On this week’s 51%, you’ll learn about a piece of Japanese subculture that focuses on girls and women. It’s an art form called shojo manga. We then turn from art to the natural world, and one woman’s obsession with pigeons. Plus, we shine a spotlight on witches.
A professor at a college in New York has a keen interest in a piece of Japanese subculture through which artists express a different path for girls and women, one not based solely on the traditions of being a wife and mother. Think of shojomanga as girls’ comics, kind of, well, I’ll let Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase explain it.
She’s associate professor of Japanese at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and teaches a course in Japanese pop culture that includes a focus on manga. She was instrumental in bringing the exhibition, World of Shojo Manga! Mirrors of Girls’ Desires, to the college. The show focuses on women’s changing roles in Japanese society. Traditionally, the predominant theme of girls’ manga has been love, boys’ manga deals with fighting. That has changed.
That was Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase, associate professor of Japanese at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. And while the exhibition at Vassar concludes in November, the World of Shojo Manga! can be seen in February at Baruch College in New York City and from mid-March until the end of May at Ohio State University in Columbus.
From learning to appreciate an art form, to learning to appreciate a natural form that sometimes gets a bad rap. Reporter Martina Castro from KALW admits she harbors a bit of a fascination with pigeons, and is out to dispel related myths.
There’s a new season brewing for a television series about the Salem Witch Trials. A scholar puts one of the witches under the spotlight. Lilia Fuquen has the story from Virginia.
And that’s our show for this week. We hope you’ll come to the circle if you can and join us for the next one. Thanks to Katie Britton for production assistance. Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock. Our theme music is Glow in the Dark by Kevin Bartlett. This show is a national production of Northeast Public Radio.
