The South Korean film industry has, in the past few years, achieved astonishing popularity domestically and internationally. This year, for the first time, we are pleased to provide a rare opportunity for the Stanford community and the bay area to enjoy a wide array of recent Korean films and to discuss the films with their directors. Three of these films will be shown here on campus. The details of the campus viewings are below. For more information about the entire festival, please visit http://www.mykima.org/.

Murder, Take One Thursday, Feb. 9, 7 - 9 p.m. Free and open to the public.

Duelist Friday, Feb. 10, 7 - 9 p.m. Free and open to the public.

Following the screening of the film, the director, Myung-Se Lee will be available for questions from the audience.

TaeGukGi: The Brotherhood of War Saturday, Feb. 11, 5 - 7:30 p.m. Free and open to the public.

Following the screening of the film, the director, Je-Gyu Kang will be available for questions from the audience.

Please join us for an academic symposium "Globalization & Contemporary Korean Cinema" on Friday, February 10 from 3 - 5 p.m. in the Okimoto Conference Room on the third floor of Encina Hall. Free and open to the public.

Panelists: Young-Lan Lee (Assoc. Prof. Kyung Hee University)

Hyangjin Lee (Senior Lecturer, Sheffield University)

Jenny Kwok Wah Lau (Assoc. Prof. San Francisco State University)

Aaron Magnan-Park (Asst. Prof. University of Notre Dame)

Kyu-Hyun Kim (University of California, Davis)

Moderator: Chul Heo and Aaron Kerner (San Francisco State University)

Korean films have emerged as a unique and influential player in international cinema. Current Korean cinema has combined Hollywood and more traditionally Asian aesthetics in ways that make it well suited for the global film market. This academic seminar will discuss the political, cultural, social, and economic implications of these recent developments for both Korea and international cultural sectors.

The joint Korean-American Film Festival "Korea Studies in Media Arts" is co-presented by Stanford University, San Francisco State University, University of Notre Dame, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Japanese "nationalism" (if such a term is even applicable) depended less on imagined similarities among Japanese than it did on their contrived customary differences from foreign peoples such as the Ainu. The boundaries of the early modern Japanese realm were ethno-geographical, and Ainu identity and difference was critical in constructing the borders of Japan.

After 1799, the Tokugawa shogunate and, later, the Meiji state, undertook policies of deculturation and assimilation toward the Ainu, because the Meiji strategy toward state building relied less on difference than on myths of internal homogeneity. The Meiji state conscripted Ainu into the myth of Japanese homogeneity through assimilation; but earlier forms of Ainu autonomy and difference first had to be destroyed.

Interestingly, wolf eradication offers one vantage point from which to view the process of Ainu deculturation and assimilation in the context of the colonization of Hokkaido and the creation of the modern myths that provided the foundation for Japan's ethnic nationalism. Ainu origin mythology held that the Ainu people were born from a union of a wolf and a goddess, and so when Ainu tracked and killed wolves and wild dogs under state bounty programs legitimized as "imperial grants," they committed mythological patricide, replacing their origin myths with Japanese ones that, over the course of the late Meiji period, served as the foundation of Japan's modern nation.

Japan Brown Bag Series

Co-hosted with the Center for East Asian Studies