stories that contained within them many symbols and musical references. His writings are well-known to be influenced by his affection for every genre of music, jazz and classical in particular, and partly due to his once owning a jazz bar named Peter Cat and collecting over 10,000 records of various musical genres that helped to sustain and deepen his musical tastes. Murakami himself believes that rhythm has a significant influence on literature, whether from music or fictions. He always artfully and blatantly applies his knowledge and preoccupation in music, accumulated from years of passions in his writings.

Competition and cooperation in Korean education

Education has become a principle duty for most of humanity. It is the major element for human growth and contributes to building a society. However, in the case of South Korea, social problems are coming from the current educational system, which is very competitive. Competitive education in South Korea has been influenced by neoliberal globalization, which has been spread widely throughout South Korea after the 1990s. Based on the neoliberal policies, markets should distribute the wealth efficiently and reasonably according to an individual’s effort.

Media portrayal of an ideal beauty image

In Indonesia, there is one image of ideal beauty that is portrayed in all media, from magazines, advertisement billboards to commercials, especially of beauty products. This image portrays woman with almost white-light skin tone, long-straight lustrous silky black hair, big rounded eyes with double eyelid and long eyelashes, pointed nose, and slim yet curvy figure. This image can be seen in almost every beauty commercials in Indonesia and it immediately raises question because most native Indonesians, except in small areas of Indonesia, is naturally dark-skinned.

"Coach Carter" and the lone quest for winning in life

One of the most powerful speeches of the 2005 American film Coach Carter was delivered inside a library, which may seem odd for a sports movie. The basketball team had been prohibited from playing and was forced to study. The one who made that decision, head coach Ken Carter, was facing the toughest challenge in his career: make his players study while pressure from the school and the community could have put not only his job but also his life in danger. It could be easier anywhere else but not in America, where high school sport is a dominant cultural event and the gym or the stadium is the sacred temple of not only the school but the whole community behind it.