I just got back from a conference in Nagoya. This was actually a result of attending the International Pragmatics Conference in Sweden last summer where I met an Australian guy who is working at Nagoya University. He invited me to participate in a conference on “Identity and Text Interpretation in Everyday Life.” The university has a nice five-year grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education to examine textual interpretation, so they were able to invite a number of speakers from all over Japan as well as some people from Australia, Singapore, and MIT. We ended up with quite a range of interdisciplinary papers on everything from 12th century carvings in British cathedrals through interactive digital media like Second Life (where people interact using avatars). There was a lot of focus on “visual texts” including not only the two papers I just mentioned, but also a really nice presentation from the MIT guy. MIT has worked together with a number of museums and archives to create an online archive of images of Japan and Japan’s encounters with the outside world—everything from photographs to woodblock prints, drawings, and postcards—ranging from Perry’s “opening” of Japan to the West up through WWII. It’s all under a “Creative Commons” license meaning that anyone can freely download the images and use them however you want as long as it’s not for profit. It’s a wonderful research and teaching tool—check it out at http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027j/menu/
Linguistic anthropology was also well-represented. I presented some of my work on Japanese wedding speeches. Zane (the Australian guy who helped organize the conference) gave a nice talk looking at neighborhood interactions in a city in Indonesia and how people use a mix of two local languages (Indonesian and Javanese) to construct identities. My colleague Debra, who works down in Kyushu (the southern-most of the main islands) gave a talk about attitudes towards local dialects in Kyushu. It is a very timely topic, because Miyazaki Prefecture recently elected a governor who ran under the slogan “Things must change” pronounced in the local dialect. This is really radical, because local dialects are traditionally looked down on and avoided in public speaking. The really interesting thing, as Debra pointed out, is that the dialect boundaries run through the prefecture, so this particular slogan, spoken in that particular way, would only have actually been the “native dialect” of a fraction of the population, but now that it has become famous, even people from other parts of the prefecture are claiming it as their own. An interesting example of the revaluing of particular local language forms.
Sunday evening, after the conference was officially over, several speakers, one of the local organizers, and some local graduate students all went out to a local pub to relax and celebrate. Whenever Japanese drink or socialize together, they always start with a toast with everyone raising their glasses and saying, “Kanpai!” Then the grad students started ordering dish after dish, each of which was passed around for everyone to take a bit onto individual plates in front of us. Every half hour or so they would order a new round of food—salads, little pizzas (even smaller than a typical one-person pizza in the US), spaghetti, French fries, and various flavors of pilaf topped with a thin omelet as a sort of covering. We were pretty full by the end of the evening.
One of the speakers at the conference was a British professor of Russian language and literature who worked in Australia for many years and is now retired. He’s also done interesting work looking at sculpture and other visual arts as “texts” (he was the guy who talked about church carvings). In addition to all his other talents, he plays the guitar. So after an hour or two of socializing, he brought out his guitar and we sang folk songs for awhile. He started with “The Wild Rover” and then sang the Australian Barbecue song for Zane (http://artists.letssingit.com/eric-bogle-lyrics-aussie-bbq-song-pd1cxkw). Then, since one of the other professors is Russian, he played a number of songs and Russian dances for her. He finished it all off with a take-off on Kenny Roger’s “The Gambler” which substituted “linguist” for gambler and featured the sorts of in-jokes based on competing linguist theories that are absolutely hilarious if you’re a linguist and make no sense at all if you’re not. It was a very fun way to wind down from the conference.
Monday Wes and I went sightseeing with my colleague Debra who had given the paper on the Kyushu dialects. Monday was Constitution Day (which the Takezono House calendar rather confusingly translated as “National Institution Day”). This worked out well since the museums and attractions which are normally closed on Monday were open for the national holiday. We went to the Tokugawa Museum to see a collection of artifacts that had belonged to one of the famous aristocratic families in the area. We saw a number of nice examples of things like swords and tea implements. The tea implements in particular really brought me back to the last time I was in Japan (1993-4) because I had also studied tea ceremony for awhile. We also lucked out because they had a special exhibit of Girls’ Day dolls. Girls’ Day is a holiday where they set up special displays of dolls, doll furniture, etc. representing the aristocratic life. This exhibit displayed the Girls’ Day doll collections of three high-ranking samurai ladies, so it was very impressive. http://www.tokugawa-art-museum.jp/english/index.html
After the museum, we also wandered around a very nice, attached Japanese garden for awhile. It had actually snowed on Sunday (which is very unusual for Nagoya since it’s fairly far south), but there were still flowers blooming. I’m not sure what they were—sort of peony looking in various shades of white, pink and yellow. In order to protect them from the cold, they are covered with a sort of straw teepee, with one side left open so you can see the flower and it can get the sunlight (see photo at top).
We also had a chance to sample some of the local cuisine. Friday evening we found a noodle shop featuring the local specialty which is noodles in a red miso broth (miso is a type of paste made from soy beans) with various additions such as chicken, oysters, or pork. Monday night we found a place specializing in breaded and fried pork cutlets called “katsudon”. The entire (very small) restaurant was done in a theme of pigs wearing the sort of apron typically worn by sumo wrestlers. Pig curtains at the door, the waitstaff wearing pig sweatshirts, even the chairs had a cut-out design of pigs on them (see above). The pork cutlets weren’t bad either.
Yesterday we took the Shinkansen (bullet train) back home. We’ve only been here a month, but just going away and coming back makes it “coming home.” We also picked up our alien registration cards from City Hall the day before we left, so I guess we’re officially settled in now.
Linguistic anthropology was also well-represented. I presented some of my work on Japanese wedding speeches. Zane (the Australian guy who helped organize the conference) gave a nice talk looking at neighborhood interactions in a city in Indonesia and how people use a mix of two local languages (Indonesian and Javanese) to construct identities. My colleague Debra, who works down in Kyushu (the southern-most of the main islands) gave a talk about attitudes towards local dialects in Kyushu. It is a very timely topic, because Miyazaki Prefecture recently elected a governor who ran under the slogan “Things must change” pronounced in the local dialect. This is really radical, because local dialects are traditionally looked down on and avoided in public speaking. The really interesting thing, as Debra pointed out, is that the dialect boundaries run through the prefecture, so this particular slogan, spoken in that particular way, would only have actually been the “native dialect” of a fraction of the population, but now that it has become famous, even people from other parts of the prefecture are claiming it as their own. An interesting example of the revaluing of particular local language forms.
Sunday evening, after the conference was officially over, several speakers, one of the local organizers, and some local graduate students all went out to a local pub to relax and celebrate. Whenever Japanese drink or socialize together, they always start with a toast with everyone raising their glasses and saying, “Kanpai!” Then the grad students started ordering dish after dish, each of which was passed around for everyone to take a bit onto individual plates in front of us. Every half hour or so they would order a new round of food—salads, little pizzas (even smaller than a typical one-person pizza in the US), spaghetti, French fries, and various flavors of pilaf topped with a thin omelet as a sort of covering. We were pretty full by the end of the evening.
One of the speakers at the conference was a British professor of Russian language and literature who worked in Australia for many years and is now retired. He’s also done interesting work looking at sculpture and other visual arts as “texts” (he was the guy who talked about church carvings). In addition to all his other talents, he plays the guitar. So after an hour or two of socializing, he brought out his guitar and we sang folk songs for awhile. He started with “The Wild Rover” and then sang the Australian Barbecue song for Zane (http://artists.letssingit.com/eric-bogle-lyrics-aussie-bbq-song-pd1cxkw). Then, since one of the other professors is Russian, he played a number of songs and Russian dances for her. He finished it all off with a take-off on Kenny Roger’s “The Gambler” which substituted “linguist” for gambler and featured the sorts of in-jokes based on competing linguist theories that are absolutely hilarious if you’re a linguist and make no sense at all if you’re not. It was a very fun way to wind down from the conference.
Monday Wes and I went sightseeing with my colleague Debra who had given the paper on the Kyushu dialects. Monday was Constitution Day (which the Takezono House calendar rather confusingly translated as “National Institution Day”). This worked out well since the museums and attractions which are normally closed on Monday were open for the national holiday. We went to the Tokugawa Museum to see a collection of artifacts that had belonged to one of the famous aristocratic families in the area. We saw a number of nice examples of things like swords and tea implements. The tea implements in particular really brought me back to the last time I was in Japan (1993-4) because I had also studied tea ceremony for awhile. We also lucked out because they had a special exhibit of Girls’ Day dolls. Girls’ Day is a holiday where they set up special displays of dolls, doll furniture, etc. representing the aristocratic life. This exhibit displayed the Girls’ Day doll collections of three high-ranking samurai ladies, so it was very impressive. http://www.tokugawa-art-museum.jp/english/index.html
After the museum, we also wandered around a very nice, attached Japanese garden for awhile. It had actually snowed on Sunday (which is very unusual for Nagoya since it’s fairly far south), but there were still flowers blooming. I’m not sure what they were—sort of peony looking in various shades of white, pink and yellow. In order to protect them from the cold, they are covered with a sort of straw teepee, with one side left open so you can see the flower and it can get the sunlight (see photo at top).
We also had a chance to sample some of the local cuisine. Friday evening we found a noodle shop featuring the local specialty which is noodles in a red miso broth (miso is a type of paste made from soy beans) with various additions such as chicken, oysters, or pork. Monday night we found a place specializing in breaded and fried pork cutlets called “katsudon”. The entire (very small) restaurant was done in a theme of pigs wearing the sort of apron typically worn by sumo wrestlers. Pig curtains at the door, the waitstaff wearing pig sweatshirts, even the chairs had a cut-out design of pigs on them (see above). The pork cutlets weren’t bad either.
Yesterday we took the Shinkansen (bullet train) back home. We’ve only been here a month, but just going away and coming back makes it “coming home.” We also picked up our alien registration cards from City Hall the day before we left, so I guess we’re officially settled in now.
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