Like most nations, China regulates the content that goes over its airwaves, runs through its printing presses, and is transmitted through its Internet. In July 2009, when tensions in the predominately Muslim population of China’s Xinjiang province escalated into violent riots, Chinese authorities turned off the Internet there. This inspired Jason Q. Ng to devise a computer script to test all 700,000 terms in Chinese Wikipedia to see which ones are routinely blocked on Sina Weibo, China’s most important social media site.

You can now search for more than 1.4 million Japanese articles from 220 Japanese academic institutions through PittCat+. There are also over 15,000 Japanese dissertations freely available at the Digital Library of the National Diet Library and 227 LibGuides are developed by Pitt liaison librarians to support your research and course work. Library research tools are evolving rapidly. This presentation will illustrate the state-of-the-art research tools and new functions of Japanese databases.

All are welcome to join and bring a lunch or snack!

Contemporary Japanese taiko drumming (wadaiko) emerged in the 1950s as a way to resurrect and revitalize regional folk drumming traditions. As it evolved, many different regional drumming styles were incorporated, including festival traditions from the Shitamachi area of Tokyo.

This professional development workshop for secondary school teachers focused on global social movements and their relationships to art and technology in various regions of the world.

Pittsburgh-native, Tokyo-based enka superstar JERO makes his New York debut at Japan Society! With his smooth voice and hip-hop stylings, JERO has breathed new life into this sentimental Japanese music genre often associated with themes of one’s hometown, lost loves and sake. Often referred to as the “Japanese blues” or “Japanese country music,” enka’s melodies and required vocal techniques make it a quintessentially Japanese musical style.

Asian Studies & the Japanese language program are offering a series of Japanese language tables on campus for students of Japanese language. This session on “Practicing your acting/speaking—Preparing for oral proficiency tests” is designed for all level of Japanese language students. Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) is a speaking proficiency test which is conducted by ACTFL, the national organization for foreign language teaching. This proficiency test is being used worldwide by academic institutions, government agencies, and private corporations to assess one’s language skill.

The notion of cultural purity is demonstrably a myth, as any careful historical analysis of cultural expression anywhere in the world can reveal multiple origins, blends, syncretisms, hybridities that are the inevitable result of human contact.

The 23rd JAWS Conference will be held from Thursday 07 March 2013 through Saturday 09 March 2013, at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh PA, USA. Further details will be posted on the Conferences page as they are available.

Over the past decade, China’s rural villages have lost over half of their residents as the young and talented have moved to coastal provinces in pursuit of better-paying factory jobs. As a result, rural China is now facing a funding crisis in education and health care services. Young children are among the most deeply affected. As rural villages have depopulated, a lack of students have forced many rural middle and high schools to close.

This dissertation study is a controlled comparison between a Han Chinese farming community engaging in an energy crop cultivation project and an indigenous Amis community practicing organic farming in Taiwan. Through investigation of cultural traditions and historical studies of interactions with agricultural specialists, I examine how these two groups’ conceptualizations of the environment have been shaped.