Summer is the Season for Monsters

Charles Inouye, professor of Japanese, has always been fascinated by the things that terrify him. So much so, in fact, that he’s made a career of studying just that:

“I grew up in a very low stimulus environment, in the middle of nowhere in Utah on a farm, but I did spend lots of time daydreaming about this and that, and thinking about this and that, and I think that my habits are still with me,” Inouye said. “But all of the things I study now are things that used to both horrify me and intrigue me.”

What is the Japanese Gothic?

The Japanese gothic is not unlike gothic movements elsewhere—subversion of social and religious norms, strange and bizarre activity, and horror are prevalent elements.

“Typically you find [the gothic] in terms of being barbaric, primitive, grotesque, horrifying, abject, and so forth. But in modern culture, something like monstrosity is so commonplace—largely because the technology that makes computer graphics effects makes it so easy to do,” said Inouye. “But it’s also because of Japanese influence. And if you want to understand Japanese influence, you have to understand that their preoccupation with monstrosity comes from animism.”

Inouye hopes that the students of his Japanese Gothic course, which was offered for the first time Spring semester of 2010, will come away from the course having developed a deeper understanding of Japanese culture, and the gothic qualities that define it.

“On one level, [I hope that students come away from my course having learned] where all the monsters are coming from,” Inouye said. “Why is it that Japanese people are so monster-obsessed? And on another level, my course will help them find out what those monsters mean.”

Monstrosity in Japanese Culture

Inouye explained that in order to understand what the monsters mean, one has to first understand how gothic elements are entrenched in the history of Japanese culture.

“Last semester, we had an exhibit [in the Tufts Art Gallery] that was trying to get at the idea of the post modernist re-animation of the world,” Inouye said. “Animism in Japan is interesting because the supernatural is neither inherently evil nor beneficent—it’s both. So whether something is Kami (God), or Yokai (monster), depends on how you treat them. So what that means is that not all monsters are horrifying.”

However, it’s often the ‘horrifying’ monsters that get all the glory—and have for thousands of years.

“The course proceeds historically: we start with The Tale of Ganji, which if you’ve ever seen the movie ‘Jun-on,’ or [the American title of] ‘The Grudge,’ many of the conventions of this movie are established in this text which was written in the year 1000,” Inouye said. “They didn’t have television back then, but they did have the long black hair thing, the woman thing, the possession…those things, even a sense of helplessness.”

Japanese Gothic in America

“You have this phenomenon recently where most of our students grew up playing Pokemon, watching Ninja turtles, and playing with Transformer toys, and all these things. So they’re very welcoming of Japanese culture,” Inouye said. “And you have the movies of Miyazaki, and the whole J-Horror craze—just on many levels, all this is coming to us and other places around the world, and it’s making us have to think twice about what ‘Gothic’ means.”

Inouye said that he doesn’t require his students to have any knowledge of Japanese culture prior to taking his course, but he does say that many of his students tend to have some subconscious knowledge.

“I get a whole mix of people [in my course], but not all of them have any knowledge of Japan—it’s not required,” Inouye said. “Having said that, they do have knowledge of Japan, because they grew up with it. They didn’t even realize that the Transformers were from Japan or that the Ninja Turtles were Japanese.”

In addition to exposing his students to a wide variety of gothic aspects (including it’s presence in films, books, and art), Inouye also enables his students’ assignments to take multiple forms as well.

“Because I often have art students, sometimes they can do things like a poster, or a drawing, where they’re saying, ‘that’s my critique of the modern.’ The more creativity, the better,” Inouye said.

Inouye expressed his excitement over ‘Japanese Gothic’ being offered as a summer course for the first time—claiming the summer season is actually fit for studying the gothic.

“The Summer is the best time to study monsters. In Japan, there was a season for monsters, and that was in the hottest part of the year, because it made you shiver,” Inouye said. “It was kind of like air conditioning.”

- Story by Charlotte Steinway