How do Zainichi Koreans understand Japanese consumers’ open embrace of kimchi in light of Japan’s reluctant social acceptance of its Korean minority population?
Cultural Consumption and Performance in Asia
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The Japanese state had tried and is still trying to depoliticize the Ainu community’s movements with a perfunctory recognition of a valorized Ainu culture to pacify them.
Tourism industries and cultural institutions are increasingly offering commercial experiences in which consumers embody a performative “tourist gaze” that “orders and regulates the relationships between various sensuous experiences while away.
Through 20 years of research experience in Japan, I realized that Japanese Sign Language itself can also be viewed as a performance genre found in the everyday lives of Deaf people, considering the relationship between their presentations of JSL and shared Deaf identity through the consumption of information and values.
At a recent government-sponsored dance competition for retirees in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province, more than 20 groups of retired women took to the stage to perform a dance routine set to Kangding Qingge, a Chinese pop song with lyrics extolling the romance of the Tibetan grasslands.
Mrs. M. realised she had made a miscalculation staying in her property on the afternoon of March 3, 2011 when water started bulging in through her floor. She had heard the official warning of the oncoming tsunami and knew that the evacuation order was serious. She had every intention of running to higher ground once she collected some belongings. And more importantly, once she found her cat.
Undeterred by the Hong Kong summer temperatures, large numbers of visitors entered the former colonial police force quarters now known as the PMQ (short for Police Married Quarters) heritage space, keen on catching a glimpse of the displays.
While Beijing deploys the Road and Belt Initiative as a geopolitical imaginary for international networks, such policies also heavily impact the ways in which local practices adapt to the R&B initiative. Among different efforts to privatize the Silk Road, the physical remains of heritage sites become a key space where local actors deploy a neoliberal logic to blend heritage management and business development. In Xi’an, where the Tang West Market Museum is located, this shows how the past and present reinforce one another.
Why is the base of the statue so fascinating for these American teachers, and why did the graduate student find the story interesting enough to share in the first place? Echoes of the Korean War adorn the landscapes of Seoul and South Korea, some more spectacular like the De-Militarized Zone, but most just ordinary sites akin to the statue’s base.