2021 Japan Lecture Series – Japanese Culture through Video Games

Japanese video games have had a significant impact on the medium worldwide. Dr. Rachael Hutchinson considers how ‘Japan’ has been packaged for domestic and overseas consumers, and how Japanese designers have used the medium to express ideas about home and nation, nuclear energy, war and historical memory, social breakdown and bioethics. She explores how ideology and critique are conveyed through game narrative and character design as well as user interface, cabinet art, and peripherals. Ultimately, she argues that Japanese artists have expressed similar ideas in the video game medium as in older narrative forms such as literature and film.

Watch the recording on YouTube.

Rachael Hutchinson is Associate Professor in Japanese Studies at the University of Delaware. She received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2000, and her research addresses representations of Japanese identity in a range of narrative texts – literature, film, manga and videogames. Her major publications are Japanese Culture Through Videogames (Routledge, 2019), Nagai Kafū’s Occidentalism: Defining the Japanese Self (author, SUNY Press 2011), Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature (co-editor, Routledge 2007) and Negotiating Censorship in Modern Japan (editor, Routledge 2013). She has published essays in Japan Forum, Japanese Studies, Monumenta Nipponica and Games and Culture, and is currently working on an edited volume on the Japanese role-playing game (JRPG).

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh national coordinating site for the National Consortium for Teaching About Asia (NCTA).

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