Where does enjoying beauty become objectifying? What does it mean to objectify a woman? A man? Does anime do it? What does it mean to objectify someone? Objectification is defined as when a person is regarded as an object. There are 10 aspects to objectification (Papadaki, 2014). I will use Shinji from Neon Genesis Evangelion…
Year: 2015
Japanese Design: Art, Aesthetics & Culture
Japanese Design: Art, Aesthetics & Culture is an introduction to Japanese design concepts and the people who brought Japanese design to the West. Obviously, it would take at least several books the size of cinder blocks to thoroughly cover the ocean of Japanese design. Patricia Graham does a good job in summarizing the high points…
Japan’s Strangest, Most Fearsome Spirit–The Wanyudo
Japan is a land chock full of weird ghosts and monsters. Some are harmless, if off-putting, creatures, while others are creatures straight out of your worst nightmare. Today’s beast is two parts weird and one part terrifying, even more so because of its tendency to haunt residential areas of major cities, most notably Kyoto. Legend…
Japan Journeys: Famous Woodblock Prints of Cultural Sights in Japan
Japanese woodblock prints combine tourism with imagination. Woodblock prints ( called that from the use of carved wooden blocks used to press ink into paper) showed tourist spots popular in nineteenth century Japan and landscapes imagined by the artist. Andreas Marks’ book, Japan Journeys, takes you to various locales from this time period. Woodblock prints,…
The Old Man Who Made Withered Trees Blossom
In the old, old days, there lived an honest man with his wife, who had a favourite dog, which they used to feed with fish and titbits from their own kitchen. One day, as the old folks went out to work in their garden, the dog went with them, and began playing about. All of…
Japanese Kanji Made Easy
I am terrible at rote memorization. In other Japanese language books (and when I took Spanish classes for that matter), rote memorization was the key to learning. I don’t know how many times I had to copy Spanish conjugate verb charts to remember even just a few of them. My memory is good, but not…