Kawamoto’s "Dojoji Temple": Puppetry, Gesture and Myth

Dojoji Temple ( Dōjōji, 1976) is a short puppet animation directed by Kihachirō Kawamoto. Influenced by Bunraku (Japanese puppet plays), emaki (painted scroll), Noh theatre and Japanese myth, Dojoji Temple tells of a woman’s unrequited love for a young priest. Heartbroken, she then transforms into a sea serpent and goes after the priest for revenge. While Kawamoto’s animation is rich with Japanese aesthetics and tragedy, his animation is peopled by puppets who do not speak. Limited and restrained though the puppets may be, their animated gestures speak volumes of powerful emotions. For our article, we will select several scenes from the animation, and interpret their actions so that we can further understand the mythical world of Dojoji Temple and the essential being of puppetry. Our gesture analysis will take into account cinematographic compositions, sound and bodily attires, among other elements.

Understandings of transnational families in debates on Migration and development

International migration sets in motion a range of significant transnational processes that connect countries and people. How migration interacts with development and how policies might promote and enhance such interactions have, since the turn of the millennium, gained attention on the international agenda. The recognition that transnational practices connect migrants and their families across sending and receiving societies forms part of this debate. The ways in which policy debate employs and understands transnational family ties nevertheless remain underexplored. This article sets out to discern the understandings of the family in two (often intermingled) debates concerned with transnational interactions: The largely state and policydriven discourse on the potential benefits of migration on economic development, and the largely academic transnational family literature focusing on issues of care and the micro-politics of gender and generation. Emphasizing the relation between diverse migration-development dynamics and specific family positions, we ask whether an analytical point of departure in respective transnational motherhood, fatherhood or childhood is linked to emphasizing certain outcomes. We conclude by sketching important strands of inclusions and exclusions of family matters in policy discourse and suggest ways to better integrate a transnational family perspective in global migration-development policy.

The Communicative Dimension and Security in Asia-Pacific: A communicative-viewing proposal for reform of the Japanese Intelligence Services

The postwar development of the Intelligence Services in Japan has been based on two contrasting models: the centralized model of the USA and the collegiality of UK, neither of which has been fully developed. This has led to clashes of institutional competencies and poor anticipation of threats towards national security. This problem of opposing models has been partially overcome through two dimensions: externally through the cooperation with the US Intelligence Service under the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security; and internally though the pre-eminence in the national sphere of the Department of Public Safety. However, the emergence of a new global communicative dimension requires that a communicative-viewing remodeling of this dual model is necessary due to the increasing capacity of the individual actors to determine the dynamics of international events. This article examines these challenges for the Intelligence Services of Japan and proposes a reform based on this new global communicative dimension.