In China, where the world's largest population is quickly getting wired, fansubbing—dubbed "zimuzu" in Chinese—has flourished among a burgeoning digital generation who is active in consuming a large amount of foreign media contents, mostly Hollywood movies and TV series, which are widely available on cyberspace in the form of free digital fansubs that are translated and distributed by fellow fans.

Over the past two decades the profession of law within China has undergone tremendous change. China’s ascension to the World Trade Organization, massive foreign investment, and an increasingly cosmopolitan middle class have forced both the central government in Beijing and the country’s practicing attorneys to grapple with new clientele, new areas of practice, and an increasingly nuanced popular response to legal issues.

The Pittsburgh Asia Consortium [PAC] Undergraduate Research Conference is a one-day, interdisciplinary event for students from PA, WV, OH, MD, NY, NJ and DE with an interest in any geographical region of Asia, including the Middle East. Students will give 15-minute presentations on Asia-related research topics from any discipline, with faculty from PAC overseeing each student panel.

Since first arriving in the country as a Peace Corps volunteer 20 years ago, Michael Meyer has witnessed China from the village and neighborhood level. His writing combines immersive reporting, memoir and archival research. Meyer’s award-winning first book, The Last Days of Old Beijing, documents daily life in the capital's oldest neighborhood as the city remade itself for the Olympics. His second book, published this month, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, depicts life on a family’s rice farm as it becomes a corporate agribusiness.

In this charming play set as a stand-up comedy routine, the title character explores history, mythology, gender... and high school. Brahman/i – funny, cynical, inventive and intensely charismatic – takes on more than a dozen unforgettable characters in a fascinating life story that reveals observations of the world from adolescence to adulthood, and takes the audience on a voyage to answer the universal question, “Where do I fit in?” Brahman/i is a compelling and hilarious 90-minutes examining identity, curiosity, courage, and the assigned roles in which we often find ourselves trapped.

Different writing systems are used across the world – their visual forms vary greatly. How can we classify this visual variation? Across the range of writing systems, how does variability in the visual characteristics of graphemes, the smallest linguistically significant writing units, in different orthographies (e.g., English: letters; Chinese: characters) affect learning to read? Specifically, do individuals with differing writing system backgrounds perceive graphemes differently?

All skill levels welcome. Light refreshments will be served.

Do you enjoy Japanese cuisine?

Do you want to learn how to make your favorite dishes at home?

Ms. Debra Samuels, food writer, cooking instructor, and best-selling author of My Japanese Table, will demonstrate the elements of a healthy and beautiful Japanese bento, including foods with the “Five Colors:” red, green, yellow, white, and black. She will also give attendees a primer on how to create a bento that will be a delight for your child – or you!

2015 marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Join the JASP for an evening of reflection on the Japanese-German alliance. Dr. Ricky Law, Assistant Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University, will speak.

His lecture will provide an overview of the origins, formation, development, and fall of the Axis alliance between Japan and Germany before and during World War II. It will discuss major events such as the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936, the Tripartite Pact of 1940, and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Observe more than half a century of change in Japan through photographs and stories. Dr. Keith Brown has been traveling to Mizusawa, a town in Iwate Prefecture, northeastern Japan, for 53 years.

Dr. Brown has captured the emergence of car culture and the evolution of agriculture from labor-intensive hand cultivated rice to capital-intensive highly mechanized agriculture. As in America, "Main Street" in the center of town has hollowed out as suburban big box stores have overtaken small shops.