So it turns out that some pretty cool Japan-related events happen at Columbia.
It all started a few weeks ago when I saw a poster for a movie called "Doubles: Japan and America's Intercultural Children" that was being shown at Barnard. I didn't know anything about it, but I gathered from the poster that it was about the children of mixed marriages between Japanese and Americans, and that naturally interested me so I decided to go. The movie was about an hour long, and turned out to be pretty interesting as well as moving. It focused quite a bit on children who were born during the American occupation of Japan following WWII, although there were also modern day children featured (well, modern being 1995). All in all, pretty interesting.
Then, after leaving the movie I went onto the website for the Donald Keene Center, which had shown the movie. Turns out that the Donald Keene Center is a Japanese cultural institute here at Columbia. I looked around their website and promptly became very excited because I saw that they are having Gary Snyder speak on October 24th! For those of you who don't know, Gary Snyder is a beat era poet - he hung around with Ginsberg and Kerouac and all of them. He also was interested in Buddhism and lived in Japan for many years. A lot of his poetry is about nature, but Japan plays a pretty big role in some of it. He's one of my favorite poets so I'm going to go hear him and I'm extremely excited!
It's pretty nice that such cool stuff goes on here.
2 comments:
いいですね。I don't know anything about poetry except that it has to rhyme. Otherwise it's just nonsensical blubbering.
そうですか、I didn't know there was a Japanese center either. I will check it out. That rocks. はなえさん、you rock.
Oops I was going to respond to your comment, "what did you do in Japan?"
I went around with my friend and his friend in Tokyo for 5 days. We spent a disproportionate amount of time in Akihabara, the electronics/anime/nerd district. I bought a lot of goodies there. Everywhere you go, everything just looks so amazing. But I hear some parts look like California... so maybe California is a cheap alternative.
Then my friend and I went to Osaka and hung out with our other friend, who showed us around, and we went to こうしえん。We took a combination of the ふつう、きゅうこう、and とっきゅう。 Osaka also has an electronics district called Nipponbashi, so of course we stopped there too. And we went to a Maid Cafe. Don't worry, it wasn't weird because one of us was a girl. No, it wasn't weird!
That's pretty much it. The train rides were all fun because the scenery around you is so different and interesting. Lots of farms and Asian looking houses.
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