After completing the 2021 US-China Institute course Objects and Ritual in Japanese History with Professor Morgan Pitelka, I recalled the Ghibli Studio movie From Up on Poppy Hill. While the sweetly told story has many twists and turns that enchant my students, my thoughts turned to the remarkable details of material culture throughout the anime, something common to most of Hiyao Miyazaki’s films. The main character’s home, the interior of small ships, and the whimsical and wild collections of objects in the Latin House, the high school’s house for various campus clubs, are painted in every detail, from tea cups to typewriters, to the clothing of students and sailors. In addition to its depiction of a slice of life for young people in post-war Japan, it includes these many elements, a mix of traditional and modern in a changing Yokohama. It would be fun to watch it with students in small teams, each responsible for recording, probably in a shared online doc, as many objects and their uses as they can find. I could have each team designate someone to take screenshots of the movie to document their finds and then compare. Beforehand, we would create categories of objects that they think make sense and then discuss afterwards the categories we missed and the objects that fell outside our original thinking. This night reveal something about different assumptions in 1960s Yokohama, 2000s Japanese anime, and 2020s students in the USA, and it could reveal comparisons among us and within those different eras. At the end I could have each student select an object their curious about to learn more about and report back to class or in an online material objects museum.
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