Ghosts, goblins, and other monsters
have long haunted Japanese popular culture, and can tell us much about its
history. This experimental course uses folk stories,
religious tracts, paintings, movies, comics, scholarly research, and various
other materials to investigate not only Japan’s enduring fascination with
supernatural creatures, but also transformative periods of its past since the seventh century. Among topics of examination are the
meaning of ghosts and magic in the religions of Shinto and Buddhism; the
importance of spirits in constructing gender ideals in Japan’s classical age;
the use of supernatural explanations for traumatic historical events such as
political revolution in the 19th century; the psychological value in
transforming enemies into cruel, impure goblins during WWII; and the metaphors
of monsters and cyborgs to express the anxieties of the nuclear and high-tech
age.
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