MEPPI Japan Lecture Series – The Myth of McDonaldization: Globalization and Culture in a Japanese Community, 1961-2014

  • Thursday, January 29, 2015
  • 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
  • Conference Room 33C12, 600 Grant St, Pittsburgh, PA
  • 8

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L. Keith Brown

Observe more than half a century of change in Japan through photographs and stories. Dr. Keith Brown has been traveling to Mizusawa, a town in Iwate Prefecture, northeastern Japan, for 53 years. 

Dr. Brown has captured the emergence of car culture and the evolution of agriculture from labor-intensive hand cultivated rice to capital-intensive highly mechanized agriculture. As in America, “Main Street” in the center of town has hollowed out as suburban big box stores have overtaken small shops.

But what does that mean for the lives of the farmers there? Has this Japanese town been “McDonaldized?”

Join the JASP for this free evening at the USX Building Room 33C12 from 6:00 - 7:30 p.m., January 29, 2015. Light hors d’oeuvres and beverages will be provided. Space is limited so please register by January 23.

Dr. L. Keith Brown is Professor of Anthropology and UCIS Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. His research supported by NIMH, NSF, SSRC and Fulbright-Hays has included extended stays in a rural village, a merchant community, and in what used to be the residential neighborhood of the samurai during the castle period and now includes among its residents doctors, dentists, teachers, city office bureaucrats and other salary men. Dr. Brown served as Chairman of the Department of Anthropology, and for twelve years as Director of Asian Studies and the National Resource Center in East Asian Studies. In 1995 he received the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, an Imperial award from the Japanese government for “outstanding contributions to furthering Japanese Studies and promoting academic exchange between Japan and the United States.”
 

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Lecture Series Sponsored by Mitsubishi Electric Power Products, Inc.