Tokyo Stories

Welcome to the Tokyo Stories blog! For the past three years this elective course taught at Temple University  Japan Campus under the guidance of Ronald Carr and Irene Herrera has encouraged students to explore personal narratives through oral snapshots of neighborhoods and communities in Tokyo. Through visual anthropology, oral history and new media design students navigate Tokyo as participant observers. Projects are based upon research, interviews and recordings. Hyper-journals serve to chronicle the week-to-week gathering of cultural artifacts, personal stories and visual information that will be used in the final project. All projects are then exhibited at a gallery in the heart of Tokyo.

In this blog, we have compiled highlights from students’ work by providing links to their own blogs where you can see their creative work, ideas, pictures and writings based on their experiences as they explore Tokyo. Both local Japanese and study abroad students have participated in this course therefore the texts and videos they have created provide a pluralistic and personal approach to how they related to Japan’s culture and society.

Enjoy and thank you for visiting our blog!

Origins of Tokyo Stories

For over 25 years students from around the world have visited Japan using Temple University as a gateway to explore a society steeped in cultural tradition and mystery. The Tokyo Stories course was created to allow students the means by which to record their observations and express them in whatever artistic medium they found most familiar and appropriate. Over the years student work has merged with new technologies, allowing for more diverse and complex narratives. While traditional documentary requires the director to chronicle the subject’s life and fill in the missing gaps, the filmmaker can now record simultaneously separate but related actions, for example, a mobile phone serves to both record the thoughts of a homeless man as well as track his journey through Ueno Park with the use of GPS Technology.

Featured Works

Each semester students submit their final project to be exhibited at Design Festa in the heart of Harajuku. Below we have listed several links to students’ final projects.

Azusa

Experimental film which traces the author’s teenage years in a Japanese high school. Azusa reflects on her childhood and the pressure of growing up in a Japanese society through thought provoking imagery.

Mizuki

Why are there so many Western weddings in Japan? Why do so many Japanese women want to marry with a white dress?  The filmmaker interviews a couple who dreams of a Western “white” wedding and a priest who with an open mind who believes anyone can marry under the conventions of Christianity.  This small personal documentary inquires into Japan’s assimilation of elements of Christianity more than as a religion as a cultural fad in a society that doesn’t completely understanding its complexity and depth and has transmuted aspects of this sacred religion into a fashionable style of marriage.

Keith

In this short music documentary, Keith offers A glance at a Japanese rock band and its members as they struggle to rise in Tokyo’s music world.

Bene