Profiles
Kimberly Hassel
Dr. Kimberly Hassel is an Assistant Professor within the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. She is an anthropologist and digital ethnographer specializing in the intersections of digital culture, youth culture, and identity in contemporary Japan. Her current book project examines the relationships between Social Networking Services, smartphones, and shifting notions of sociality and selfhood in Japan, especially among young people. Hassel’s examination of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on digital sociality in Japan and ethnography has appeared in Anthropology News [1]. Hassel also specializes in diaspora studies, critical mixed race studies, and Afro-Japanese encounters. Her work on digital activism among Black Japanese youths was published in the edited volume Who Is the Asianist?: The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies [2]. Hassel is a proud Dominican New Yorker.
Junnan Chen
Junnan is a PhD candidate at Princeton University, pursuing a joint degree of East Asian Studies and Interdisciplinary Humanities Studies. Junnan’s dissertation Expressing Time explores the transforming critical concept of time and its relation to technical media in the twentieth century, with a focus on Cold War Japan. The dissertation will bring together various thinkers, writers and artists including Taki Kōji, Yoshida Kijū, Takiguchi Shūzō, Chris Marker, and Andrei Tarkovsky. In December 2021, Junnan presented a paper titled “The Imperishables: Somatic Remediation, Femininity, and Plasticity in Ōshima Nagisa’s Urban Critique” at the Embodiment workshop at Dartmouth College. In the paper, Junnan examines the under-explored intersection between the emergent thoughts on the urban in the 1960s and 70s Japan and a particular coding of gender in the leftist cultural imaginaries. Via studying Ōshima’s Tōkyō sensō sengo hiwa (The Man Who Left His Will on Film, 1970), the paper also questions anglophone feminist film theory’s premise of a universal male gaze and intends to read the “imperishable” female bodies as critical sites that reveal a series of abstraction, capture, erasure, and potentialities. Besides her research, Junnan is interested in filmmaking and photography.
On June 16th, 2022, I [Sachi Schmidt-Hori] had a three-way Zoom conversation with my former student, Kimberly Hassel, who had just defended her dissertation and would be joining the University of Arizona as an assistant professor in the Fall, and Junnan Chen, a PhD candidate at Princeton University and Kimberly’s kōhai. Both of them had presented their works-in-progress at the Dartmouth workshop, “Embodiment: Representations of Corporeality in Texts and Images of Japan,” which took place in December 2021. The following are some of the highlights from our conversation.
S: Kimberly, you must be very busy preparing to move across the country, from the East Coast to Arizona. In addition to all the hustle, what have you been working on.
H: I’m actually in the middle of writing a paper that I intend to submit to the special volume of Mechademia [3] on “Media Mix.” It is a paper based on what I presented at the Embodiment workshop at Dartmouth last December.
S: That’s wonderful! Is that the paper on insta-bae [creating and posting eye-catching images on Instagram]?
H: Yes, it is! This version combines parts of the first and second chapters of my dissertation. I discuss how insta-bae culture and Instagram use on a broader scale should be included in media mix discourse, especially discourse pertaining to girls’ culture. Aside from discussing participation in insta-bae culture as a playful social practice among girls and young women, I also discuss the issues surrounding the Instagram culture, such as food waste and socioeconomic exclusion.
S: Can’t wait to read it, if and when it comes out. What about you, Junnan? Are you busy with dissertation?
C: Yes, but I’m also working on a petition letter to protest against the denial of tenure to a professor who is a stellar scholar and widely respected. When the news of the denial came out, both graduate and undergraduate students were in shock. The letter gathered many testimonials and more than 200 signatures, but the university decided to not respond. This is the second denial that happened to a theory-focused professor in East Asian Studies at Princeton. So in the end, rather than the single case, I want to call attention to the differential tolerance of theoretical knowledge production, and highlight the elite tenure system that is non-transparent and not-accountable [4].
S: That’s so unfortunate. Certainly, the tenure system can function to motivate junior scholars to work diligently, just like what grades are for the students. So it’s completely taken for granted by the “R-1” institutions. But it can get tricky, not least because private universities cannot and will not advertise a list of criteria for granting faculty tenure, as in “If you check these boxes, you will get it for sure.” They want to keep some wiggle room, you know, and whenever a tenure application is turned down, usually no explanation is given. It is so complicated.
H: I’m already nervous about going through the tenure process in the near future.
S: I hear you. It’s normal to feel that way. But you can get a lot of advice from those who were recently tenured at the University of Arizona.
H: It is great that you got tenure and promotion, Hori-sensei!
S: Yes, absolutely. For those who have appointments in two departments, things could become even more complicated, since they need support from both departments. So I am happy that I did not have a dual appointment. What about you, Kimberly? Are you also only affiliated with one department?
H: Yes, my appointment is only in East Asian Studies. In the fall, I will teach “Japanese Popular Culture” and “Anthropology of Japan,” so I’m working on those syllabi now.
S: I am sure your classes will be extremely popular. Speaking of classes, I have been thinking a lot about why it feels so hard to teach about Japan in U.S. colleges. It certainly has something to do with the fact that area studies were founded against the backdrop of WWII and the Cold War, which makes it easy for us to default to the “us vs. them” perspective. But, come to think of it, there are even more obvious reasons; all the terms, theories, and methodologies used in Japan Studies, at least in the classrooms of American colleges, originated in the West, especially the United States. It’s almost as if we all have to observe Japan through an “official” binocular that is designed to be slightly out-of-focus. So I would like to ask you guys about your experience teaching undergraduate classes as TAs.
C: Last year I served as a TA for a class called “Japan Media Mix,” and it was pretty hard for me to teach (laughter). As you know, many students are drawn to this kind of class because they are fans of Japanese pop culture. In this case, too, a number of them had already developed firm ideas like “Japan is this and that,” mostly influenced by the media content they had consumed over the years. It was truly difficult to challenge their cultural filter.
S: Could you give me an example?
C: During that term, we spent one day of class on Teshigahara Hiroshi’s film adaptation of Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna, 1964), and Nina Cornyetz’s essay on this movie [5]. But the students did not want to discuss the film as a whole or the essay. Rather, they ended up obsessing with one of the scenes in the movie. It shows what one could call an “attempted rape,” though quite not. To make the matters worse, the students’ discussion was not really about the scene but more about how unethical sexual violence is in general.
H: I can see how and why that happened. I understand and empathize with your students’ reaction, but I can imagine that it was also conflicting for you as the instructor. There are so many topics worthy of analysis and discussion in both the film and essay beyond that one scene. But it sounds like your class discussion was limited to that scene.
C: Yes, and some students also asked me why I did not give them a trigger warning. They seemed a little upset. Actually, I had never heard of this term before and I did not know that this was a thing. I felt quite guilty, thinking that I did not do enough to ensure the emotional well-being of my students. So, for the rest of the session, I tried to shift the students’ attention to the reading, but it was too late.
H: If you are going to assign this film again in the future, do you think you will modify the way you teach?
C: For sure. Next time, I am going to let the students know in advance that the movie contains an unsettling scene, though I will avoid using determinant descriptions like “rape” and “sexual violence.” In class, I would help the students to situate the scene within the context of the screen world and see it as such, rather than projecting a universal category like “sexual violence” onto a Japanese avant-garde film from the 1960s.
S: Oh, that must have been tough, Junnan. But I am sure you will be able to teach Woman in the Dunes much more effectively next time and the students will get a lot more out of the movie, too. By the way, I never give trigger warnings to my students. What about you, Kimberly?
H: I don’t use the term “trigger warning,” but when I teach works that deal with topics such as discrimination, violence, bullying, or suicide, I let my students know in advance. Lately it seems that more professors use the term “content warning” rather than “trigger warning.”
S: Hmm but it’s still a type of warning. I think warning the students can make them expect to see something bad or focus too much on something they may not need to obsess with. Research has shown that trigger warnings can backfire, too [6].
H: When I’m showing videos in class, I say to my students, “Anyone who wishes to step out of the room can do so.” If it’s an online class, I tell them they can mute the audio, if they want to. In my experience, no one has chosen the option. To the contrary, they become more engaged with the themes. I just think that it’s good to give them the option and they appreciate it, too.
C: From now on, I will need to ask the students what kind of themes require a trigger warning in advance. This is new. When I was an undergrad, this term was not in use yet. That said, I understand why students feel anxious about certain themes that remind them of their own traumas. I am sympathetic to such concerns.
S: For me, I first encountered this phrase in 2015 when I came to Dartmouth.
C: Hori-sensei, what do you do when you show certain types of work that your students may find disturbing?
S: This is a constant challenge, especially when I teach Japanese classics, which is my specialty, because old tales are filled with “triggers” for my students, such as polygyny, kin marriages, and marriages between adults and teenagers (laughter). I don’t think there is a magic bullet—all I can do is to engage them in discussions so that they can relativize their presentist, West-centric worldviews. I say things like “Let’s separate representations from realities,” “Do you want to read literature like ethics textbooks?”, and “If you were born a Heian aristocrat, you would have practices polygyny, too.” Also, whenever we encounter an aristocratic lady character lamenting about her husband who is besotted with his younger new wife or whatnot, many students take it as infallible evidence that (A) she is lamenting the marriage system itself and (B) polygyny is bad for women. Both assumptions are demonstratively wrong. Furthermore, today there are millions of women who are deceived, battered, or murdered by their intimate male partners and the vast majority of them are in monogamous relationships. In this case, we do not blame monogamy for the plight of the women, right? So I encourage my students to slow down and become a bit more skeptical about their intuitions. Introspection is like yoga for the mind. Being open-minded and less judgmental makes literature more enjoyable and meaningful, I think.
C: I agree. I was disappointed that my students did not give Woman in the Dunes a chance. There is so much to this film. It sets up a lot of tension between the imagined rural area and metropolitan area, and can challenge a lot of presumptions about identity, nationhood, sexuality. The visual aspect is also very rich; it asks the audience to reflect upon the new imagistic reality and how visual technology mediates new relations of power in Japan of the Cold War era. Moreover, the “attempted rape” scene is a crucial aspect of Woman in the Dunes, which presents a new mode of technologized visuality. But the students seemed to be more invested in focusing on “male sexual violence” without contextualizing the incident.
H: This conversation is making me think more about my own film selections for my “Japanese Popular Culture” syllabus. For our week on idol and celebrity culture, I am pairing an academic essay on idol culture in contemporary Japanese society with Kon Satoshi’s Perfect Blue (1997). I think that the essay, film, and context of celebrity culture in Japan have great analytical potential, but I also worry that the film’s depictions of sexual violence and gore may dominate our discussion. I plan to discuss this with my class in advance and will also put content warnings with time stamps for scenes that students may find disturbing. I also think that I will offer an alternate film that is relevant to celebrity culture and has analytical potential.
C: I think it is hard to achieve a balance between not discouraging the students’ attempt to initiate a political or ethical reading and asking them to reflect upon the materials with a historical and formal context in mind.
S: Yes, we need to make efforts not to accidentally discourage our students from contributing to the discussions. However, if our students are too constrained by their worldview or political stance as members of an elite institution in the United States or if they seem unable to set aside their Rotten Tomatoes mentality, I try to stimulate their scholarly identity. It’s important for us to help our students redirect their attention away from the question of “How do I feel about this work?” and to “What’s this work about?” and “Why should we care about this?”
C: It is ultimately our mission to ask the students to reflect more upon any established standard, be it political, social, or epistemological.
H: I’ve encountered something very similar when serving as a TA for a class on Japanese society and culture. Throughout the semester, I emphasized to my students that they should unlearn the tendency to compare the United States and Japan and the belief that dynamics within the United States are the universal standard. The United States is actually the outlier in many ways, such as its lack of universal healthcare and the right for ordinary citizens to bear arms. This was highlighted in the course material, and students developed strong skills in analysis that de-centered any emphasis or mention of the United States.
C: That’s great. At the same time, it’s very delicate to not fall into the East-West binary trap. For most students who came to the class, they might have a certain idea about Japan that is isolated from “the West.” A lot of the cultural stereotypes have informed the students that Japan might be a spectacular Other. In this sense, we also need to reflect on the role of Japan Studies in a more comprehensive way to avoid serving as the knowledge producer of the Other.
H: I completely agree. I also think it’s worth considering how students first became interested in Japan or exposed to Japanese society and culture. I like to ask this question during my first class sessions with students. I think that many students take classes on Japanese society and culture because of an interest in anime, manga, and other facets of popular culture—which is very understandable! Junnan, I remember you mentioned this earlier in our conversation; I’ve noticed that Japanese popular culture has been heavily featured on TikTok lately, which may also impact Gen Z’s interest in Japan. I think it’s important to emphasize to students that there is more to Japan than popular culture. I plan to discuss this in my popular culture class, even though that may sound a bit contradictory to my students. To emphasize this point, I plan to weave in broader historical and anthropological discussions of Japanese society in our syllabus and class discussions.
S: Teaching is not easy and there’s always room for improvement…that’s for sure. You know, there are researchers who specialize in pedagogy, right? It’s great for educators to think deeply about how to teach effectively. That said, I just think that 80% of effective teaching comes from building trust and good rapport with students. In other words, pedagogical research, I think, is really about how to improve the remaining 20% and if the teacher and the students do not have good interpersonal relations, adopting a cutting-edge teaching method and technique is not necessarily the best investment for anyone. I always tell my students I will treat them as adults who want to learn, which motivates them to work hard, and I also try to be as funny and entertaining as possible. When you are enjoying teaching, your students will know and they will respond well… I know you are both stellar teacher-scholars! Thanks for your time today.
H&C: Thank you!
[1] https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/digital-sociality-in-covid-19-japan/
[2] Hassel, Kimberly. 2022. “Black Japanese Storytelling as Praxis: Anti-Racist Digital Activism and Black Lives Matter in Japan.” In Who Is the Asianist?: The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies. Edited by William H. Bridges, Nitasha Tamar Sharma, and Marvin D Sterling. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 139–157.
[3] https://www.mechademia.net/
[4] https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2022/07/erin-huang-tenure-denial-area-studies-princeton
[5] Cornyetz, Nina. 2004. “Technologies of Gazing in ‘Woman in the Dunes.’” U.s.-Japan Women's Journal 26: 30–54.
[6] Boysen, G. A., et al. 2021. “Trigger Warning Efficacy: The Impact of Warnings on Affect, Attitudes, and Learning. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 7(1), 39–52.
[7] Update from fall semester by Kimberly:
“Many of my students shared that Perfect Blue was one of their favorite films from the course. During our class discussion, students shared that although the film was unsettling, it truly made them reflect more on the nuances and pressures of celebrity culture within and beyond Japan. Most of the class watched Perfect Blue and kept my content warnings in mind, while a few watched the alternate film, Hosoda Mamoru’s Belle (Ryū to sobakasu no hime, 2021).