Second essay: Institutions and Individuals in Contemporary Japan
"If you want to get across an idea, wrap it in a person" -- Ralph Bunche
One of my ambitions in this course is enhance your appreciation of how the institutions of one's society shape the life one leads but also, conversely, how the lives we lead in turn give form and meaning to those institutions. For your second essay, I would like you to write a profile of a person or a place in contemporary Japan. If a person, you should place him/her in a nexus of relationships and in terms of family background, educational experience, work (or work aspirations if still in school), and any other significant dimensions of personal identity. If a place, you should try to depict both its structural features and the characteristics and relationships of the people who customarily inhabit it. The point of this topic is to use the device of a character profile to develop a realistic and revealing (although not necessarily representative) perspective on the institutions and lifeways of contemporary Japan.
Your profile will most likely be of an imagined individual or institutional site, which you creatively depict. While some of you may know relatives, acquaintances, or host families whom you might wish to profile, this can prove more difficult than it seems (and I would encourage you to discuss such a possibility with me). Another approach is to base your profile on a character whom you have encountered in our reading or documentaries.
Both alternatives offer considerable room for conceptualization and development, which can be advantageous but also potentially baffling to the writer. A first step may be to reflect on examples from our course readings that might offer guidelines and hints. The most fully developed profile is the extended portrait that Elisabeth Bumiller draws of Mariko Tanaka. It focuses on the year that Bumiller spent in interviewing Tanaka, but through that, extends backwards to sketch her life history and extends outward to describe the networks of family, friends, neighborhood, and workplaces in which Tanaka's life is embedded.
Like Bumiller, you should aim to draw a portrait that will reveal the intersections of family, school, and work. For instance, you might depict a woman on the verge of graduating from a junior college, thinking back on education and forward to work and marriage. To this you can add details of her life that both particularize her and place her in recognizably contemporary Japanese terms — for example, study in the US for a year, a father taken off fast-track, a fascination for comics, living next to a construction project using foreign laborers, a mother who joins a New Religion, etc. How does such a person think and act and what might she want out of life?
Alternatively, you may wish to profile an institutional site -- for example, a school, a factory, a household, or even a pachinko parlor, a police station, or train station. Here, too, we have several examples from the readings (Ueda Bank, Kozu Junior High School, etc.). Although I certainly do not expect the length or expertise of these studies, they can usefully expand your horizon of possibilities. Your aim here should be to flesh out the site--both the internal social relations that constitute it and its external environment.
In either case, use what you know as a starting point and apply an anthropological imagination. For instance, in a documentary on a Fuji Film corporate work site, we will meet a young college-graduate, Shimosaka, who has just joined the company. Try to imagine what he is like fifteen years later, at age 36, and how his life might be then embedded in an institutional nexus. There are many possible strategies for developing your profile, which you should think about, talk about, and experiment with. I can imagine an essay that is built around two contrasting positions -- for example, the views of a student facing entrance exams or some other critical juncture versus his/her parents' perspective on that. If your topic is a site, you might highlight the contrasting positions and views of a daughter-in-law and mother-in-law, or husband and wife, or workplace boss and subordinate.
You can also be creative in the format of your profile. Most will perhaps adopt an essay form, but I am open to other possibilities as well. A hanseibun (school "reflection essay"), a letter, an interview transcript, a panel discussion, a suicide note, a probation report, a funeral oration, and a job application are all examples of frameworks through which a lifeway can be revealed. If you wold like to see some examples of such profiles written for the course in previous years, please see here. Note that I make these available to you with the explicit permission of the student authors. It will help immensely though to have a conception of the person(s) and/or sites in the context of your emerging understanding of contemporary Japan. You will not be making an argument in the sense of a hypothesis to test. Nonetheless, such a profile can and should make a point about what you are coming to believe through this course to be the significant features, linkages, possibilities, and pressures in contemporary Japan.
The construction of the essay as well as its subject offers a range of options. Whether you adopt first-person or third-person voicing, whether you fashion the essay as a distanced "ethnographic" account or a life history "interview," whether you have a compressed time-frame ('a day in the life of...') or a longer-term perspective — these and other issues are part of the challenge and, hopefully, pleasure of the assignment. Try out possibilities – on yourself, on friends, with me.
The assignment is designed so that the materials and ideas required can be found within the assignments and lectures of the course. It is not necessary that you do outside reading or research. You are free to draw on other sources and experiences, but I prefer that you devote your time and energy towards some creative synthesizing of the issues and materials of the course and towards a careful and stylish expression of those ideas. The suggested length of this essay is ten pages. I am not strict about word count or page count, but there is no need to go on at greater length. I always prefer a well-turned phrase to an extra page. Please see here for the form that we use in evaluating your final version.
You will be evaluated on the quality of your thinking and writing and on your ability to draw upon a wide range of course materials. Avoid a simple recitation of my lectures. I am more interested in how you have come to reflect upon them and relate them to the readings and video documentaries. I recognize that the format of such an essay can make it difficult to reference your sources. Footnotes, for example, may detract from the flow of your narrative. I would suggest as a solution that you append a list of sources that have been directly relevant to your writing (including books and articles, interviews, "field" observations, lecture notes, and video documentaries).
There are two deadlines. By Friday, October 7th at 5 p.m. on dropbox, you must submit a first draft of the essay. I expect it to show a good faith effort to be engaged in the project, but I also expect that it will be rough, partial, unfinished, tentative, and preliminary! It will not be given a letter grade, but we will respond with suggestions and advice. If you do not submit a first draft by this date, you will be ineligible for a final grade above a B.
The second, and final, version of the essay is due on Friday, October 28th by 5 p.m on dropbox.
As always, I am available to meet with you to discuss your ideas and questions.