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For
a writer, the joy of live appearances is the
joy of disappearance; the moment of connection
between audience and writer is more powerful
and yet less enduring than that forged upon
the page. In every presentation, I live for
the Q & A session, when the reader becomes
the speaker. |
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Presentations |
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12
Japanese Masters: Devastation, Dreams and
Cultural Re-design |
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For
Design and Communications Students
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How
can an entire citizenry be persuaded to change
the way it works, eats, dresses, sleeps, and
spends its money? For students of design,
advertising, and communications, I present
100 slides--of devastation and rebirth, reality
and the dreams designers presented to an exhausted
postwar population. These images, dating from
the 1930s and reaching into our new century,
combine works of the masters profiled in my
book and scenes from Japan before and after
their influence changed it. What responsibilities
do creators have, to their cultures and to
their audiences? The question remains vital,
here and now.
More about
12 Japanese Masters |
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For
Students of Cultural Anthropology |
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For
students of cultural anthropology, I use Japan's
postwar experiments with design as an extreme
case study of the intersection of commerce
and culture, or more specifically, of postwar
US culture and prewar Japanese culture. Japan
actively embraced the values of 1950s America,
and used the brand-new occupation of design
as the most efficient way of persuading the
public to imagine a New Japan in the image
of the conquerers, as they worked their way
to a modern economic power. But what was lost?
How and how much does our aesthetic environment
affect our thoughts and actions? With a broad
viewpoint, I hope to affirm that these are
questions for all of us in the modern world.
More about
12 Japanese Masters |
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For
those interested in Japan |
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| 12
Japanese Masters looks at the history
of postwar Japan as a history of design, and
those who know Japan will recognize that the
fascination with--and reliance upon--image
has continued throughout Japan's history.
After WWII, practitioners of a brand-new occupation,
"design", completely re-imagined the visual-cultural
landscape. I begin my presentation with images
of the foundation of Japan's cultural and
spiritual environment, proceed through the
transformation of the outer landscape in chronological
order, and end with images of the anomalous
environment of my last years in Japan, the
tiny isolated village of Miyamacho in Northern
Kyoto Prefecture, where every instance of
media documentation relegates the still real
traditional Japanese life further into the
realm of memory. |
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Documentary |
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In 1999,
I found myself with a great idea and the energy
to pursue it to the bitter end. We were poor,
and we lived in a thatched house that needed to
be repaired. Desperate and optimistic, I schemed
to combine British thatching, which had evolved
into a modern, efficient trade, with Japanese
thatching, which hadn't.
After
the war, thatching in Japan had transmogrified
from a mutual-aid system--like the Amish barn
raising--to a cash-only trade too expensive for
us to consider. In order to draw attention to
the real issue of thatch, I sacrificed myself
to the illogical Japanese attachment to the caucasian
interpretation. I became a minor star for a time;
In TV Tokyo's "Human Theater" series, "Maggie's
Great Rethatching" was broadcast twice, once
in the winter of 2000, and once in the spring
of 2001.
More
about Thatch and other Metaphors
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Lectures |
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The cross-cultural
rethatching of our house brought more media interest
to the disappearance of Japan's most common vernacular
architecture than had all of the momentous projects
undertaken by Japanese groups put together.
For a
group called MINKA
SAISEI, formed by Japanese who dispute the
sinking of their architectural heritage into a
Western, modernist cacophany of concrete, I lectured
in Japanese to a crowd of over 200. This appearance
led to others, and to assignments for Japanese
publications. More...
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