Month: March 2021

Diving into Japanese Fashion: A Virtual Field Study

Once a year, Associate Professor Hendrik Meyer-Ohle of the National University of Singapore flies his students to Tokyo to shop. Prof. Meyer-Ohle is not a fashionista with too much money and time on his hands—rather, he runs JS2880A, a class on Japanese fashion based almost entirely on fieldwork done in Japanese retail stores.

The Covid-19 pandemic throws a wrench in this arrangement. With restrictions on cross-border travel, Prof. Meyer-Ohle has had to come up with a new way to conduct these field studies. With his friends and collaborators Profs. Kazuo Kikuchi and Takahiro Nishi from Meiji University, they came up with the somewhat paradoxical “Virtual Field Study.”…

Rapture/Rupture: Modernist Poet Xu Zhimo’s Break from Tradition

Rainbows. Dreams. Mist. With one verse alone, Xu successfully weaves an ethereal world where dreams and desire flourish in his poem “Taking Leave from Cambridge Again.” In the eyes of a poet, an ordinary pool filled with duckweeds can easily transform into an alluring rainbow which harbours our wildest desires. Perhaps such is the power of literature—it is the power to use simple language to envision another reality and transform our mundane reality into a radically exciting one. Yet, this ability to imagine—to dream—is often considered excessive in modern society, where everything is mostly governed by utilitarian metrics. In a world where success is measured by efficiency and productivity, what value can literature hold? It seems to embody the exact opposite: it is subjective (god forbid), occasionally abstract (how unfortunate) and often idealistic (yikes!). …