scholarly journals Mechagodzilla i kobieta cyborg. Technogroza triumfu nad naturą

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 473-493
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Wałaszewski
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Visual Narrative ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Complete Interpretation

Interpretations suggested in this article are based on the fourteenth and the fifteenth God-zilla films, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974) and Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975), featuring the eponymous icon of the kaijū-eiga (monster films) genre and global pop culture.An analysis of diverse contexts (visual, narrative, structural, and genre) of the cinematic fight of Godzilla (the epitome of Nature) with Mechagodzilla (the epitome of Technology) makes it pos-sible to reveal details of the expression of the desire to acquire and maintain control over technology and, through that, over nature. In the context of the genre of both the analysed films, frightening elements characteristic of a horror film are overcome by mechanisms derived from science fiction, i.e. science and technology, with the concern of civilisation about threats or fatal consequences of the use of devices which get out of control.In the cinematic discourse of images of the conflict of fear of nature with anxieties of civilisa-tion, a technological demon emerges, Mechagodzilla, in an ultra-modern body made from titanium, accumulating the horror of atavistic monsters attacking humans with the new terror of powerful alien machines. The techno-terror of Mechagodzilla is contrasted with original nature, unspoilt by technological interference, which transforms Godzilla, the frightening monster and an archetype of the chaotic and destructive force of natural disasters, into a sympathetic defender of humanity.The sensitivity and cultural tradition of a Western viewer of the films, which serves as the point of departure for the analyses, initially made it difficult to derive a complete interpretation of the message; when the interpretive apparatus was broadened, however, by rooting kaiju eiga in Japanese culture, this helped overcome the problems of interpretation and enriched the reading of Godzilla symbolics with a spiritual element referring to nature.

scholarly journals School education for disaster risk reduction in Japan after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (GEJET)

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatsuya Fujioka ◽  
Yasushi Sakakibara
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Great East Japan Earthquake ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Japanese Archipelago ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Education Today ◽  
The Japanese Archipelago

The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (GEJET), reminded us Japanese of the harsh realities of the natural envi-ronment in the Japanese Archipelago and the importance of crisis management systems. However, the treatment of disasters has not been neglected in Japan, where natural disasters have historically occurred. In Japan, here are two separate approaches to handling natural disasters in formal education. The first is learning within specific subject areas, particularly social studies and science. The second is educational activities that take place outside subject teaching hours. Although natural disasters are common in the Japanese Archipelago, this arc-shaped string of islands, surrounded by the ocean and possessing a rich natural landscape, has greatly influenced Japanese culture, science and technology, and education. The Pacific Ocean coastline of the Tohoku region has been frequently hit in recent years by large killer waves (Tsunami) that have repeatedly resulted in serious damage. The main difference between the 2011 GEJET, and the previous tsunamis that hit the region is the accident that oc-curred at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant. Because the perspective of understanding science and technology from a social context is closely related to issues in education today.

The Power of Art to Cope With Trauma: Psychosocial Intervention After the Tsunami in Japan

2020 ◽  
pp. 002216782098214
Author(s):  
Tami Gavron
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Psychosocial Intervention ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Psychosocial Interventions ◽  
Kindergarten Teachers ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
The Arts

This article describes the significance of an art-based psychosocial intervention with a group of 9 head kindergarten teachers in Japan after the 2011 tsunami, as co-constructed by Japanese therapists and an Israeli arts therapist. Six core themes emerged from the analysis of a group case study: (1) mutual playfulness and joy, (2) rejuvenation and regaining control, (3) containment of a multiplicity of feelings, (4) encouragement of verbal sharing, (5) mutual closeness and support, and (6) the need to support cultural expression. These findings suggest that art making can enable coping with the aftermath of natural disasters. The co-construction underscores the value of integrating the local Japanese culture when implementing Western arts therapy approaches. It is suggested that art-based psychosocial interventions can elicit and nurture coping and resilience in a specific cultural context and that the arts and creativity can serve as a powerful humanistic form of posttraumatic care.

scholarly journals Counterfactuality as a Polyphonic Assemblage. Entangled Human and Nonhuman Stories of Early Modern Sciences in Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-121
Author(s):  
Mateusz Chaberski
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Multispecies Ethnography ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Effects ◽  
Neal Stephenson ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Point Of Departure

Summary In recent science-fiction literature, we can witness a proliferation of new counterfactual narratives which take the 17th century as their point of departure. Unlike steampunk narratives, however, their aim is not to criticise the socio-political effects caused by contemporary technological development. Such authors as Neal Stephenson or Ian Tregillis, among others, are interested in revisiting the model of development in Western societies, routing around the logic of progress. Moreover, they demonstrate that modernity is but an effect of manifold contingent and indeterminate encounters of humans and nonhumans and their distinct temporalities. Even the slightest modification of their ways of being could have changed Western societies and cultures. Thus, they necessitate a rather non-anthropocentric model of counterfactuality which is not tantamount to the traditional alternative histories which depart from official narratives of the past. By drawing on contemporary multispecies ethnography, I put forward a new understanding of counter-factuality which aims to reveal multiple entangled human and nonhuman stories already embedded in the seemingly unified history of the West. In this context, the concept of “polyphonic assemblage” (Lowenhaupt-Tsing) is employed to conceptualize the contingent and open-ended encounters of human and nonhuman historical actors which cut across different discourses and practices. I analyse Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle to show the entangled stories of humans and nonhumans in 17th century sciences, hardly present in traditional historiographies. In particular, Stephenson’s depiction of quicksilver and coffeehouse as nonhuman historical actors is scrutinized to show their vital role in the production of knowledge at the dawn of modernity.

scholarly journals Film Costume as a Visual Narrative Element

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-100
Author(s):  
Jelena Vojković
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Psychological Test ◽  
Visual Narrative ◽  
Ridley Scott ◽  
Invasive Approach ◽  
Non Invasive ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Narrative Element

This research is an attempt to try to define the semiotic elements of film costumes that result with certain final feelings of the viewer. Looking through the semiotic theory of both Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin and the specifics of (theatre and) film costume as a means of influencing the viewer and his/her thoughts, feelings and overall catharsis, the identity of a certain film has been set through an analysis of various elements. Furthermore, it has been noticed that psychological results by one observing a film can be various and lean more on known philosophical and psychological tendencies i.e. Freud’s theories or the ones of M. Merleau-Ponty or Lacan. To make it less verbatim, the example for the analysis that has been chosen is the 1982 science fiction film Bladerunner directed by Ridley Scott. With surreal messages and multi-layered meanings of its visual and audio presentation, it seemed like a perfect starting point for the research of the subconscious mind of the viewer. Finding a non-invasive approach to viewer’s impression, the costume itself could be observed both independently and in correlation with other film elements. By combining the results of all film levels via a visual psychological test by Robert Plutchik, known as Plutchik’s wheel of emotions, it is plain to see that a final impression still lies in a personal analysis. We find a prevalence of certain thoughts that lead the viewer to change his/her perception and, ultimately, to catharsis.

The Stone and the Wireless

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaoling Ma
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Media History ◽  
Gender Dynamics ◽  
Chinese Media ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Feminist Poetry ◽  
Do So ◽  
Communicative Processes

In the final decades of the Manchu Qing dynasty in China, technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, telegraph, and photography were both new and foreign. In The Stone and the Wireless Shaoling Ma analyzes diplomatic diaries, early science fiction, feminist poetry, photography, telegrams, and other archival texts, and shows how writers, intellectuals, reformers, and revolutionaries theorized what media does despite lacking a vocabulary to do so. Media defines the dynamics between technologies and their social or cultural forms, between devices or communicative processes and their representations in texts and images. More than simply reexamining late Qing China's political upheavals and modernizing energies through the lens of media, Ma shows that a new culture of mediation was helping to shape the very distinctions between politics, gender dynamics, economics, and science and technology. Ma contends that mediation lies not only at the heart of Chinese media history but of media history writ large.

scholarly journals Visual Narrative of the Loss of Energy after Natural Disasters

Climate ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerardo Castañeda-Garza ◽  
Gabriel Valerio-Ureña ◽  
Takako Izumi
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Electrical Power ◽  
Comparison Method ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Visual Narrative ◽  
Power Outages ◽  
Photographic Images ◽  
Manual Analysis ◽  
Digital Methods

Concerns exists regarding natural disasters, but what about the resulting power outages? This study investigates the characteristics of a digital visual narrative depicting the loss of electrical power after a natural disaster to identify how such situations are represented in images found on the internet. A qualitative approach with an exploratory scope was taken using digital methods. Six events in different places were selected, and 4691 images were analyzed using the Google Cloud Vision API. A constant comparison method was used to identify categories from these images. Then, a manual analysis was performed on a sample of the images of each event, and then categorized. It was found that more than half of the images refer to categories such as infrastructure, nature, and hazards, while the energy category was represented in 13.02% of the images. Most images were photographs; however, the non-photographic images found contained useful information regarding energy. Even when all events featuring power outages, few focused on the lack of energy and more on impacts to the infrastructure, despite energy being required for cities’ recovery.

The Reception of Mark Twain in Japan from the Meiji Period to the Heisei Period (1860s–2000s)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tsuyoshi Ishihara
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Japanese Society ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Imperial Japan ◽  
Huckleberry Finn

Why have so many Japanese people been fascinated with one of the most distinctively “American” writers, Mark Twain? Over the past hundred years, Mark Twain has influenced Japanese culture in a variety of ways. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe claimed that Huckleberry Finn was one of the “roots of his inspiration as a writer” and called Huck one of the heroes who means the most to him in world literature. However, it was often necessary for Japanese writers to “Japanize” Twain’s works in accordance with the cultural and political norms of contemporary Japanese society. For instance, Kuni Sasaki’s Huckleberry Monogatari (1921), the first Japanese translation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, significantly bowdlerized Huckleberry for Japanese juvenile readers, following the period’s genteel conventions of juvenile literature. In Jiro Osaragi’s samurai novel Hanamaru Kotorimaru (1939), an adaptation of Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, the elements of didacticism, rigid class hierarchy, and patriarchal relationships, all significant in contemporary imperial Japan, were particularly emphasized. During the American occupation after World War II, a number of Japanese juvenile translations of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn appeared. They not only idealized Tom and Huck as democratic American heroes, but also considerably tamed them out of concern that those untamed heroes might justify juvenile delinquency, which was common in the post-war moral confusion. In the sphere of Japanese popular culture, Twain is everywhere. Twain and the characters in his works frequently appear in popular science fiction, television commercials, musicals, repertory theaters, documentary films, and theme parks. An animated TV series depicting Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer achieved record-breaking popularity among Japanese children in the 1970s and 1980s. These popular cultural adaptations sometimes reflected the changing trend of Japanese juvenile television anime and the development of themes in late 20th-century Japanese society, such as the empowerment of women and increasing awareness of the necessity to represent blacks.

Braindance of the Hikikomori: Towards a Return to Speculative Psychoanalysis

Paragraph ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 392-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Contact ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Ambient Music ◽  
Computer Based ◽  
Multi Media ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Linguistic Basis

This article takes its point of departure from late Lacan's meditations on the incompatibility of psychoanalysis with Japanese culture due to its non-European linguistic basis. The article argues that this emphasis on language narrowly conceived fails to keep pace with the interconnected, multi-media, all-encompassing nature of the unconscious today. Illustrating this point, the article focuses on the figure of the hikikomori: middle-class Japanese youths who have withdrawn from all conventional social contact to indulge exclusively computer-based interactions. Thanks to the overlap with the related figure of the ‘Bedroom DJ’, the analysis then moves on to the ambient music of Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin. It argues for the validity of the concept of an ‘audio unconscious’ distinct from Lacan's unconscious ‘structured like a language’. The final part of the article, however, examines one of James's music videos and discerns in it modes of jouissance that psychoanalysis can still describe.

scholarly journals UNSUR ESTETIKA BAHASA DALAM NOVEL-NOVEL PEMENANG SAYEMBARA FIKSYEN SAINS DAN TEKNOLOGI DARI TAHUN 2012 SEHINGGA 2017

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-212
Author(s):  
ROSNANI MD ZAIN ◽  
NIK RAFIDAH NIK MUAHAMAD AFFENDI
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Review Analysis ◽  
Language Style ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Language Styles

ABSTRAK Estetika merujuk kepada cabang ilmu yang membahaskan perihal keindahan dalam karya sastera. Unsur estetika memainkan peranan penting dalam penghasilan sesebuah karya kreatif, iaitu dijadikan sebagai medium bahasa dalam menyampaikan mesej yang jelas kepada pembaca. Kajian yang dilakukan ini berdasarkan pengamatan pengkaji tentang pendapat sarjana sastera yang mendakwa novel-novel fiksyen sains yang terhasil daripada Sayembara Fiksyen Sains dan Teknologi tidak memaparkan unsur keindahan bahasa kepada pembaca. Sehubungan dengan itu, untuk merungkai permasalahan ini pengkaji menggunakan lima buah novel pemenang Sayembara Fiksyen Sains dan Teknologi iaitu Bekamorfosis (2012) karya Jali Kenoi, Petaka Bakteria (2012) karya Mohd Kasim Mahmud, Puranakila (2015) karya Saadiah Ibrahim, Ajal (2015) karya Ruhaini Matdarin dan Yang Diselindung Samudera (2017) karya Nor Azida Ishak, Fadli al-Akiti dan Ted Mahsun. Kajian yang dilakukan ini juga mempunyai dua objektif kajian iaitu mengklasifikasi dan menganalisis unsur estetika bahasa iaitu penggunaan gaya bahasa yang terdapat dalam novel-novel kajian. Oleh itu, kajian ini menggunakan kaedah kajian kepustakaan, analisis teks dan penerapan Teori Puitika Sastera Melayu yang diasaskan oleh Muhammad Haji Salleh sebagai sokongan terhadap hujahan pengkaji. Hasil kajian yang dilakukan terhadap novel-novel fiksyen sains tersebut pengkaji mendapati dua jenis gaya bahasa yang diketengahkan oleh pengarang iaitu gaya bahasa perbandingan dan gaya bahasa pengulangan. Gaya bahasa tersebut juga dapat dikaitkan dengan konsep estetika dalam Teori Puitika Sastera Melayu iaitu keindahan dalam mendidik atau mengajar, keindahan dalam pengungkapan kesusahan dan kesedihan serta keindahan dalam rasa seperti yang dinyatakan oleh Muhammad Haji Salleh.   ABSTRACT Aesthetics refers to the branch of knowledge that debates the subject of beauty in literary works. The aesthetic element plays an important role in the production of a creative work, which serves as a language medium in delivering clear messages to the reader. This study is based on the study of literary scholars who claim that science fiction novels from the Science and Technology Fiction Contest do not present the language’s beauty element to readers. To this end, the researcher used the five novels of Science and Technology Fiction Contest winners namely Bekamorfosis (2012) by Jali Kenoi, Petaka Bakteria (2012) by Mohd Kasim Mahmud, Puranakila (2015) by Saadiah Ibrahim, Ajal (2015) by Ruhaini Matdarin and Yang Diselindung Samudera (2017) by Nor Azida Ishak, Ted Mahsun and Fadli Al-Akiti. The study also has two objectives of the study which is to classify and analyze the aesthetics of language which is the use of language style found in the research novels. Therefore, this study uses the method of literature review, analysis and application of the theory of poetic text Malay literature founded by Muhammad Haji Salleh in support of the submissions from researchers. As a result of the study of science fiction novels, researchers have identified two types of language styles that the author promotes: comparative language style and repetition language style. The style of these languages can also be associated with the aesthetic concept in the theory of poetic beauty of Malay literature in educating or teaching, discovery of beauty in distress and sadness and beauty in the sense as described by Muhammad Haji Salleh. 

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