Details
*Note - This is an Archived course*
The history of postwar Tokyo reveals an essential feature of the modern city, i.e. the city as a place of visualities. In postwar Tokyo, countless gazes fell upon others; gazes from and upon Americans and the Emperor, gazes going up skyscrapers or rushing aggressively through the cityscape, and gazes twining and wriggling among classes, genders, and ethnic groups in downtown Tokyo. In Part 2, we will focus on the geopolitics of these gazes in modern Tokyo. What kinds of gazes fell upon the war orphans, the poor, and the marginalized groups in Tokyo? How did students themselves, who represented the vast accumulation of knowledge in Tokyo, perform in front of these gazes? Moreover, how did cinema or television shows, as media for these gazes, implicate the whole city? In answering these questions, we will identify the geopolitics historically involved in the practice of “visualizing postwar Tokyo.”
This course is in the series, Visualizing Japan, and it will be offered immediately after the first course in the series, Visualizing Japan (1850s - 1930s): Westernization, Protest, Modernity, by MITx and HarvardX.
*This is a past/archived course. At this time, you can only explore this course in a self-paced fashion. Certain features of this course may not be active, but many people enjoy watching the videos and working with the materials. Make sure to check for
reruns of this course.
Outline
- The way of the dynamic exchange of gazes in postwar Tokyo from different perspectives
- How technologies for visualizing were developed and accepted by people in Tokyo
- The research on the poor and the margins of urban society with the sociological theories behind them
- The transformation of Tokyo as the city of students “visualizing” in cities and “postwar” in Japan
