click for the whole picture as a 63k gif Roland Barthes  L' empire des signes Roland Barthes essays have been accompanying me in all my journeys to Japan. Important for my project are the observations of daily occurrences and the way Barthes transposes them in the grid of his more universe thinking on semiotic and sign systems. I am attracted by the charm and easiness he treats his subjects and by the unexpected but comprehensible associations. Until now I've found two texts more or less concerning my interests in the project: Les années structures, les années révoltes by Bernard Sichère Mythologies by Tony Mac Neill click for the whole picture as a 63k gif Chris Marker  Sans Soleil Chris Marker's film from 1980 has been for a long time one of my very favourite. I adore the poetic way Chris Marker is making relations between places and time. His accent is not explicitly cultural comparison, but as a man of the world, travelling with open eyes he is able to pick and combine substantial material from the featured places. Adrian Miles from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University made a huge site on Marker; or go directly to the Sans Soleil related part or the astonishingly extensive bibliography click for the whole picture as a 88k jpg Mark Schilling  The Encyclopedia Of Japanese Pop Culture Mark Schilling's book describes some of the more famous Japanese pop excrescenses in the recent three decades. For my project this is very valuable because it can give me more background information to aspects I've already known (but have not been too familiar with) or introduces new facts that the non-Japanese world happened to miss so far... In 67 short, historical descriptive essays the author covers idols like Miyazawa Rie, Tora-san, Mario or is thinking about phenomenon like Yakuza movies, Television News, Instant Ramen or the Sumo Dynasty of the Hanadas for example. There was an online chat with the author in 1997 by a Tokyo Trend E-Zine. Read it, learn more about the author or order the book on this page. And amazon.com has some reviews as well as the table of content with a list of all the subjects of the book here. click for the whole picture as a 75k jpg Frederik L. Schodt  Dreamland Japan - Writings On Modern Manga In the sequel to "Manga! Manga! The World Of Japanese Comics" the author gives additional information to the extensive universe of drawn picture stories in Japan. Brief essays are introducing important magazines and leading artists. It is a valuable guide book which helps through the immense amount of paper one is opposed to studying this world. The editor of the book, stonebridge, has more information. click for the whole picture as a 175k gif Kurosawa Akira  Rashomon Akira Kurosawa's movie comes closest to my ideas about multi-perspective storytelling: the same story told in four different ways gets less and less objective. If my project can demonstrate one thing, then it should be the picture's dependency of their cultural background, making clear the shift in the representation of a "common reality" in two different cultures like Europe and Japan and permitting conclusions about the thinking which is behind the picture production. To make this mechanics obvious in my culture (through the mirror of the mechanics in Japan) is one of the ideas behind the project. click for the whole picture as a 113k jpg Ian Buruma  The Missionary and the Libertine - Love and War in East and West A collection of articles from the past 10 years by the asian specialist Ian Buruma. He namely is the author of Wages of Guilt,1994 and some other books about the East. He works as a journalist in London. Here are some of the Japan-related chapters in Missionary and Libertine to show the range of his interests Mishima Yukio: The Suicidal Dandy, Oshima Nagisha: Japanese Sex, Tanizaki Junichiro: The Art of Cruelty, Yoshimoto Banana: Pink Dreams, Edward Seidensticker: An American in Tokyo, Ghosts of Pearl Harbor, We Japanese, The Nanny State of Asia. There is a rather strange kind of review out there; it is not really worth to go and read it! click for the whole picture as a 75k jpg Donald Richie and Joseph I. Anderson  The Japanese Film -Art and Industrie Richie/Anderson's standard work on Japanese cinema with "all" the information on the history of the seventh art in this country from the beginning until the eighties (together with his update from 1989). click for the whole picture as a 50k jpg Noel Burch To the Distant Observer Burch's interesting attempt to consider the Japanese movie production as a critique of the western Hollywood narrative cinema. Above all he cites Mizoguchi and Ozu and their aesthetical strategies to establish a theory of critique. As clearly pointed out in Lehman's article (see below) this attempt in the tradition of French structuralism and marxist theories is not without questionable projections using the "otherness of the orient". There is a highly informative introduction and a big amount of pictures to Burch's book by J.A. Murphy, University of Florida with the title "Japanese Film as a Critique of Hollywood Realist Narrative Cinema" And some additional "Notes for Noel Burchs To The Distant Observer" by Abe Marc Nornes at: click for the whole picture as a 75k jpg James Mak, Shiam Sunder, Shigeyuki Abe, Kazuhiro Igawa  Japan: Why it Works, Why it doesn't - Economics in Everyday Life Japan has many features in which it differs from any other, especially western countries. Some of them are recorded in statistics (Statistics Bureau , Government of Japan or Japan Information Network), others are just attracting the foreigner's eye by their sheer occurrence. The five authors of the book take some of the statistics, where Japan writes extraordinary digits and try to explain it simply. So you will learn for example why there are so many small shops in Japan, why rice is so expensive in Japan, why Japan is the paradise of vending machines or if Japan is an egalitarian society or why doctors describe so many pills. click for the whole picture as a 75k jpg Sharon Lockhart  Goshogaoka 1997, 16 mm, color, 63 Min This film which I have seen at the Image Forum Festival '98 in Osaka impressed me mainly due to its austere form, fitting to the rigid exercise routines and drills of a girls' basket ball team. Filmed in a middle-school gymnasium in suburban Japan, the film consists of six ten-minute takes, in which the various cadences of chanting voices and bodily movements digress into distinct studies; together, they construct a subtle and multi-layered social portrait framed within a study of choreographed movement. Once more I was shocked by a learning system which is based on mechanic drills, rather than joy, playing or creativity. There is a review of the film on the occasion of its screening at the sundance film festival. click for the whole picture as a 175k jpg John Clammer Contemporary Urban Japan - a Sociology of Consumption John Clammer is Professor of Comparative Sociology and Asian Studies at Sophia University, Tokyo. I haven't yet started to read his book, but the blurb (Klappentext) sounds interesting: This volume demonstrates a fresh approach to urban studies as well as a new way of looking at contemporary Japan which links economy and society in an innovative way. Just in case anybody is interested, here is a rather large Bibliography on Consumption-Mediated Youth Identity in Urban Japan. Articles de Bary, Brett. Review of To the Distant Observer, Journal of Japanese Studies 8.2 (Summer 1982): 405-410. Felperin, Leslie. John Sayles: Walking Alone, Sight and Sound 6.9 (September 1996): 22-23. Greenfield, Karl Taro. "Otaku: the Incredibly Strange Mutant Creatures Who Rule the Universe of Alienated Japanese Zombie Computer Nerds (Otaku to You)," Wired 1.1 (1993): 66-69. read it! Izbicki, Joanne. "The Shape of Freedom: The Female Body in Post-Surrender Japanese Cinema" U.S.-Japan Women's Journal 12 (1997): 103-153. Lehman, Peter. "The Mysterious Orient, the Crystal Clear Orient, the Non-existent Orient: Dilemmas of Western Scholars of Japanese Film," Journal of Film and Video 39 (Winter 1987): 5-15. Malcomson, Scott L. "The Pure Land Beyond the Sea: Barthes, Burch and the Uses of Japan," Screen 26.3,4 (May/August 1985): 23-33. McDonald, Keiko Iwai. "Family, Education, and Postmodern Society: Yoshimitsu Morita's The Family Game," East-West Film Journal 4.1 (December 1989): 53-68. Schilling, Mark. "Into the Heartland with Tora-san," Japan Quarterly 40.2 (April-June 1993): 199-206. Silverberg, Miriam. "Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie Chaplin, and the Case of the Disappearing Western Woman: a Picture Story," Positions 1.1 (Spring 1993): 24-76. Ueno Toshiya. "The Beginnings of Cinema the Outside of Cinema," in 7 Spectres, ed. Abe' Mark Nornes and Fukushima Yukio (Yamagata/Tokyo: Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, 1995). [Essay exploring connections between Walter Benjamin and Nakai Masakazu.]