Skip to main content

Precis: "Making Majority Culture" (2005) by Roger Goodman

Roger Goodman’s article, “Making Majority Culture” (2005), introduces the major argument of his thesis which revolves around discovering ‘what makes the people Japanese’, through examining the conception and briefly tackling the critiques garnered by published documentations and scholarly works on Japanese Culture during the 1980’s that was aptly categorised as “Nihonjinron” or theories about the Japanese People. He examines two main authors of the nihonjinron category – Nakane Chie and Doi Takeo – whose works would later be translated into English and become one of the primary sources for foreigners who are studying the Japanese Culture. Goodman highlights two main concepts in both authors’ work: firstly, that the current Japanese Culture was explained to have origins relating to familial ties and sense of duty whose concept dates back to the feudal era; and secondly, that group-ism is collectively seen more important than individualism, which was the backbone of the economic rise of the country during the 1980’s. Goodman also quoted a famous historiographer Edward Said who wrote “Orientalism” (1979), which would assert the idea that the main purpose of the nihonjinron was to create an identity for the Japanese People, not with respect to it’s neighbouring asian countries, but set against the backdrop of the “west”. Given the treatment of this article, Goodman aimed to contribute to academic papers or a journal studies of culture and is intended for a well-educated audience with prior knowledge to international relations, critical thinking and cultural studies.

 (October 12, 2015)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bibliography: " Game Design as Narrative Architecture" (2004) by Henry Jenkins

Jenkins, Henry. 2004. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game , edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118–30. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. In this article, Jenkins examines games less as stories than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility. He list downs the characteristics of games as defined by current Ludology versus Narratology debates such as: (1) not all games tell stories but they do have narrative aspirations, follows genre entertainment and previous narrative experiences; (2) narrative analysis need not be prescriptive; (3) games should not be reduced to the experience of a story; and (4) if games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in the same ways that other media tell stories for games as a medium, specifically, is what distinguishes them from other narrative traditions. He also lists down the problems and limitations within the current game study discourses, often pointing out how ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Precis + Critical Response Paper: " The Imaginary" (2006) Chapter 1 part 1 by Claudia Strauss

Reevaluating Scholarships (October 17, 2019) In Claudia Strauss’s article “The Imaginary” (2006), she gives a detailed discussion and analysis of the major scholarships in cultural studies regarding the matter of the Imaginaries, such as the works of Castoriadis, Lacan, Anderson, and Taylor, in order to map out the essential arguments that are more popularly being used/cited in cultural studies research, before she examines how Ivy uses these concepts with regard to the national-imaginaries with the Japanese socio-cultural sphere. In summary, Strauss explains that Castoriadis was concerned with "concepts of cultural abstraction, reification and homogenization, while Lacan used the concept of the imaginary to explain fantasies, and Anderson and Taylor used the concept for explaining cultural models as potentially valuable when used with person-centered ethnographic methods to study real rather than abstract cultural subjects” (323). Despite the summation of the the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Precis: "The Invention of the Martial Arts: Kano Jigoro and Kodokan Judo" (1998) by Inoue Shun

In Inoue Shun’s “The Invention of the Martial Arts: Kano Jigoro and Kodokan Judo” (1998), Inoue explores the modern invention, and subsequent reinvention, of the Japanese martial arts by an examination of Kodokan judo (163). This is done through a detailed discussion of Kano’s decision and active participation of creating the new martial arts such as: conception, process of modernization through scientification of the martial arts, promotions and competitions, institutionalizations and adoptions into various agencies (government institutions, universities, etc.), establishment of the Kodokan Cultural Association (promotion of the basic principles of Kodokan judo as well as serving as a legitimate infrastructure and governing body that actively promotes the new martial arts ideology), its inevitable re-invention post-Kano years by the Dai Nihon Butokukai (leading to an ultranationalistic role), and finally, a return to the sportification of budo post-WW2 in order to escape censorship wh...
Post a Comment
Read more