allison's reading shelf

Good Morning Blog! I have just finished the very long read of Out by Natsuo Kirino. It was definitely a very good read, I really liked the book. A topic I found interesting from the novel is the idea of women in the Japanese workplace. All of our main female characters (Masako, Yoshie, Kuniko, Yayoi, and Anna) hold some sort of job in the novel, yet none of them seem to be the most thrilled about their work. The workplace environment presented in the novel shows the layers of gender discrimination found in Japanese society.  To begin, after WWII and during the economic boom, women were given more legal rights, but they were still treated as a second-class citizen in society, “Although they were now legally equal to men, women still occupied a different position in society.” (Goto-Jones 106). In the novel, Out, women are looked down upon in the workplace and they are judged heavily on their age and appearance. For the women at the packing factory, they can only manage to a...

Good Morning Blog, One of the first things I noticed in this movie was the collection roles of identities presented. For example, take Glico.Glico was born in China, so part of her identity is Chinese. She now lives in Japan, so another part of her identity is Japanese. And finally, she lives in Yentown, which has its own identity as Yentown. Many other characters in the movie also share this “Third” identity.  Even though Glico has three cultural identities, she really only identifies with two: Chinese and Yentown. Interestly, Yentown, though it is in Japan, is not considered Japanese by the Japanese natives due to its overwhelming large population of foreigners. Identity is something that is fluid, but the Japanese here have created borders on what it means to be “Japanese.” This is the same thing with one of the other characters in the movie, the man who proposed the idea of “Third Culture.” The man has American parents yet he was born in Japan. He has grown up livi...

In Osamu Tezuka’s manga, Astro Boy, the reader is brought into the future where humanity lives side-by-side with robots. Tezuka’s manga comes after WWII after Japan had to suffer from the hands of technology from the atomic bomb. Instead of representing the effects of technology as dangerous, or destructive, instead, Tezuka chooses to emphasize humanity in technology in the manga. The effects of technology are represented positively. Through different artistic techniques, Tezuka not only humanizes Astro Boy in his story but also humanizes all robots that live in human society. In the first opening pages, the readers are shown the society in which humans and robots coexist together. As robots continue to become more intertwined with them, they become more human in order to fit into society. For example, on page 14 on the first panel, the scientists put skin on the robots in order for them to further emulate people. The robot is drawn with a human-like face and body. In comparison...