Together with four fellow Japan Studies majors at the Asian Center, University of the Philippines Diliman (UP Diliman), and our Japan Studies Program Coordinator, Dr. Jocelyn Celero, we visited Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka from 15 to 20 December 2019 as part of a six-day study tour sponsored by the Konosuke Matsushita Foundation. The study tour was themed, “Tradition and Modernity: A Study Tour for Understanding Japanese History, Language, and Culture.”
Apart from allowing us to visit and experience selected cultural sites of the Kansai region, the trip also provided an avenue for us to experience how it feels to live and navigate Japan’s bustling metropolitan and cultural areas. Moreover, the trip also gave us the opportunity to interact with Japanese students from a private university like Ryukoku University and with those specializing in the Filipino language from an imperial/state university like Osaka University–Minoh campus
Author
Domar Balmes (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) is pursuing his master’s degree in Asian Studies, majoring in Japan at the Asian Center, University of the Philippines Diliman.
Article Information
Type of Manuscript: Travel Narrative Volume, Issue, Year: Volume 58, Issue 1, Year 2022 Pages: 173–188 URL: https://asj.upd.edu.ph/index.php/archive/20-58-1-2022/185-japan-impressions-from-six-day-visit
“Hey, even if you surround yourself with so many books about Japan, it will never reach the actual happiness when you experience Japan yourself,” my team leader told me. An enticing invitation to visit Japan to experience the country itself. A country that until today, exists only in my imagination.
I have been self-studying the Japanese language for a decade or so—I can read a novel in the original Nihongo and absorb more or less its plot. My pronunciation had actually been praised by a Japanese journalist. It was too good, he said. I can also explain some language-related stuff but never once in my entire “Japanese experience” have I set my foot on the country.
Author
Julius Mañalac (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) is pursuing his master’s degree in Asian Studies, majoring in Japan at the Asian Center, University of the Philippines Diliman.
Article Information
Type of Manuscript: Travel Narrative Volume, Issue, Year: Volume 58, Issue 1, Year 2022 Pages: 178–182 URL: https://asj.upd.edu.ph/index.php/archive/20-58-1-2022/184-unexpected-journey-japan-personal-log
Admit it, matcha is one of the things that comes to mind whenever you hear about Japan. The boom in cafes and milk tea shops in the Philippines has brought several tea flavors from eastern Asia, and matcha always had a special section on the menus of most shops. However, the matcha we consume is not the same as the matcha that was consumed in the high culture of Japan, or what we read in history books. In some way, the difference among forms, experiences, and knowledge about Japanese tea is the lingering distance between our imagination and a reality that is yet to be experienced.
If you are an avid tea drinker and a Japan enthusiast like me, you will want to read more about the history of tea in the country. You will find that Japanese tea has quite an importance. They have this very formal tea ceremony called chanoyu or sadō, a tea production capital in Uji, tea expressions like chabashira (upright-floating tea stalk) which is an omen of good luck, and other various tea practices and expressions.
Author
Christel S. Sobredo (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) works for the Center for Migrant Advocacy and is pursuing her master’s degree in Asian Studies, majoring in Japan at the Asian Center, University of the Philippines Diliman. Her research interests include student migration, regional revitalization in Japan, and the social costs of labor migration in the Philippines.
Article Information
Type of Manuscript: Travel Narrative Volume, Issue, Year: Volume 58, Issue 1, Year 2022 Pages: 173–177 URL: https://asj.upd.edu.ph/index.php/archive/20-58-1-2022/183-chabashira
It is common to see old Japanese temples amidst a bustling city, traditional garb and items on sale, and even geishas out and about in Gion district, Kyoto. This convergence between the old and the new is astonishingly noticeable in such a modern nation-state as Japan, and it is this aspect of the country that has the most allure for me. As a Filipino of Chinese descent, a third-generation descendant of immigrants, I thought I had begun to lose touch with the culture and history from both my countries, yet my trip to Japan in December 2019 helped reinforce an idea: it is possible to reconcile one’s culture with modernity. In Japan, there seems to be an invisible red thread that binds the traditions of antiquity to those of modern lifestyles. It’s not unlike Makoto Shinkai’s musubi, symbolized by the red-knotted thread that ties the main characters of Kimi no Nawa (Your Name) together despite the challenge of time and circumstance.
Author
Faith Madeleine S. Ong (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) is taking up her masters degree in Asian Studies at the Asian Center, University of the Philippines Diliman.
Article Information
Type of Manuscript: Travel Narrative Volume, Issue, Year: Volume 58, Issue 1, Year 2022 Pages: 167–172 URL: https://asj.upd.edu.ph/index.php/archive/20-58-1-2022/182-invisible-red-thread-constructed-symbols-unity
Coral and Concrete tackles the multiple stories of Kwajalein, an atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. In the early 20th century, Kwajalein was part of the Japanese empire’s nan’yō (south seas). A battlefield during the Asia-Pacific War where many soldiers of the Japanese died, it was a place which US forces later claimed. It became the site of US nuclear and missile tests during the Cold War, receiving an influx of American military servicemen, professionals, and their families. In the 1980s, the islanders who were displaced by the American Occupation sought to reclaim their land through the Homecoming Movement. At present, Kwajalein is part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, which, along with the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of Palau, is in “free association” with the United States. Their Compact of Free Association provides the US with military authority on the islands, in return for economic assistance.
Author
Maria Cynthia B. Barriga (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) has a PhD from Waseda University, Japan.
Article Information
Type of Manuscript: Review Volume, Issue, Year: Volume 58, Issue 1, Year 2022 Pages: 162–166 URL: https://asj.upd.edu.ph/index.php/archive/20-58-1-2022/181-coral-concrete-remembering-kwajalein-atoll-between-japan-america-marshall-islands-greg-dvorak
Directed by a triumvirate of academics—the fictionist Charlson Ong, the playwright Lito Casaje, and the film scholar Choy Pangilinan—the screen adaptation of Sinai Hamada’s beloved short story, Tanabata’s Wife, is currently showing at selected movie houses across the country, as part of this year’s TOFARM Film Festival.
This festival’s uniqueness is also, arguably, its “value added”: its films are required to thematize Filipino agricultural, horticultural, silvicultural, or otherwise broadly environmental issues, that immediately commit the filmmaker to “ground” his or her project in our beautiful but imperiled verdant and archipelagic localities in all sorts of literal and metaphorical ways.
Author
J. Neil C. Garcia (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) is Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman.
Article Information
Type of Manuscript: Review Volume, Issue, Year: Volume 58, Issue 1, Year 2022 Pages: 157–161 URL: https://asj.upd.edu.ph/index.php/archive/20-58-1-2022/180-tanabata-wife-review
