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.

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.

Bilingual education and cultural identity development

Strong cultural identity is often perceived as vital for school adaptation in the psychology literature, as it strongly relates to students’ mental well-being and self-esteem. Addressing this issue, studies on acculturation have been conducted through observing behavioral patterns and perspective change of overseas students experiencing acculturation. The relationship between acculturation and identity is often discussed in terms of the complications between the need to adapt and the need to maintain one’s cultural identity.

Eyes of the Journey Alternative World Premier

September 21 is the alternative world premiere of a new film Eyes of the Journey, a visual poem in Quechua from director Rodrigo Otero Heraud and and producer Maya Tillmann Salas of Asociacion Cuyay Wasi in Peru. Several organizations, people who are interested, and cinema clubs in several countries around the world who will show the film on that day to spread the energy of the film around Mother Earth on the same day. The film is like a prayer in Quechua and its makers know it will have a magic effect. The film originates in Cusco, Peru, where it will be projected on the 21st to an audience of 600. Cusco is the home of the film's protagonist, the Quechua shaman Hipolito.

The Nuclear Deal and Failed Iran-US Relations

2015 witnessed a significant turn of events in international relations. The Obama Administration adopted a flexible approach to mending frozen relations with regimes the US had for decades perceived as hostile and consequently its relations with Cuba and Iran were put into a new direction.

A Cultural History of Criminalizing Homelessness

Recent decades have seen a drastic rise in the number of homeless people, both individuals and families, and this is largely due to unemployment, limited affordable housing and failures of social safety networks. According to a 2005 United Nations survey, there were approximately 100 million people worldwide dwelling on the streets and another 1 billion without inadequate housing. Since then, the problem has only worsened, as the number of homeless people within several countries still remains considerably high.

A Puerto Rican Experiment in Social Films

At a time when Latin American and other Third World national cinemas began to finally receive their long overdue recognition, the need emerged to develop a plan for the methodological study of the Puerto Rican cinematic tradition. Undertaking this project, Ines Mongil-Echandi and Luis Rosario Albert concentrated their analysis on the collection of over 100 films produced by the Division of Community Education during the 1940s through the 1960s under the sponsorship of Governor Luis Munoz Marin. These films represent a national artistic expression whose great value was internationally recognized at the time but which after 40 years lacked an analysis based on modern historical studies of film.

Television, Culture and Consumerism

Television encourages viewers to consume images that most people would otherwise not have access to in the course of a typical life. While this might sound like a benefit, television is not simply about seeing new and different things. It is also about selling. Television programming evolved hand-in-hand with consumerism, at first in its birthplace in America during the mid-20th century, but increasingly everywhere else in the world as well. In a way, television has spread the ethos of consumerism around the globe. It has also spread voyeurism, a more insidious form of consumerism, in the way it reveals what used to be private aspects of human life to public view. Television has normalized consumerism and voyeurism, and in turn these cultural preferences, encouraged by television, exert an influence over the medium, so that there is a reciprocity between television and society. The TV industries monitor the flow of this give-and-take relationship by sophisticated marketing surveys to tailor programs to what they perceive as the interests of their consumer-viewers. Many viewers are unaware that their habits are carefully monitored and that the television industries have created various market segments, or what they call "audiences," to buy and sell in the global marketplace, just like any other commodity. Although viewers think that they are sitting at home watching the tube, the tube is also watching them, and their viewing habits are traded in a marketplace that is still primarily driven by advertising.

Redefining Black Independent Cinema

In August 1984, the Los Angeles Times first-string film critic, Charles Champlin, devoted his column to the subject 'A Black Film Bonanza Hollywood Ignored.' He--and the Los Angeles filmgoing audience--were discovering for the first time the wealth of Black cinema that had been produced in recent years. Beneath the facade of Hollywood'd glitter and Southern California's 'me' culture, Los Angeles is becoming a city of color. The largest ethnic group in its public schools is Latino, and it has one of the largest Asian populations in the US. It is a city with a long history of organizing for affirmative action in the workplace and schools. Los Angeles has been the source of some of the most pioneering and important independent works in recent years, much of which has been produced in these Third World communities.

Microbroadcasting vs. the Media Monopoly

People around the world are becoming disgusted with the state of the airwaves. Despite threats of fines and violence, pirate radio activists are turning out and turning on their own stations in defiance of government broadcast regulators. Thousands of Taiwanese police blitzed 14 unauthorized radio outlets, many of which returned to the air following the raid. Twelve people were killed in a raid on a pro-democratic pirate station in Haiti, but the soldiers failed to seize the transmitter. A pirate station broadcasting from a traffic island in Mexico City was also shut down by a phalanx of police. Microbroadcasters in Canada and the U.S. haven't yet been subject to such brutality, but the battle to exercise their claimed right to the public airwaves is no less fierce. The movement's North American epicenter is the San Francisco Bay area where unlicensed FM stations offer a non-commercial alternative. It is also home to the movement's unofficial spokesperson, Stephen Dunifer.

The New Time Religion of Advertising

One of North America's foremost media theorists, Sut Jhally is professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and founder and director of the Media Education Foundation. He has written numerous books and articles on advertising, social communications and cultural politics. In the following interview with Kalle Lasn and Nicholas Racz, conducted in the Vancouver offices of 'Adbusters' magazine in 1993, professor Jhally suggests that modern advertising has become a cultural force resembling a religion. He implicates this 'new time religion' in the culture of consumerism threatening to bring about environmental collapse on a planetary scale. The way out of this mess, he suggests, is to mount a 'reformation' in attitudes toward ourselves.

C. K. Raju interviewed by Claude Alvares

TV Multiversity is proud to present a five part series featuring Professor C. K. Raju interviewed by Claude Alvares. Professor Raju brings to bear his immense knowledge of mathematics, history, and philosophy in providing a systematic deconstruction of the Eurocentrism of mathematics as currently conceived and taught. Beginning with a discussion of why mathematics has become so difficult to learn, the interviews proceed through the myths surrounding the 'heroes' of Western science, from Euclid to Einstein. They also cover the transmission of mathematical knowledge from India through the Islamic world into Europe, where it was initially misunderstood but then coopted and corrupted by the Holy Roman Empire. One of his most startling conclusions is that mathematics is essentially religious or spiritual in nature, but he offers a way to think about and practice mathematics shorn of its theological assumptions and Eurocentric historical accretions. Professor Raju has developed this material over a series of books, ranging from 'Time: A Consistent Theory' (1994) to his latest work, 'Euclid and Jesus' (2012). Conducted in Penang, Malaysia, during June 2013 and totalling over nine hours of material, these exclusive new interviews were produced and distributed on behalf of the Multiversity Project for the Multiworld Network and are presented here for the first time.

Images of Native Americans in US Cinema

The handling of American Indians and American Indian subject matter within the context of commercial U.S. cinema is objectively racist at all levels, an observation which extends to television as well as film. In this vein it is linked closely to literature, both fictional and non-fictional, upon which may if not most movie scripts are at least loosely based. In a very real sense, it is fair to observe that all modes of projecting concepts and images of the Indian before the contemporary American public fit the same mold, and do so for the same fundamental 'real world' reasons. This essay will attempt to come to grips with both the method and the motivation for this, albeit within a given medium and examining a somewhat restricted range of the tactics employed. The medium selected for this purpose is commercial cinema, the technique examined that of stereotypic projection. The matter divides itself somewhat automatically into three major categories of emphasis. These may be elucidated as follows.

Nature, Animals, Intelligence and Madness

'The city child is asked, in effect, to go directly from his symbiosis with his mother to a mastery of social relations. He is to skip the genetic interlude in this task, in which he indulges in eight or ten years in nature, and go directly to the real job of life. During this time his frustration and inarticulate desire will be anaesthetised by portrayals of the nonhuman as entertainment in an array of images--toys, pictures, zoos and gardens, decorations, Disney films, motifs, and designs--a stew of nature so arbitrarily presented that the result of his years of trying to fix it in his heart will only lead to despair. No wonder the child of thirteen turns with keen interest to machines. Man-portrayed nature has proved incoherent.'

Race and Class in the Cinema of Apartheid

To write a Marxist history of an art form or a cultural process in a time designated as postmodern--or at least with the logic of postmodernism dominating cultural debates--is one of the central challenges of our time. In Europe, three responses from a Marxist perspective have been put forth as the dominance of poststructuralist theory begins to ebb. Italian architecture critic Manfredo Tafuri has argued convincingly that the essential task of today is not so much writing a history of modern art forms as writing a modern history of those forms. In his discussion of the politics of history writing, French philosopher Louis Althusser has theorised the imperative of producing a dialectical concept of the history of an art form rather than merely presenting a narrative account of its history. And in England, writing about the history of structure of the State, Perry Anderson has postulated that history writing should be theoretical and analytical as well as factual and descriptive in order to be adequately comprehensive.

Toward a Semiotics of Third Cinema

Third World filmmakers and scholars should not be forced always to think in a sign system that is not theirs. The question is whether the categories that inform Western semiotics are fully relevant to the analysis of non-Western sign systems. Western semiotics has presumed that its categories can travel across cultures and languages. But language is saturated with the values of its own culture. To think in a language other than one's own is to experience a peculiar form of alienation--a kind of self-exile. Besides, Western semiotics has not developed a strategy to explain the specific mode of transformation required by the Third World context where semiotics should be an instrument of political action. This has been largely ignored and underdeveloped. It is now imperative to formulate Third Cinema semiotics in terms of its relation between Third World concepts and its own artistic mode to develop forms of explanation that account for its specificity.

Neo-Colonialism in Mambety's 'Hyenas'

Friedrich Durenmatt's play 'The Visit,' filtered through Bernhard Wicki's 1964 film adaptation starring Ingrid Bergman, provided the storyline for Djibril Diop Mambety's 1992 film 'Hyenas,' although Mambety gave the story a Senegalese flavor. Introduced as a representative of the World Bank, an incredibly rich woman, Linguere Ramatou (played by Ami Diakhate), returns to Colobane, the town of her birth--and, we eventually learn, her shame. In revenge for vicious treatment by her former lover Draman Drameh (played by Mansour Diouf), who had paid two other men to say they had slept with her, she promises the village elders to bankroll her eceonomically depressed hometown if they will only do just one little thing for her: kill Drameh. Of course they refuse, with high moral statements about the sanctity of life; of course they gradually give in as they are seduced by the consumer goods 'the visitor' can produce for them.

Ethical Media and Social Reconstruction in China

In December 2004, I found myself in a meeting room at Guangzhou's Guangdong Film Distribution Corp., participating in a discussion about the difference between a 'communist' and a 'party member' with the producer, director, cinematographer, and distributor of the independent documentary Soul of the Nation (Guohun), which tells the stories of China's nationalist and communist revolutionary heroes by touring their tombs and memorials throughout the country. Zhao Jun, the producer, recalled that his elementary school teacher had explained that whereas a communist was a true believer in communist ideals, a party member was somebody who had joined the Communist Party as an organization. Although I was interested in researching independent media production outside the party-state and I have read quite a lot about independent documentaries that exposed the dark sides of the party's history in the Western and Diaspora Chinese media, I did not expect to meet a group who jokingly self-identified themselves as 'Bolsheviks outside the party' in 2004, making and distributing a 'red theme,' independent documentary in Guangzhou, the frontier of China's 'reform and openness' and globalized commercial popular culture.

Challenging the Norms of Documentary Filmmaking

'Two Laws/Kanymarda Yuma' is a film made by the Borroloola Aboriginal Community, who live in the Northern Territory of Australia. The film was shot by two Sydney filmmakers, Alessandro Cavadini and Carolyn Strachan, but because of the Borroloola community decisions over the choice of subject matter and methods of filming 'Two Laws' is described by its distributors as 'an epic story told by the Borroloola people.' The film is in four parts, each dealing with different moments in the history of white Australian institutional attempts to coerce the Aboriginal people into the acceptance of white law and white custom. Part One--Police Times--re-enacts a round-up and forced march which took place in 1933; Part Two--Welfare Times--deals with the process of settlement and the imposition of government policies of assimilation during the 1950s; Part Three--Struggle for Our Land--is concerned with more recent fights for the recognition of Aboriginal land and law in the Land Claims courts; and Part Four--Living with Two Laws--describes the movement back to traditional Aboriginal lands. The film therefore represents an attempt by the Borroloola people not only to talk of their own history, but also to decide how that history would be represented. It is a directly political project, as its title suggests, in its efforts to reconstruct and remember white institutional coercion and Aboriginal struggles against it.

Television and Commercial Culture

Citizens of many modern industrial societies, and in American society particularly, seldom think twice about referring to themselves as ‘consumers,’ accepting the terminology from the world of media and advertising constructed for them by large corporations. Yet in the lives of their grandparents, ‘consumption’ referred to a debilitating disease, and nineteenth century dictionaries equated it with destruction and pillage. Only during the last century did advertising succeed in normalizing what was once an aberration. This is not to say that people are unaware of this process. Many are beginning to wake up to how their lives are packaged and processed; how they are ‘branded’ as children with product loyalties; how their behavior is manipulated by slick advertising campaigns; and how their public spaces have become commodified by the messages of advertising to buy, buy more, and buy again. The problem is that few people know what to do with this realization, or how to respond. Although one would never know it from watching corporate television, there is a global anti-consumption movement afoot. In street demonstrations, classrooms and other public and private gatherings, as well as by way of alternative media and non-corporate sources of information, the movement is growing. In recent years a number of books have begun to question consumer culture, ranging from psychological analysis of advertising to evaluations of the environmental impact of the all-consuming lifestyle.