Boston University Japanese Program

12/08/2023

A nice feature on Japanese major and alum Siobhan Sullivan on her successful career at Crunchyroll.

Built In sat down with four tech veterans to learn more about how to build the resilient workforce of the future.

02/24/2023

BU and other Kyoto Consortium students having a wonderful time in Japan this semester. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=884864002911522&id=100041637923907&sfnsn=mo&mibextid=6aamW6

06/25/2020

If you are thinking of studying Japanese while living in Japan, you might want to check out this site.

Go! Go! Nihon is a FREE service that helps you to live and study in Japan, with visa, school and accommodation support. Find the perfect school for you!

12/20/2017

Last January, Professsor Vincent came back from a trip to Matsuyama, Japan with a suitcase full of more than three decades' worth of back issues of the "Shiki kaishi," the journal of the Matsuyama Shiki society. The journal is an amazing example of the vibrant tradition of local scholarship in Japan and a treasure trove of research on the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki and his circle. Since not even the Diet Library has more than a few issues on its shelves, with the the kind permission of the Shiki Society, we digitized all 146 issues and uploaded them to our digital archive here at BU, where they are now easily accessible, and full-text searchable. Thanks to Hoyt Long of the University of Chicago for recommending a good Japanese OCR program, to Dawn Lawson of the University of Michigan for writing the catalog entry, Eli Castro of the BU library for getting them online, to Nanae Tamura of the Shiki Society for her help throughout the process, including loaning Professor Vincent the suitcase to bring the journals back to Boston, and to WLL grad Rebekah Machemer for doing most of the work! You can access all of the journals at the link below. Please spread the word! https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/20274

10/30/2017

Don't miss this retrospective of one of Japan's most radical and fascinating film makers. Just across the river!

Poet, playwright, novelist, photographer, sports critic, filmmaker and cultural agent provocateur Shuji Terayama (1935-1983) was among the most broadly influential and innovative figures active in the post-WWII Japanese avant-garde. Throughout his all-too-brief but astonishingly prolific and multifa...

10/07/2017

Great piece on Masaoka Shiki in today's Japan Times.

Alighting at one of the JR Yamanote Line's quietest stops, Uguisudani Station, I chat with the stationmaster about its name, which means "Bush-Warbler Vall

10/07/2017

2017 Japanese grad Rebekah Machemer will speak at WLL's haiku symposium this coming Thursday about her experience "translating" three haiku into manga form. Check out Rebekah's website below to see these "haiku comics" along with other beautiful works in manga style. And congrats to Rebekah, who just got a job at Twitter, where she will be able to use her skills in Japanese and illustration.

“Shiki’s Haiku in a Comic Panel: Exercises in Composition and Contextualization”
Haiku and comics share an important characteristic: both have been referred to as “films on paper.” In the case of haiku, Sergei Eisenstein and Roland Barthes have likened certain verses to cinematic montage, and Shiki’s shasei poetry in particular is famous for presenting carefully-curated snapshots of real life in order to evoke a certain response from the reader. The same technique is used in film and comics to convey information to readers in concise, beautiful, and interesting ways. Noting this similarity, earlier this year I attempted to “translate” three of Shiki’s haiku into one-page comic illustrations, which have gone on to be featured in the Shiki kaishi and in local Matsuyama newspapers. In my talk I would like to describe my process of creating these comics, focusing on the way that supplementing each haiku with visuals allows the deeper implications of each poem to rise to the surface.

Rebekah Machemer is a recent graduate of Boston University, where she earned her B.A. in Japanese Language and Literature and minored in Visual Arts. She is passionate about the way that comics, animation, and film unite people and cultures, and this enthusiasm has led her to exhibit her artwork at American and Japanese comic conventions and to found the student organization BU Comic Arts. She began studying haiku in Fall 2016 under Professor Vincent, and since then has introduced Masaoka Shiki’s poetry to a wider audience through her work digitizing the Shiki kaishi and by creating haiku comics which have been featured in Japanese newspapers.
https://www.rebekahbox.com/

09/23/2017

A review of Professor Vincent's translation of a novella by Tanizaki Juni'ichiro, one that deals with " the deeply buried, perverted desires of the human psyche." Sound interesting? In the spring semester he'll be teaching a whole course on Tanizaki...

Question: Is it really the case that for a large part of the 20th century Japan enjoyed a golden age of literature? Or is this just misty-eyed nostalgia? O

08/03/2017

BU's own Professor Anna Elliott on her work translating Murakami Haruki into Polish and "the hegemony of English." https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2017/0802/Meet-the-woman-who-brings-Haruki-Murakami-works-to-an-enthusiastic-Poland

Anna Zielińska-Elliott is now translating her 12th Murakami novel from Japanese into Polish, as she has done for 30 years. She is a professor of Japanese literature at Boston University.

07/01/2017

The hip sushi chef has been speaking English in a Japanese accent