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Online classes have so rapidly expanded in Japanese universities as a result of the Covid-19 shock in 2020. Although this shift opens many possibilities in the university education including the participation of students who have small kids, disabilities, and reasons they cannot come to the university campus, we still need to think about the difference between the small scale interactive style class and the large scale on-demand delivery style class. The most important part of the online class is the sharing of time. However, in the online class of delivery type, the learning time itself is not shared, and the students can access the lectures at any time. In online lectures where space and time are not shared, there should be artificial mechanisms to share the context that establishes the questions in a different way than physically given. In this paper, I discuss MOOC (massive online open courseware) and Minerva University as the two prominent challenges of online education today. And I also discuss the historical positionality of university as a crossroad of different intellectuals and students of different cultural backgrounds in the long waves of globalization and pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an obituary for British professor of sociology and cultural theorist Stuart Hall.

Shibuya in the 1970s became the scene for the emergence of a postmodern culture, wherein urban space was differentiated, staged and mediatised, so as to become an integrated advertising environment. This was enabled by and produced a particular geography, but was the result most directly of a conscious strategy on the part of Parco, its dominant retailer. The segmented area could therefore be consumed by its visitors, as women's magazines at the time were being consumed by their readers, with the reader and visitor simultaneously seeing and being seen within the new urban/media space. This article traces this process, emphasising the new kind of agency that was acquired by women in the process, but also the rapid disappearance of this new sense of possibility, constrained not only by the limits of consumerism and by a mid-1980s decline in consumption, but also from the more general uncertainty that became apparent towards the end of the decade. By the turn of the century, postmodern culture had disappeared in Tokyo. Inasmuch as Shibuya's earlier self can still be discovered in Taipei, Seoul and beyond, however, its lessons continue to resonate today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the advancement of cultural studies in Japan. It states that cultural studies were obstructed by several boundaries among national knowledge and culture, and academic knowledge and world. It mentions that a large number of Japanese scholars were provided training on cultural study within their home country. It further states that cultural studies were given importance among Japanese academics in the 1990s.

This article focuses on Americanization in Japan after the Second World War and Asia during the Cold War. Japan's defeat in 1945 and subsequent occupation by US forces influenced the development of postwar mass culture in that country. It would seem that the cultural policies pursued mainly by the American Civil Information and Education Bureau (CIE) during the occupation had the effect of spreading Americanism from its earlier prewar base among the urban middle classes to the nation as a whole. The emphasis of America's policy toward Asia shifted from democratization and the elimination of Japanese imperialism to the construction of an anticommunist stronghold in Asia.

Focuses on the condition of cultural studies in Japan. History of the critical research on popular culture; Acceptances of cultural studies; Problems of the globalization of cultural studies.

The article provides an introduction to the journal "Inter-Asia Cultural Studies" of November 2003. The first paper, by Park Keunho, "The Vietnam War and the "Miracle of East Asia", focuses on South Korea and examines the relationship between the Vietnam War and the rapid economic development of Asia. "Okinawa's Postwar" by Toriyama Atsushi demonstrates how the mainland Japanese at the end of the Second World War forgot Okinawa and how the US took advantage of such Japanese national amnesia by turning Okinawa into its permanent military base. Tanaka Yasuhiro in his "The Media Representation of Okinawa" illustrates how the image of Okinawa as a southern paradise has been reproduced in the postwar Japanese media.