I unfortunately was unable to attend the last seminar due to a school event, but this gave me the opportunity to visit the USC Pacific Asia Museum to learn more about Asian history and culture. I have lived in Pasadena the last two years and had not realized how close this museum was to me. The museum was very easy to navigate, and I appreciated how it divided the art by the different countries: China, Korea, and Japan.

The first part of the museum has artifacts from South and SouthEast Asia, as well as the Pacific, and I particularly found interesting the statutes that dealt with Buddhism and the Buddha. Since I teach sixth grade history, I made sure to take pictures of these Buddhist artifacts to show in my classroom when I teach this content next year. They had different tools, baskets, jade, metals, etc. to examine as well. In the Japanese art hall, I appreciated the different scroll paintings and scenic pictures on display. There was one in particular that depicted a winter landscape that was so beautiful! It was illustrated by Tanomura Chokunyu. This gave me the idea to incorporate more landscape type pictures/paintings when I teach about Asia, this way students get a more visual perspective on what these countries are about. In the Korean art hall, the section on shamans caught my attention, in that I didn’t know much about them previously and it gave me more insight and information to teach my students about next year. They had really cool shaman bells as well. In the China art hall, I liked how they had a video that talked about Chinese stamps and calligraphy, and then had the artifacts next to the video being shown. Definitely added more knowledge to what we had learned in class previously. My favorite artifact in this hall was the Chinese wedding jacket, in that it was made up of brilliant colors and designs, very elaborately designed. I even created a video to show my students next time I teach China. Overall, I enjoyed this museum and would definitely recommend checking it out!