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Katherine CanebaI agree with all of you that with the rise of South Korea's "soft power" through cultural exports, educators should strive to increase the amount of instructional time spent on Korean history, society, and culture to balance students' awareness of pop culture with the historical and cultural background of the country that gave birth to these forms of modern entertainment. Whereas students can potentially learn about a country's history through watching movies, TV, or anime in the case of Japan, my opinion is that there is not as much potential for learning these topics just through popular music and music videos. Particularly with K-pop, it is geared towards an international market now, so the visuals and sound are generally very Westernized (save for the Asian-looking K-pop stars and mostly Korean lyrics). Korean movies, TV dramas, and variety shows are all of potential interest to students as well. Ultimately, I think it would be beneficial to incorporate more sources from the cultures themselves, not just Western perspectives like M*A*S*H that take place in Korea during the Korean War but focus on American characters.
Katherine CanebaI didn't realize that there is a Comfort Women Memorial in Glendale, but it is now on my list of must-visit places. I sought out and read a book about the comfort women while I was in undergrad, and the biggest question I had had at the time (Why don't we hear about more people being descended from comfort women?) was answered: they forcibly sterilized the majority of those women and girls. I believe there were a small number of comfort women who did still get pregnant, but I am not sure on the specific data or whether the pregnancies were allowed to go to term vs. ending in forced abortions. I notice that of those surviving comfort women with living family members, the family are all great-nieces and nephews or other more removed relatives, not direct children or grandchildren. Not only did these women and girls go through life being ostracized by society for their sexual enslavement, but they were also denied any reproductive future that they may have wanted. Forced sterilizations have happened throughout modern history in many countries, including in China in Jinxiang (Uighur territory), North Korean gulags (concentration camps), and in the US with ICE detention camps. A medical ethics/eugenics/reproductive justice discussion of forced sterilization and its ongoing oppression of people with female reproductive systems would make for a salient learning experience for students.
Katherine CanebaHello Serece, I think it is intriguing how you decided to watch this documentary without any prerequisite knowledge or interest in the group Blackpink, but rather because you seem to have a background in watching many other documentaries about musicians/performers. I am coming from the opposite perspective in that I watched <Blackpink: Light Up The Sky> specifically because I am a fan. I get the sense that the most famous K-pop boy group in the West is BTS, and the most famous girl group is Blackpink. I think that a good percentage of our students in the US are also familiar with them, so this documentary may be of specific interest to them.
I wanted to clarify that out of the four group members, three are ethnically Korean and one is Thai (born and raised in Thailand until age 14 when she was chosen to become a K-pop trainee). The story of the Thai member, Lisa, who ultimately overcame the language barrier and gained the respect and admiration of others, resonated with me because I have also experienced being a newly arrived foreigner who could not speak the language. Many of our students may also have memories of immigrating to the US, so this experience of otherness could speak to them as well.
Katherine CanebaJapan, South Korea, and other countries that rank very low on female participation in the workforce seem to have policies in the government and private sectors to disincentivize women from having children. I think that this is key to both issues of falling birthrate and a small female labor force: women are forced to chose either a career (in which they are sadly paid far less than their male counterparts) or childbearing because their companies and the government make it too unrealistic to pursue both. A thriving workforce that also sustains the population growth must include a high percentage of working women. I think that it is a good thing for young people to go through the education system and see that the majority of teachers are women (particularly in primary education), and these women tend to have families and children of their own. Education and health care are both caregiving sectors, which tend to attract many women due to our socialization to be nurturers. I hope that we in education and health care can be positive examples for these students.
In most recent international news, the #KuToo Movement (kudu [“shoes”] + kutsuu [“pain”] + #MeToo) has raised awareness of the pressure on Japanese working women to conform to painful societal expectations of dress: another form of controlling women’s bodies. (But in fairness, Western societies like the US also have the implied dress code for women in certain professions like business and law to wear painful high heels and skirts to work in frigid air-conditioned office buildings, while their male counterparts can comfortably wear low-heeled leather-soled shoes and long pants.) This week’s topic also reminds me of my Japanese friend who is a young salarywoman in Tokyo: she describes a poor work-life balance and no meaningful length of vacation time for traveling or entertaining friends visiting from abroad.
To learn more about the human perspective of being a young woman in Japan, I encourage people to watch the Netflix animated show <Aggretsuko> (created by Sanrio), which strikingly illustrates many of the points that Dr. Elyssa Faison brought up in her lecture. The show features an anthropomorphic red panda named Retsuko who is a corporate accountant in Tokyo in a world of other anthropomorphic animals. Her boss calls her “Short-Timer” because he pegs her as a typical young woman who intends to quit her job whenever it is that she gets engaged or married, and he always expects her to serve him tea in the mornings, even though there are other women in the same department that he could have assigned this role. And they did, indeed, have a female employee in the same department who left the company when she got married. And furthermore, Retsuko’s two best friends are older women in managerial positions in the company, neither of whom are married or have children (one was married for 3 months and then divorced her husband because she did not like being subservient to him). Throughout the show is Retsuko’s hobby of death metal screaming as her main form of stress relief (performed secretly in karaoke rooms at first, then gradually more and more publicly as she lets her friends in on her hobby), as well as her overarching desire to find meaning in her life beyond being an ordinary office worker in search of eventual marriage and children.
Katherine CanebaThe topic of women in Japan has been an enlightening subject for me through my learning for this session.
Firstly, I found it so surprising that the modern Constitution of Japan was written by the Americans, with gender equality explicitly stated. However, despite appearing to be progressive on paper, the practical reality of Japanese society is strongly patriarchal. I was also shocked (but, sadly, not surprised) to learn that Emperor Naruhito’s daughter had been denied the throne at the last minute because Naruhito’s younger brother had a son just before the government would have legalized female succession in modern, post-WWII Japan. Patriarchy will do whatever it takes to sustain itself, even to the point of moving down the line of succession to someone further removed just for the sake of having the next emperor be a male.
Continuing on the subject of the oppression of women by the patriarchy, it was also shocking to me that oral female contraception only became legal in Japan in 1999, which was decades after it became legal in the US.
Lastly, the analogy of Japanese men using women as “toilets” (e.g., passive recipients of the bodily fluids of men) disturbed my sensibilities because it was so apt: men seem to have been using women as objects of sexual pleasure and as vessels of reproduction.
Essentially, men in societies all over the world have long sought to control women by controlling their reproductive systems, and Japan is no different. This greatly impacts my role as a school nurse because young people all over the world, including in the US, are growing up in patriarchies, which in turn impacts their health and their life decisions. Society tells women that their individual identities, hopes, and dreams are secondary to their socially prescribed roles of wife and mother: teenage girls do not dream of ambitious careers because they are told to know their place. And society tells men and boys that women are meant to be homemakers and raise the children while they are away from home, working inhumane hours, and are never truly present in their children’s lives. Things are slowly changing, but they have a long way to go.
Katherine CanebaHi Brigid, I definitely agree with your point and there is a lot to discuss about the spread of Christianity in East Asia. I am also reminded of the Boxer Rebellion in China in the late 1890s, which was in part an anti-Christian movement. In China during that time period as well, Christian missionaries were proselytizing and gaining new followers, and it was also particularly attractive to Chinese women because the traditional social hierarchy denied women many rights and dignities afforded to men. Korea and China have massive Christian populations today, and South Korea is well-known for sending Christian and/or Catholic missionaries abroad all over the world.
Katherine CanebaI honestly was unaware of the fire history of Tokyo before we studied this topic and the accompanying presentation by Dr. Wills, so this has been a very eye-opening topic for me. I also did not tend to think as much about the amount of devastation to buildings and loss of life that the average Japanese people in Japan suffered during WWII (not including the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor the people who developed cancer in the decades afterward). Given my personal background as an American, I think that my focus has generally been on the millions of people in other countries (e.g., US military personnel and civilians in the Asia-Pacific) that the Japanese military killed during the war. I have never visited Tokyo so I haven’t seen Ginza District for myself, but it was fascinating to learn the influence of Western architecture there. If and/or when I do get the chance to visit, I’ll especially be on the lookout for signs of Western influence in the city planning.
The idea of living a “portable lifestyle” is one that is not so familiar to modern people in a relatively stable environment, but refugees from wars, famine, and climate-related disasters have always been there, and as we move into a future of increasing climate emergency, ever more people will lose their material possessions due to displacement from their homes. It will be difficult for adult mentors of young people to nurture a sense of hope for the future when it seems (to me, at least) that we as a human species will inevitably suffer more as consequence for endlessly taking from the environment. I hope that children today will grow up asking more questions than we were taught to: Why is society the way it is? Who and/or what benefits from these systems? And why are the people in power so resistant to changing things for the better?
Katherine CanebaThis lecture cleared up a lot of vague half-understandings and questions that I have had for a long time about what exactly led up to Japan’s role in the Asia-Pacific Region in the 1900s. The Self-Strengthening Movement in China was reflected clearly in Japan’s similar aim to assimilate Western technologies and systems they deemed useful, while still maintaining a nationalist identity that was uniquely culturally and politically Japanese. However, unlike the Chinese, who struggled with significant internal political unrest that kept their focus inward, the Japanese were able to plan better and be proactive in sending a knowledge expedition (a.k.a., the Iwakura Mission) around the world to “study their enemy”, so to speak. I got the sense that Japan was able to prepare more effectively for Western influences by taking control over which foreign reforms to implement, as well as how.
Furthermore, it was surprising to me (although perhaps it shouldn’t have been) to learn that Japan learned the ways of colonization from observing how Western powers colonized other territories (and coveting the kind of power and resources they had gained from their colonies). Even though there were some countries in Asia that seemingly escaped Western colonization, Japan ended up being a colonizing power throughout the rest of Asia during WWII. It is so ironic that countries like Great Britain and the United States that ended up forming the Allies in WWII had inspired the formation of their enemy in the Japanese Empire.
Lastly, this lecture also brought up “revisionist history” questions: What if Japan had not colonized Hokkaido? What if Sakhalin had become part of modern Japan instead of Russia? The political boundaries that we may take for granted as facts today were not so clear one hundred years ago. In my own lifetime, Pluto started out as a planet and then was demoted, the Berlin Wall came down, the erstwhile country of Sudan split into Sudan and South Sudan, East Timor split off from Indonesia to gain religious freedom, etc. If I were teaching students in a classroom setting about world history, I would promote discussion about how events in history shape the world as we know it right now, and how history never stops happening.
Katherine CanebaHello everyone! My name is Katherine and I am a school nurse at Los Angeles Unified School District, currently working remotely; this is my first year with LAUSD, after 4 years with previous school districts in Northern California (Bay Area). Since I am not a classroom teacher and I don't have a realistic hope of being able to complete the assignments, I have been permitted to audit the class. I will participate in the Zoom sessions, look at the readings, and watch the videos for personal enrichment, as well as post in the forums. Ultimately, I feel pleased and privileged to be here and to have this opportunity to learn!
When I was younger, I did a "gap year" (between high school graduation and undergraduate matriculation) as a Rotary Youth Exchange student from the US to South Korea. I lived in Busan, the second largest city on the southeastern coast of South Korea, where I went to Korean-language public high school and stayed with host families (or "homestays"). Since then, I continued to take Korean language classes on and off through the years as time allowed, I kept in touch with friends abroad, and I continued seeking out learning opportunities when possible. It has been a fascinating journey for me to live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area and now Los Angeles, where East Asian immigrants, cultures, and politics contribute so much to the diversity of these regions.
Outside of work, I dedicate my time to:
After Coronavirus restrictions started, I have also been taking acting classes via Zoom since May 2020. It’s been a great way to understand myself further, both inside (internal emotions) and out (physical presentation).
