[David Millians]

While ostensibly an art project about particular pottery forms in pre-literate Japan—a Jomon era flamboyant ceramic and Yayoi era footed jar—the real goal of this two-lesson series is to investigate with students the ways in which experts examine and interpret ancient material.

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[David Millians]

I am so happy that I enrolled in this course of study! Professor Pitelka and the materials he has provided have not only vividly presented the changing material culture over the course of the great sweep of Japanese history and before, but he has also given immense clarity to how I should look at these artifacts and their relationship to both the people that use them and the way they are understood by later Japanese and non-Japanese.

 

First, he finally cracked my tendency to view material concrete as something that simply exists and evolves materially over time by demonstrating with great clarity the co-evolving ways in which elements of material culture and the needs of their users interact over time and place. From the fascinating speculations of the pre-literate cultures to the ways Japanese people, elites in particular, understood, accessed, and manipulated their own material culture, Dr. Pitelka showed me the reasons and means addressed by cultural elements. In addition to functionality, pottery interacts with cultural and spiritual qualities. Clothing demonstrates status, lineage, and association. Food, armor, and more. Even the rarified practices of incense and tea come to establish and demonstrate cultural placement. If not them, then presumably something else would have taken their place in various eras, but that is what developed in Japanese culture from its own varied roots and its interactions with external influences from Korea, China, and the wider world. This course transformed my personal understanding of the interplay of culture and material culture, lessons I carry into the future to inform both my own learing and that of my students.

 

I also really enjoyed and benefitted from discussions of the related dynamic relationship between the materials and objects used and the meanings they have for those that use them and those trying to use them to influence the wider society, especially as each generation or era reconstructs its own understanding of Japan and being Japanese. Concepts and relationships to imperial authority, spirituality, citizenship, and more undergo shifts in time and retroactively, as needed by the people of various social strata for the novel circumstances of their own epoch. The ways in which an “immutable heritage” comes into being for both the Japanese and non-Japanese has important messages for students of Japan, as well as all of us within our own shifting cultural embraces.

 

I have relished the lessons and materials for this course! It has been a wonderful gift. I am excited to continue to explore its elements and themes into the future.

[David Millians]

I'm so sad to have missed this live discussion! There are so many ideas and possibilities for exploration in these materials. Bento boxes in societal context, UNESCO-defined Washoku, and attempts to define and codify Kyoto vegetables exemplify so well the ways in which understandings of food are culturally mediated. Kids, families, and communities experience many parallel situations. My classroom is a pretty safe space for kids at lunch, but children naturally want to express their reactions to other's meal contents, hopefully with less "ewww" and more discovery and awareness of their own emotional reactions to food, based on their cultural background. As we discussed in our first class, valuations of various "authenticities" are rife for USAens in deciding which restaurants and even cuisines to enjoy. I tend to be in favor of supporting cultural heritage, but it's unfortunate when that is understood in ways that warp or fossilize the designated area or hinder normal development, much less creativity, in that area. In parallel somewhat with the attempts to define the best of Kyoto traditional vegetables, the vast majority of grocery stores in the USA have a limited range of standardized options in their produce departments, and every specimen has to appear as near as possible to the understood-perfect form of that foodstuff.

A teacher of much younger students at my school always does a unit on apples, and one of her activities is showing the kids a range of apples breeds and wild forms and asking them which ones are "really" apples. Questions of color, shape, deformities, smell, and taste arise and are much debated. I've always been tempted to do this same activity with my ten and eleven year olds and may do so. After this reading, I think it would be interesting to do similar activities with other raw foods and types of dishes that people think they know well. For example, which of these are really sushi?

[David Millians]

China's unprecedented growth and development in recent decades has lept ahead of the development of regulations and systems to oversee and enforce them, much like earlier changes in the UK and USA, but when this interacts with an era of food (and water) scarcities in a changing environment, both natural and political, China and the rest of the world face huge, novel challenges. When I've been asked in the past about China's food scandals, I replied that the inquirer should read Sinclair's The Jungle. We've been there. Growth is hard. I'm struck by the class materials and the comments above that for China and the rest of us in the twenty-first century, we have apparent limits on how we will all get enough good food, leading to shortcuts, smuggling, gray markets, confused policies, and violence at various levels. The ways in which China, the USA, and other major food producers and consumers will affect all of us in localized and very personal ways that we cannot predict well. This session raises so many questions but also offers information about trends and issues. I hope mindful leaders and thoughtful citizens can keep needs, sources, and new technologies in mind. Even done with great care, these efforts will be imperfect and painful in many ways and places. I was born during the Green Revolution, which challenged Malthusian predictions in the last century, allowing us to feed a massive population of humans. The potential and massive side effects of these developments have affected different communities in various ways in a great spectrum of haves and have-nots. In the United States, for example, we benefit from a fundamental bounty, but so many here go hungry or have poor access to nutritious food, while our capitalist system and political policies prevent much of our excess production from consistently reaching the hungry in other parts of the world. China faces a much more constrained set of resources and options while also trying to feed the largest population on Earth. Its own systems of production, distribution, and quality assessment have undergone massive changes and are insufficient to maintain the consumer lifestyle, including food, that resembles that in the USA more and more every day. At the same time, China has its own range of access to quality victuals. Each of us can deepen our own understanding and that of our students in order to promote good choices for ourselves and our world.

[David Millians]

We always have a unit on dumplings, and these links will fold into that nicely, like a delicious filling! Thank you.

[David Millians]

During each of my trips to China with high school student, invariably, at some point, they ask to go to McDonald's, though one time it was a Pizza Hut. They're almost embarassed to ask, since the food we get in restaurants and homes is SO GOOD, but they're a combination of homesick and curious about what it's like, variations in presentation, sauces, and options. They enjoy experiencing something familiar and novel at the same time. We also come away with copies of the menu, photos, and lots of observations about how people inhabit the space, again a mix of known and discovery.

[David Millians]

The complex social and victual encounters that produced contemporary Chinese food in the USA are fascinating. I really enjoy the way Lee digs deeper into the known story to find the many narrartives and accidents underneath. I would enjoy hearing more discoveries, and I would love to be able to travel to various parts of Asia to explore the people and histories behind the elements of a cuisine that is seemingly so well known. I look forward to hearing stories from my classmates!

[David Millians]

I had a teenager on a student trip to China who brought his own fork for the whole journey, kept in a small belt sheath. The other kids harassed him (nicely) until he stopped using it after about a week and learned to use chopsticks.

[David Millians]

Modern foodways in Asia and the USA both are changing so quickly in so many ways. I am impressed by how eager companies and comsumers are to try new things, but the communication of new idea is mediated by powerful cultural expectations. As McDonald's in China and Norwegian salmon sushi in Japan demonstrates, it may only require a narrow window of acceptibility to alter, but so many possibilities never gain acceptance. A friend of mine runs a Chinese restaurant, and he claims the largest agent of change in US restaurants is the fact that so many of them have Latin employees in their kitchens, and these men and women are introducing new ideas all over the country.

Food safety in shifting foodways can be a problem anywhere, but the size of China and the scale and rapidity of change exacerbate the issue there. Regulations, inspections, and consumer awareness move more slowly than forces in the food market, good and bad. I've seen tremendous shifts in all these areas since I first visited the PRC in 2007. Clearly, suppliers and the government take food safety so much more seriously, and access to safe, fresh, even organic, ingredients has grown so much, though not as quickly as demand. Many conversations with Chinese students and their parents make it clear to me that continued improvements are a must in most parts of society.

So interesting!

[David Millians]

Greetings, everyone!

I teach a self-contained classroom of fifth and sixth graders at a K-12 private school in Atlanta, Georgia. Most school years, our them is East Asia, so I am excited to expand my knowledge in any way I can. I come to Asian studies through history via a wonderful professor in college. My wife and I love to travel, and we have visited China, Japan, and Korea, and our oldest daughter lives in Seoul. I am the Asian resource guy for my whole school. This mostly means I am asked frequently where to eat in my city and others, even overseas. What's real? What's authentic? What's best? What works for kids? How do I cook this at home? All these fraught questions and more come my way. I am excited to explore new ideas and options and good ways to talk about how to share them with children.

[David Millians]

These are great links and images. Thank you, Katharine! I'll be using them.

[David Millians]

These lectures and materials bring together so many threads from previous weeks. I'm fascinated by the interplay of the elements of objects, behavior, and identity and the ways in which they are constantly re-interpreted in each new era to create new ways to be Japanese. My ten-year old students in 2021 know only a few aspects of Japan, an uneven mix of what it is to be Japanese, and this week's material helps me better disentangle the shifts, stereotypes, and assumptions in coversations with them.

The short film "99" is a wonderful dip into broken traditions and re-making. Mount Fuji at the end re-orients all of the images that came before as at the core of Japanese tradition. I will definitely use it in class! I'd like to have students handling and working with umbrellas, fabric, and shrine materials, imagining Japan.

My wife is a potter, and she's loving all of Professor Peralta's images and insights. I'm learning from her too!

[David Millians]

The culture of this period is fascinating. I enjoyed learning more about the various ways Japanese society adapted the technology of guns or the outmoded nature of warriors into something new during the Edo Period. I think I can also make classroom connections with the ways in which our modern governments use symbols, events, and rituals to evoke their power and attributes.

The conceptual framework of Noh theater makes it difficut for those from a Western tradition of storytelling and performance. The emphasis on building an emotional experience over characterization and plot is unlike much of what I'm familiar with and moreso my students, but I think I can connect it to the emotional impact of a piece of art or perhaps even a soundtrack to one of their favorite movies, especially those with some emotional intensity. I will keep exploring.

[David Millians]

Thanks, Katharine!

[David Millians]

I think I'm finally starting to "get" the importance of the combination of objects and rituals in maintaining a community or a society. I'm struck by the vivid importance of everything from swords to tea in developing relationships and ideals for the samurai elite during this period. It's a novel way of exploring and intepreting this history and culture, and I'm excited to explore ways to share this with my students through examples and parallels in their own lives and society.

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