Eye Magazine
The Magazine of The International Academic Forum | Issue 3 | Spring 2014

Exclusive Interview
Severn Cullis-Suzuki
From the Midwest to theMiddle East

Gary Swanson interviews Richard Rothabout his life and work in journalism

Progressively WorseClassrooms

How Long Can We Tolerate Declining
Standards? by Craig Sower

University Rankings
Crossing Disciplines, Borders,and Credulity by Jerry Platt

Japan’s Abenomics Story
A quintessential dialogic news event
by Beryl Hawkins and Barry Natusch

One Big Happy Family?

Subverting Reaganism in Peggy Sue
Got Married by Douglas Forster

EYE MAGAZINE ISSUE 3

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16

11
21

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24

CONTENTS
4.
From the Editor
An introduction to the latest
edition of Eye Magazine
by Michael Liam Kedzlie

16.
One Big Happy Family?
Subverting Reaganism in
Peggy Sue Got Married
by Douglas Forster

6.
Progressively WorseClassrooms
How long can we tolerate
declining standardsby Craig Sower

21.
Exclusive Interview: From
the Midwest to the Middle
East
Gary Swanson interviews
Richard Roth11.
Rating the Rankers
A look at the 6 current
prominent University
Rankings
by Jerry Platt

24.
IAFOR Keynote Series
ELT in a Changing Russia
by Prof. Svetlana TerMinasova

12.
University Rankings
Crossing Disciplines,
Borders, and Credulity
by Jerry Platt
2 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

26.
Exclusive interview with
Severn Cullis-Suzuki
Eye magazine interviews
environmental activist,
Severn Cullis-Suzuki

EYE MAGAZINE ISSUE 3

26

40

30

42

44

47

30.
Japan’s Abenomics Story
A quintessential dialogic
news event by Beryl
Hawkins and Barry Natusch

44.
The Mena Saga
Let’s get Sy(I)ria-ous: Whereis the counter narrative?
by Anis H. Bajrektarevic

Eye Magazine

38.
Photo Feature
St Jude Storm, Brighton, UK
by Thaddeus Pope47.
Wan ChaiHong Kong’s Vividly
Colourful Wan Chai Districtby Jun Kobayashi

40.
Developing Safe and civil
Schools
A look at how the US istrying to decrease violencein schools
by Rebecca Irby
42.
The Writing Life
A light-hearted look at thetrials and tribulations ofbeing a writer
by Vineet Kaul

Cover Photograph by
Thaddeus Pope

Issue 3 | Spring 2014

EditorMichael Liam Kedzlie
DesignThaddeus Pope
Subscriptions
magazine@iafor.org
Copyright © 2014, Eye Magazine

If you would like to subscribe to Eye Magazine,
or would like to contribute to the magazine,
please contact us via magazine@iafor.org
Third Edition Eye Magazine | 3

A word from the editorW

elcome to this the third edition of Eyemagazine the International Academic
Forums own in-house e-magazine
publication. Through Eye magazine, we hope toenlighten you to various views and opinions of ourcontributors, many of whom, have presented fullresearch papers at our various conferences. We
are very excited by this particular edition of themagazine as we have a new design layout thanks
to my colleague, Thaddeus Pope, IAFOR’s MediaManager, as well a some great articles to interest
you as the reader.
As the new editor of Eye magazine one of mygoals is to provide opportunities for the latest
research presented at IAFOR’s conferences andsubsequently published in our various official
proceedings and journals the opportunity to reachout to a new audience. Of course that research has
to be able to be digestible to the non-specialists. So
hopefully, with Eye magazine a specialist in the areaof international relations can inform and enlighten
a language learning expert and likewise a cultural
studies exponent can speak to an economist, ora lawyer to an environmental engineer, without
the burden of over-specialist terminology foundwithin one’s own traditional research silo. To that,
Eye magazine is in many ways, an extension of our
focus on developing interdisciplinary knowledge
and research synergies.
In this latest edition I wish to thank thosecontributors who have kindly written articles
and submitted photos to make it all happen,
to make it an interesting and vibrant read. This
edition has some fabulous articles. Craig Sower
throwing down the gauntlet with respect to thedirection of modern education. Doug Forster
with his wonderful essay on the movie Peggy Sue
got Married filtered through the socio-politicalperspective of Reagan’s America. Barry Natusch
and Beryl Hawkins with their critical examinationof ‘Abenomics’ and the resulting media discourse
here in Japan. It is also a pleasure to publish theopinion editorial of Dr Jerry Platt who provides a
critical analysis of the current university rankings,
which are becoming over prescribed, described
and with people like Jerry around – thoroughly
debunked. I first became aware of the research inthis area following Jerry’s address at last year’s Asian
Conference on Education. Also in this edition we

4 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

have featured an interview by Gary Swanson with
Robert Roth, which will also be soon available on
IAFOR’s Channel. The interview looks back on
Richard’s long career as a journalist and media
professor. It highlights the exciting journalism
program at North Western under Brad Hamm
and Richard’s current role in the Middle East. The
video of this interview is available on IAFOR’s
YouTube channel.
Also in this third edition of Eye magazine
we also get a chance to meet up with Canadianenvironmentalist Severn Cullis Suzuki whom
Rebecca Irby recently interviewed on video,
something that will be available shortly on
IAFOR’s YouTube Channel. Rebecca Irby also
contributes an informative report on a New Jersey
based education program – the Developing Safeand Civil Schools Initiative. Hong Kong based
Japanese writer Jun Kobayashi introduces us thearchitectural culture of the colourful Wan Chai
district in Hong Kong, and Anis Bajrektarevic
provides us with a fascinating perspective of thecurrent Syrian issue. Young Indian writer andacademic Vineet Kaul offers a delightful shortpiece on the personal joy and torment of the writing
process, something, which many of us can relate toas professionals or academics. This edition features
an excerpt from the keynote speech of Professor
Svetlana Ter-Minasova’s Keynote Address at the
Asian Conference on Education in which she
reflected on the past attitudes and practices that
she experienced first hand as a young student thenambitious professor of foreign languages underthen Soviet Russia.

““

FROM THE EDITOR

Lastly at IAFOR we felt that you, as a readerof Eye, should also have the opportunity tocontribute to this new exciting magazine venture.
Thus we hope that it can give you the opportunity
to also creatively focus your own vision, perspective
and insight as a contributor to future editions. We
trust that this edition of Eye magazine will be an
informative, interesting and exciting way for us tocommunicate with you, and you in turn with us.
Sincerely,
Michael Liam Kedzlie
Editormkedzlie@iafor.org

Third Edition Eye Magazine | 5

FEATURE : Craig Sower
Photograph by Aaron Loessberg-Zahl / Flickr

Progressively
Worse Classrooms

HOW LONG CAN WE TOLERATE DECLINING STANDARDS? BY CRAIG SOWER

A

paper
titled“American
Progressive Education and Yutori
Kyoiku” elicited interesting responses
at the ACE 2013 Conference.
Immediately after the presentation, an
attendee raised his hand and said, “Asan educator in California for the past
25 years I disagree with everything
you said.” He went on to blame
conservatives for current problems in
California schools. Such comments
BY
CRAIG
SOWER
from
Americanteachers are notsurprising, but the comments fromtwo Asian attendees were. During the
break, a Malaysian woman said, “Mr.
Sower, I am agreeing with you in every
particular. I did not know where thisstyle of education was coming from,but it is having a very negative effectin Malaysia. Public schoolchildren
are unprepared for higher educationand it is getting worse.” A Taiwanese
woman agreed, though she thought
6 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

the “new” ideas came from Japan.
These reactions illuminate a divide
between an entrenched establishmentthat favors progressive education, anda growing sense among parents andteachers that something is deeply
wrong. Objections to progressive
education are not new.
The origins of the movement are
detailed in the original paper, but
the main points are these. American
intellectuals educated in Germanyin the late-1800s were inspired by
the Prussian model of an efficiently
organized society under the leadershipof experts backed by the power of thestate bureaucracy. They returned homeimbued with ideas about an ostensibly
rational Statism and began to advocate
similar changes in America. Leadersof the movement (Stanley Hall, John
Dewey, Edward Thorndike, David

Snedden,and William Kilpatrick) werealso inspired by Rousseau. Working
principally at Teachers College atColumbia University (TCCU), they
replaced traditional curricula witha differentiated curriculum that put
the masses on a vocational track
while giving elite students a better
education. Theyde-emphasized
reading and dumbed-down courses.
From 1910-1950, academic content
in American schools was slashed by
60% as “life-adjustment” courses roseten-fold. They established an ongoinghegemony over teacher educationand placed pupils’ self-esteem above
learning facts or developing good
habits. A century later, in Japan,
yutori kyoiku (stress-free education)
reduced the school week fromsix days to five in 2002, and cut“educational requirements by a third.”
Scholastic performance cratered inboth countries. Progressive education
results in a two-tiered system withwell-educated elites on top, poorly
educated masses below, and lower
overall academic achievement, as isdemonstrated in the U.S. and Japan.
This is not a bug, it’s a feature.
The results are clear. In America,the 2011 National Assessment of
Educational Progress tests of 4th- and8th-graders showed that performancehas flat-lined. The 2012 average SAT
reading score fell to 496, the lowest
since data became available in 1972.
Writing, at 488, was the lowest since
being added to the test in 2006. U.S.
scores also declined in the Programfor International Student Assessment(PISA). In math, the US slipped from18th out of 27 countries, to 25th outof 30. In science, the U.S. fell from14th out of 27, to 21st out of 30.
U.S. students remained number one
in self-esteem. American teachers
blame inadequate support. However,as performance declined from 1970
to 2009, staffing doubled and total
inflation-adjusted
spending
perstudent for K-12 public education

increased from $55,000 to $151,000.
In Japan, “declining scholastic abilities
of Japan’s children and university
students—formerly ranked at the topof the world—is said to be a failure of
the [Ministry of Education’s] policyof yutori kyoiku.” This occurred asacademic contents were cut and classsize was reduced from a post-war
average of 50 to the current 35. Japan’s
free-fall shocked the nation.

2000
2003
2006

Japan PISA Ranking
Math Science
Reading
2
2
8
6
2
14
10
5
15

The ideas at issue began with the
French philosopher, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, the enlightened genius who
sent his five illegitimate children to
foundling homes before sitting downin 1762 to pen his extended sermon
on childrearing, Emile. Rousseau’ssuggestions of easy, “natural” learning
are seductive. Imagine a world wherechildren effortlessly learn language
and history, science and math. Imagine

discipline and moral behavior arisingspontaneously. Imagine schools where
teachers need no lesson plans, but
guide students in seamless harmony
with the children’s interests. Imagine
it all, for imagination is as close as you
will get. Regardless, American elites
in the late-19th century embraced
Rousseau’s unproven assertions about
the nature of children, learning andteaching, and founded an approachthat is “progressive” only in the sensethat it creates progressively worseclassrooms. Since Japan’s yutori
kyoiku follows suit, Japanese parents
should familiarize themselves withthe origins of this philosophy before
deciding if it is good for their children.
Perhaps Malaysian and Taiwaneseparents should, too.
The traditional ideal of a liberal
education rested on three principles:1) rigorous study disciplines the mind;2) this benefits all students; and 3)
studying the cultural, scientific, andreligious heritage of the nation adds
value to the society and uplifts thecommunity as a whole. Disdainfulof American social, religious, andThird Edition Eye Magazine | 7

8 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

Photograph by AJARI / Flickr

political institutions, progressives
pursued their own vision instead.
One person who took issue with thestrange new definitions of democracy
and education being advanced was
William Maxwell, superintendent of
New York City public schools. In a
paper published in 1914, he blasted thedismal outcomes of the fads, panaceas,
and easy answers pushed by academic
theorists: “It was so comfortable
to imagine that, thru interestingreading and thru story-telling andthru counting the petals of flowers
and the legs and ears of animals, andwriting about them, children could
learn arithmetic, and composition
and grammar, and that those tiresome
drills to which old-fogy teachers andsuperintendents pinned their faith
could be neglected with impunity!
Hence thousands of teachers followed
this new will-o’-the-wisp. The results
were deplorable.”
Another dissenter was Paul Shorey,classical studies professor at the
University of Chicago. He opined ina 1917 article: “The things which, forlack of better names, we try to suggest
by culture, discipline, taste, standards,
criticism, and the historic sense, theyhate…the tendency of their policies
is to stamp out and eradicate thesethings and inculcate exclusively theirown tastes and ideals by controlling
American education with the political
efficiency of Prussian autocracy andthe fanatical intolerance of the French
anticlericalists. Greek and Latin havebecome mere symbols and pretexts.
They are as contemptuous of Dante,
Shakespeare, Milton, Racine, Burke,
John Stuart Mill, Tennyson [or]Alexander Hamilton…as of Homer,
Sophocles, Virgil or Horace.” He wasto be proven right. It was not justthat educationists were removing theclassical curriculum from high schools
it was that they sought to remove
scholarship altogether. Their assault
was not only on the education of thechildren of the lumpen proletariat,
whom they were apparently willingto consign to sweatshops and farms,
the progressives were bent on thediminution of a common cultural
understanding even for would-be
elites.

be enthusiastic. In 1928, Kilpatrickand Dewey traveled to the U.S.S.R.,
meeting with educators including
Soviet People’s Commissar of
Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky,
professor Albert Pinkevich, and S.
Shorey’s concerns were echoed T. Schatzsky. The Russians praised
thirty-six years later. In 1953, Arthur The Project Method effusively. Knoll
Bestor, a former TCCU professor, writes, “Viktor N. Sulgin, head of thewrote: “Progressive education became Institute of Educational Research
regressive education, because, instead in Moscow, called the concept theof advancing, it began to undermine ‘withering away of the school’ andthe great traditions of liberal declared the ‘metod proektov’ to be
education and to substitute for them the one and only truly ‘Marxist’ andlesser aims, confused aims, or no aims ‘democratic’ method of teaching.”
at all.” Bestor dismissed progressives’ The Russian reformers planned toclaims of innocence about their future implement the method throughout
designs on the curriculum: “We must the country.
face the facts. Up-and-coming publicschool educationists are not talking Alas, they acted too hastily. Knoll
about substituting one scholarly writes that on September 5, 1931,
discipline for another. They stopped shortly after the adoption of Sulgin’s
talking about that years ago. They are new curriculum, Stalin, “condemned
talking—as clearly as their antipathy the ‘ill-considered craze for thefor grammar and syntax permits them project
method’…declaring[it]
to talk—about the elimination of all was not suited for teaching thethe scholarly disciplines” (emphasis knowledge and skills necessary tohis).
increase industrial production andstrengthen communist consciousness.
Nor are Japan, Malaysia, and Taiwan Indeed, there was considerable risk
the first non-Western countries that…progress achieved in the field
progressives have tried to seduce. In of general and scientific education in
the 1920s, TCCU professor William recent years would be jeopardized.”
Kilpatrick advanced his own version One searches in vain for furtherof progressive education, “The Project mention of the hapless Mr. Sulgin.
Method.” His variant consisted of Other advocates of progressive
student-led activity for activity’s sake. education also seem to have “withered
Students made newspapers, sewed away.” Commissar Lunacharsky wasdresses, and produced portfolios. purged the year after he met Dewey,
Like other progressives, he adamantly his name dropped down the memory
opposed academic curricula. In 1925, hole during the Great Terror of 1936he wrote of “activity leading to further 38. According to Ravitch, “In theactivity” (emphasis his) and of “growth mid-1930s the reformer Schatzsky
in richness of life and growth in control committed
suicide.
Professor
over experience…If we can each day Pinkevich was arrested in the regime’s
get him [the child] to do better than mass purges of intellectuals andthe day before, we can gradually build died in a forced-labor camp.” While
up a finer quality of living. The details anyone who has sat through a facultyof doing it are as infinite as there are meeting can understand the impulse
children and situations.” Almost any to send academic gasbags to Siberia,
activity one could imagine would one wishes today’s progressives better
fit his model so long as the teacher luck.
had nothing to do with planning
it. It mattered only that students Today, progressive educators dress up
Third Edition Eye Magazine | 9their weak curriculum with happytalk about critical thinking andinterdisciplinary problem solving, but
the results prove Rousseau and Dewey
were wrong. Many parents now use
their wallets to get around dumbeddown public education. In the U.S.,
there have always been private schools
for those with money or connections.
In Japan, families rely on juku (private
cram schools) to prepare theirchildren to enter elite institutions.
Unfortunately, this does not help thevast majority of children who aretrapped in public schools that fail toprepare students for anything beyond
low-level jobs. The result is a system
in which a few lucky students receivea high-quality liberal education, andeveryone else receives mush. In otherwords, it produces precisely the kindof statist society Bismarck had in
mind: clever shepherds tending apliant flock.
There remains, however, the problem
10 | Eye Magazine Third Editionof culture. Do Americans reallywant to be herded by their betters?
If not, then perhaps schools using
more traditional methods may yet
prevail. There are some hopefulsigns. At Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem
Children’s Zone Promise Academy
charter schools (featured in Waiting
for Superman) students do daily
homework, drills, and other effective,
old-fashioned activities. Similarly,
students at traditional Catholic highschools—many in inner cities—
are twice as likely as public school
students to graduate from college.
Japan poses a different challenge
to progressives. While top-down
decision-making is familiar to mostJapanese, radical change is not. Afterall, Confucian and Zen Masters arebywords for tradition. Finally, how
might Malaysia and Taiwan react toprogressive academic failures?
Elites have pushed progressive
education in America, and yutori

kyoiku in Japan, based on false
assumptions about children, learning,
and teaching. Under their leadership,
academic performance has collapsedin the U.S. and will continue todeteriorate in Japan unless thesepractices are changed. Japan’s decline
in scholastic achievement followed
a course similar to the decline inAmerican academic performance
when progressive “reforms” wereenacted. Empowering experts over
the objections of parents and teachers,
reducing contents, and shortening
study time inevitably results in poorer
performance and a two-tiered system.
Prof. Craig Sower is a Professor
of English at Shujitsu University,
Okayama, Japan, where hehas taught writing and teachereducation at graduate andundergraduate levels since 1998.

Rating the Rankers
A look at the 6 current prominent University Rankings
by Professor Jerry PlattT

here is little agreement on what constitutes a quality university or that raters go to great lengths to differentiate
their rankings product – neither explanation offers much support for trusting university rankings. The categories
of admissions selectivity and student demographics, finances and spending, services, and financial aid are exclusively
American concerns. Inclusion of international diversity has been characterized by some as a British effort to improverankings of their schools relative to the Americans. The tendency to focus on input measures is evident throughout.
Rather than an exhaustive listing and critique of all known university rankings, following are my selective comments
regarding two American and four global University ranking organizations.
U.S. News & World Report
The most well-known university rankings are the annual
publications by U.S. News & World Report. Given thatsome universities are in their second millennia, and that few
institutions resist change quite like a university, how much
can university rankings really change year to year? Quitea bit, according to the magazine’s spokesperson leading up
to the 2014 release date: “Many school ranks will change
in this year’s edition compared with the 2013 edition”. Not
so much, according to the empirical evidence. The actual
correlation between 2014 and 2013 rankings was 0.991 for
U.S. national universities and 0.989 for liberal arts colleges.
Perhaps rankings change more gradually, over time. The
evidence suggests otherwise, at least at the top. For U.S.
News & World Report, the criteria indeed has changed
over time, from solely peer assessment to consideration ofsome 16 factors, but rankings of top schools have reshuffledever so slightly over the past 30 years.
Forbes / CCAP Rankings
Forbes Magazine has formed a partnership with The
Center for College Affordability and Productivity,
ostensibly to construct rankings consistent with “our firm
belief in ‘output’ over ‘input’. We’re not all that interested
in what gets a student into college, like our peers who focus
on selectivity metrics such as high school class rank and
SAT scores. Our sights are set directly on ROI: What are
students getting out of college?” (11). Apparently lost on
Forbes is the irony that their #1 ranked school for 2013 isStanford University, most assuredly one of the most selective
institutions among the 650 sampled, with extremely highmedian high school class ranks and standardized testscores among incoming students. Regarding the “college
affordability” in the title of the Forbes rankings partner,
note that annual tuition at Stanford is $42,690.
Shanghai Academic Rankings of World Universities
The first international ranking system was developed in2013 in China, possibly in an effort to identify institutions
after, which to model their own. The criteria are decidedly
elitist, restricted to just research productivity andrecognition – and Nobel prizes. The top three rankings for2013 were Harvard, Stanford, and University of California,
Berkeley.

QS World University Rankings
One year after the Shanghai rankings first appeared, theLondon Times partnered with Quacquarelli Symonds(QS), a London-based education survey research
firm, to produce the Times Higher Ed / QS World
University Rankings. Since 2010 the two organizations
have published separate ratings, although collaboration
continues. For the 2013/14 rankings, half the weighting
applies to their own global surveys of academic (40%)
and employer (10%) reputation; the remaining half isderived from faculty-student ratios (20%), faculty researchcitations (20%) and international students (5%) and faculty(5%). The current top 10 rankings include six Americanand four British universities. Given the heavy weighting,the surveys merit scrutiny. It also is questionable to placemuch weight on the proportion of international staff orstudents on campus. To the extent it contributes at allto academic excellence, what would seem to matter is a
global mind-set rather than mere foreign presence. For thelast year (2009) in which THE/QS combined to produce
rankings, 11 Japanese universities were included among theworld top 200 universities. As is evident from the graphbelow, they are highly ranked despite weak international
representation. Conversely, if Prime Minister Abe wants
to increase Japanese representation at the high end ofsuch global rankings, simply increase the number of nonJapanese faculty and students on campus. Does this reallyconnote excellence?
Times Higher Education Rankings
Despite weights reported to four decimal places, theTimes Higher Education (THE) rankings actually places
more than 40% weighting on worldwide reputation andinternational presence. The top 10 rankings go to 7
American and three British schools.
CWUR World University Rankings
A new entry in 2012, the Center for World University
Rankings (CWUR) eschews surveys and data submissions
by the universities to build a ranking system robust against
manipulation that it claims measures quality of education
and research. Identically to Shanghai, however, in 2013 it
ranks Harvard #1 and Stanford #2.

Third Edition Eye Magazine | 11

FEATURED : Jerry PlattFEATURED ARTICLE

University
Rankings

Crossing Disciplines, Borders, and Credulity by Jerry PlattR

Photograph by Seth Sawyers / Flickr

ankings are ubiquitous in modern
society, an irresistible pairingof 21st-century capabilities in data
access, packaging and distribution
to the timeless tendency of humannature to recognize, invoke or impose
comparisons. For thousands of years
rankings invariably were derived
from census data, and were limited tocomparisons among regions within asovereign jurisdiction.

Many rankings are harmless, mere
conversation
fodder.
However,
University rankings almost never
are without consequences thatmatter. Parents often are (mis-)guided by rankings in selecting acollege for their child, and internallyadministrators use rankings as a tool
to garner increased funding. Recently
the stakes have increased.

into newspapers, and the uproar fromcollege deans and presidents who feltslighted led President Taft to issue
an Executive Order prohibiting its
official release. No administration has
tried since.

Reputation-based rankings received
a boost in 1983 when the magazine
U.S. News and World Report began
publishing and updating rankings
In the United States, the Obama of American universities. In 1988
For 150 years we followed the dictates administration has announced a it expanded the criteria beyondof Adam Smith and the market magic plan to develop metrics and create reputation to include objective input/of his “invisible hand”, then came the university rankings, and to then use output data, including admission and
Depression. Governments around those rankings to help guide allocation graduation rates, faculty publications
the world lacked data, metrics, or of Federal government student and economic resources. Competitors
strategies to intervene and influence financial aid and other resources. emerged, and in 2003 Shanghai
the direction of their economies. It Even as critics express concern over Jiao Tong University released its
was a short step from measuring each basing public policy and resource first “Academic Rankings of World
country’s GDP to sorting and ranking allocations on rankings that invariably Universities (7). Competition is thisby GDP, and then by GDP per capita, rest on questionable assumptions market today includes the QS Worldand then by further variations on this and often suffer from measurement University Rankings since 2004
and other themes.
and methodological deficiencies, the (8), the Times Higher Education
politicos seem intent upon marching Rankings since 2010 (9), and the
Of course, there is no obvious way to ahead.
CWUR World University Rankings
compare apples to oranges, or wealthsince 2012 (10).
to health, so such rankings necessarily The ranking of Universities haveare somewhat subjective. The UN been around for nearly a century. As Why Do University Rankings Vary?
chooses to assign equal weights documented by Myers and Robeto each of its three categories, an (5), in 1900 Alick MacLean of The seemingly simple example
attempt at neutrality that nonetheless England contributed to the heredity of American college football isis value-laden. Whatever the widgets v. environment debate of the day by instructive. Even with an empiricalbeing considered, many of the most ranking universities in the order of and unambiguous scoreboard forrecognized rankings in play today “eminent men who attended them” each game, a (usually) fixed set offollow this neutrality model.
(6). Several such periodic rankings games, and the single objective ofbased on distinguished alumni or winning games, it proves impossible
No entities seem off limit: a cursory faculty reputation followed over the to construct rankings upon which
web search offers up rankings of next half-century.
Of particular all reasonable folks might agree.
American presidents, of hospitals, interest given the current Obama With over 300 teams each playingof the social value of songs, of radio initiative, in 1910 Kendrick Babcock, perhaps 12 games, there are likely tobroadcasters, of country corruption a U.S. Federal employee with the be multiple teams with the same win
perception, and of so very much more. Bureau of Education, created a set percentage. To ferret out differences,
Perhaps most common of all are of American university rankings. A one turns to less obvious metrics,
rankings of universities.
draft of his rankings found its way over which judges may disagree as
Third Edition Eye Magazine | 13

to their selection, their measurement,
their relative importance, and so on.
Imagine now repeating this exercise
for another unit of the university,
such as the physics department, forwhich there is no clear measure of “awin”. Now extend the exercise to eachindividual unit of the institution, andthen somehow aggregate across thesedisparate units to arrive at a university
measure. Do so for all universities inyour universe of interest, regardlessof big or small, public or private,in London or Leeds, in Latvia or
Lithuania. No small task, indeed.
Rankings differ because different
choices are made in their construction,and there are a surprisingly large
number of choices that must be made,at least implicitly. Following are tensuch choices.
CONSTRUCTION CHOICES
1) Institutional Objectives
Surely university rankings should
be guided by institutional objectives.
Just as surely, those objectives differ
among universities, as do the resources
available to pursue objectives. For
example, one university may aspire tochange the world through fundamental
research. If successful, it will recruit
brilliant faculty and students, andprovide sufficient resources and an
environment conducive to research
productivity. It then will acquire a
reputation for excellence in research.
A different university, perhaps
operating with a fraction of theresources available to the first, may
aspire to change the world by creating
opportunities for the otherwise
disadvantaged to challenge engrainedsocial strata. If successful, it will beappreciated by those who benefit,
dismissed by those who are threatened,
and likely be overlooked by rankingsthat focus on reputation, resources
and selectivity. Both universities
are changing the world, arguably forthe better, but ranking systems that
impose a single monolithic objective
implicitly favor one institution over
the other.
Almost all current university ranking
14 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

systems are based on reputation orvariables that correlate highly with
reputation, the dominant driverof rankings dating back to Alick
MacLean in 1900. Absolute measuresof success that are tied to reputation,such as alumni achievement andresearch production, invariably receive
greater emphasis than do efficiency
measures, such as value-added per
student or return on investment;
equity measures, such as providing
opportunities for the sociallydisadvantaged, are rarely considered.

5) Data Collection
Do you rely upon data within the
public domain that approximate yourvariables of interest, or do you request
data directly from the schools toassure exact responses to the variablesof interest? U.S. News & World
Report does the latter, and in theprocess incurs missing data problems
from non-responsiveness.

6) Variable Normalization
For whatever reason, you want torank universities by assigning equal
weight to retention rate and median2) Sample Selection
standardized test score for the
You want to rank American universities. entering class. You have:
Do you include the Rhode Island
RetRateTestScore
School of Design, a prestigious but University
highly specialized institution? Do you X		90		500include Gustavus Adolphus College, Y		70		700a prestigious liberal arts institution Z		50		900that indicates it does not require
standardized test scores for admission If you sum the measures, then rank #1(on which basis U.S. News & World = University Z, at 950. Note, however,that they would remain #1 even if
Report excluded it)?
their retention rate approached 0. The
problem is that retention rates and3) Variable Selection
Input measures often are readily standardized test scores are measured
available for universities, either on different scales, so that in thisthrough self-reporting or from instance the nominal equal weighting
government or other official and in effect weights test scores about 10
standardized sources.
Output times more than it weights retention
measures often are more elusive, in rates.
part because of intrinsic measurement
problems and in part because schools 7) Variable Correlations
sometimes safeguard such sensitive Assume that you add entering
information. Valid rankings may grade point to retention rate andrequire a balance between input standardized test score, and intend toand output measures, perhaps give equal weight to each underlying
including meaningful output/input factor in deriving rankings? Assume
ratios. Given the varying objectives further that admissions data (gradeof different universities, the varying point and test score) are highly
conditions and cultures that prevail correlated (say +0.90). If you assign
across countries, and the diversity of equal nominal weight to the three
activities across departments on any variables, then in essence you are
given campus, how do you decide the weighting test score nearly double
appropriate set of input and output retention rate, since grade point is
so highly correlated with test score
measures?
as to be a surrogate for it. retention
rate, since grade point is so highly
4) Variable Measurement
You want to measure student correlated with test score as to be asatisfaction as one component of your surrogate for it.
rankings? Do you rely on a direct
measure that is easy to access but may 8) Variable Weightings
be biased, such as the website www. You somehow have constructed a
RateMyProfessor.com (as does the single perfect measure for each of
education effectiveness, efficiency andForbes/CCAP Rankings)?
equity, and now you want to weightPhotograph by uniinnsbruck / Flickr

the measures so as to aggregate theinformation. Do you assign equal
weightings? Random weightings?
Do you choose weights to reflect thestatistical quality or face validity ofthe data?
9) Variable Aggregation to Scores
Having decided how to weight thevariables, do you then combine themin a linear manner? Would you prefera geometric aggregation that imposes
penalties for compensation amongindividual indicators? There also are
multi-criteria approaches to consider,
if your goal is to prohibit a very highscore offsetting a low.
10) From Scores to Rankings
Finally, you have scores for each
university, from which you easily canconstruct rankings? Should you? Ifranking 800 universities, it is likely thatyou are not confident that University# 583 is truly “better” than University# 584, so why suggest otherwise?

analyses of their rankings, despite theobvious fact that the many choices
enumerated earlier rather clearlysuggest that different choices would
lead to different rankings.

constructing rankings. Consider thematter of correlation among attributes
included in the ranking scheme, aproblem not adequately addressed byany of the ranking services discussed.

3) Documentation
Some services provide careful
documentation of data sources,
rationale for inclusion, weighting
1) Reporting
scheme, and so on; many do not. Why
What to report? What, if anything, trust those that don’t?
to hold back? Some ranking services
provide only the rankings, some 4) Accessibility
provide category standardized scores More often than not, university
and/or weights, some provide the rankings are packaged online
raw data, but few provide the raw in a manner not conducive todata in a friendly format to download. downloading and analyzing. Even
While there may be understandable when the ingredients are supplied,concern that consumer-modified they usually are packaged as a pdf fileanalyses might misrepresent publisher or a separate pull-down menu item
intentions, or that there could be for each attribute. Control sometimes
usage without attribution, these are seems to border on paranoia, such as
not concerns unique to rankings data, at the QS site:
and in any event should be trumped
by a spirit of transparency and support 5) Reproducibility
for replication of scientific results.
Most sites make data access soponderous only the hearty persevere.
2) Sensitivity
All of the university rankings are It is evident that current publishedpresented with an air of finality, as if university ranking services are rather
the evidence has led inescapably to cavalier with regard to the difficult
the resultant rankings. None provide choices that should be made inconfidence intervals or sensitivity

It is evident that variability acrossrankings for any given university isroughly proportionate to its medianranking, with the highest-ranking
institutions experiencing the least
variation in ranking, independentof criteria or weighting choices. If
rankings are to convey significant
meaning, it will be in ferreting out
differences among the many nonelite schools. These are the very
schools that differ most in objectives,
which somewhat negates the valueof monolithic ranking services that
implicitly impose the same criteria
and weights across all schools.

PRESENTATION CHOICESNot only do university ranking
systems vary in their construction
choices, they also vary in what theypresent, and how. Following are fivepresentation choices.

Dr. Jerry Platt is a Professor at
Akita International University,
Japan, and Professor Emeritus
at San Francisco State University,and is the current Vice Chair of
the International Academic Forum.

Third Edition Eye Magazine | 15

FEATURE : Douglas Forster
16 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

FEATURED ARTICLE

One Big Happy Family?
Subverting Reaganism in Peggy Sue Got Married
by Douglas Forster

W

Photograph by APEC 2013 / Flickr

hile much critical analysis has
been done on the “Reaganite
cinema” films made during Ronald
Reagan’s presidency, Francis Ford
Coppola’s 1986 Peggy Sue Got
Married (PSGM) has received limited
attention. Most scholars have focusedon how the film promotes traditionalfamily values, i.e. the reinstatementof the nuclear family headed by astrong, patriarchal father figure, as
ensconced in Reaganism. However,a closer analysis reveals that the film
also reflects Reagan’s (1989: online)
championing of “new patriotism,” aswell as the reactionary backlash against
women’s rights causes. Because Peggy
Sue (Kathleen Turner) makes theseemingly fatalistic choice of reuniting
with her estranged husband Charlie(Nicolas Cage), the film suggestthat even a conservative’s approach
to social issues might be far morenuanced than what the mythologizedReagan storyline suggests.
PSGM reflects Reagan’s belief
that “tampering with the spacetime continuum was not dangerous
but beneficial...it was...absolutely
necessary for happiness and comfort”(Nadel, 1997: 20-21), even if itmeant bending the truth so muchas to “rewrite” history. Like a movie,
Reagan’s assurance that his economic
policies would eventually lead toa balanced budget was completely
illusionary. He asked the American
people to be like moviegoers who, in
pursuit of short-term rewards, accept
the illusionary and illogical spacetime continuum of film.

Comparing Reaganism in Peggy nostalgic look at a seemingly “simpler”
Sue Got Married with Back to era in American culture. We must
the Future
remember, however, that time is not
PSGM seems to resemble Robert
Zemickis’s 1986 Back to the Future(BTTF) because of its “use of animagined past to escape from a
bitter present” (Crowdus, 1994: 91).
In fact, both films are symptomaticof the American “cultural impulse
to internalize the power of time”
as well as America’s “deeply-rooted
chronophobia” (Carter, 2000: 257266). They “reverse the arrow of time,”
reflecting the “American passion for
the new” as a symptom of a deeper
collective urge: the desire to escapetime altogether” (ibid.). However,unlike Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox),
Peggy Sue actually knows her future:
an adult life filled with compromiseand disillusionment. Both films offer asynonymous with change, order, orsequence. For Marty and Peggy Sue,
their trials of personal redemption
necessitate being redeemed from time.

Both films create an “intensely
nostalgic atmosphere that pervades
the film” (Babington, 1998: 94).
However, the film is much more thana “sentimental journey into the past”
because “the idea of time travel...
is itself absurd” (Bawer, 1992: 37).
Some critics have read the narrative as
being simply nostalgic and, therefore,
conservative. However, the film’s
coherence as a text stems also fromacknowledging the potential ways ofseeing how the film undermines the
Reagan cultural fantasy that there is astable, idyllic past to which the United

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: PHOTOGRAPH BY FICG.MX - FLICKR

Third Edition Eye Magazine | 17

States can easily or simply return.
Peggy Sue’s time travel back to 1960
occurs before the feminist movement
and the sexual revolution. Even though
Peggy Sue is given the opportunity
to imagine a different kind of life, inthe end she reasserts her identity as awife and mother. The message seems
to be that it is okay for Peggy Sue
and Charlie to give up their dreams
because in doing so, it reunites thefamily and awards them with “middleclass success: money, stability, security”(Young, 2008: Online). In particular,
marriage is imagined as a woman’s
most important accomplishment.
PSGM also reflects the Reagan
ideological rhetoric in a similar, yetdifferent, way as BTTF. Whereas
BTTF was about legitimatizing thestrength of the father’s role and reenvisioning history, PSGM attempts
to reinvigorate the case for family
and marital values at a time when
1980s America was experiencing adecline in such values and institutions.
Reagan based his presidency not only
on economic reform and militarymight, but also on reestablishing“traditional” family values. Peggy
Sue only had two options: either she
reconciles with Charlie or she starts
life anew without him. With Peggy
Sue, the film confronts the illusory
separation of the American family
from the marketplace, as couched in
Reaganomics and the championed
attitudes of laissez-faire capitalism.
But the film also seems to highlight—
if not champion—the indispensible
dimensionof
consumerism.
Peggy Sue’s journey into the past isvery different from Marty’s in BTTF:
she is given another chance to realize
her teenage dreams, whereas Marty
was fighting for his very existence.
The problem is that Peggy Sue avoids
the riskiest and most potentiallyrewarding choice in her extraordinary
opportunity—whichbecomesacontentious point for some of thefilm’s sharpest critics. For Corliss
18 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

(1986: 16), the message is clear:“The movie is a plea to treasure life’s
ordinary gifts.” This certainly reflects
Reagan’s persistently sunny speeches
about the nation’s future. Like BTTF,
PSGM also serves simultaneously as
an endorsement as well as a subtle
critique of the artificial and symbolicclass of life embodied in Reaganism.
However, by digging deeper into
the film’s texts and contexts, we canenvision how the critique of family
values portrayed in PSGM moves
well beyond the polarizing genderand sexual politics of the 1980s intoa broader examination of the troubled
relationships the American family
has with consumerism and capitalism
as championed during the 1980s.

Reuniting the Nuclear Family
The rhetoric of Reagan and the New
Right in the 1980s resurrected the
traditional American family version,
but it also effectively sheared awaysome of its most traditional elements,
such as the extended family model,
its economic emphasis on sharedlabor, and patriarchal hierarchy
where women and children had
been relegated to subordinate roles.
Within the fantasy text, the film
attempts to resolve this social andpolitical displacement. However, weare distracted from this ideology due
to the ambiguity of Peggy Sue’s time
travel. In making sense of the choices,
we can see many imaginary discourses,
although intricately subtle in many
instances, which go beyond theevident nostalgic connections between
the 1950s and the 1980s in the film.

ideologically is just as important—the “unsaid” text reveals and reflects,
as did BTTF, Reagan’s reliance on“forgetting” the past. Reagan’s (1983:
Online) demonization of the Soviet
Union as an “evil empire,” or theappropriation of “welfare queen”(Fialka, 1976: Online) to characterize
the abuse of government benefits,
emboldened many segments of his
constituent base to deploy their own
tools of rhetorical assault in “culturewar” (Teixeira, 2009: Online) issues.
Rather than be aimed at bridging
ideological gaps in public issues, theculture war rhetoric solidified an
identity wholly antagonistic to theprevailing sociopolitical culture, andwhich preferred division and enmity
over collegiality. Indeed, the secularpaths of conservative and liberal canconverge in the aggregated experiencesthat constitute one’s emotional,
intellectual,andphilosophicalmaturity. It is the ultimate capacitythat the choice between conservativeand liberal is a false one, a pseudowar fomented by those who stand to
profit by the manufactured conflict.

We must remember, however, that
Peggy Sue has come from 1986, atime when the American nuclear
family and traditional family values
were seemingly in peril— despite theRepublican Party’s and the Christianfar-right’s pleas to restore the nation’sfamily values. Peggy Sue’s own
marriage and family had collapsed.
The sanctuary from the brutalitiesof the outside world had been
compromised. Reassuring comfort
was couched in easily definable andreadily solvable explanations of how
PSGM pulls the earlier decade and why the stability of the family
forward as a back text into the 1980s would rectify all of America’s social,
by giving Peggy Sue her autonomous, economic, and cultural ills. Perhaps
self-directed voice to speak her own Peggy Sue’s decision to reunite
experience by challenging authority with Charlie is simply the mostand refusing to be an obedient teenager pragmatic solution when faced within 1960. Non-conformity stretches the inevitable death of her hopes andonly so far as PSGM seems, in some dreams. And shouldn’t we expect her
respects, to promote “traditional” to choose the path that will ensurefamily values. However, what it ignores the birth of her future children?

Arising from the film’s enigmatic tone
is an awareness of the artificiality of theconservative-liberal divide: maturity
versus immaturity, selflessness versus
selfishness, disinterested truth versus
power at any price. In 1980, there
were Reagan Democrats who crossed
the ideological divide, hoping for astatesman able to breach the political
gridlock that frustrated both sidesof the aisle. Twenty-eight years later,
many independent voters—including
those who had described themselves as
Reagan Democrats—cast their ballots
for Obama, hoping for a prudential
judge of national affairs. The question
remains whether, in the larger sphere,
individualism can trump selfishness.

Greed is Good?
Gordon Gecko’s (Michael Douglas)
oft-repeated quote, “...greed is good.
Greed is right,” in Oliver Stone’s
1987 Wall Street, accurately reflects
Reagan’s pro-business presidency andthe bull market of the 1980s. And in
PSGM, we find that Peggy Sue isselective in how she describes the past
25 years to Richard. Peggy Sue seems
more excited about the possibility ofmaking Richard and herself rich using
her knowledge of future commodities
Materialism is the safe haven removed
from the psychological and emotional
stresses of relationships, fidelity,
sexuality, and uncertainties about thegenuine forces of love. And for Peggy
Sue and Richard, it seems that greed
is good. All of the excitement had
seeped out by what Peggy Sue left
out of her description of the past 25
years, particularly the social turmoilof the 1960s and 1970s. In PSGM,
the “movements of history become
defined solely in terms of technology
and commodities—twenty-five yearsof social, political, and economic
history become repressed” (Bartosch,1987: 3-4). Just like Marty in BTTF,
instead of using this unique time
travel opportunity to intervene inhistory, Peggy Sue does nothing.
While not appropriating the tone of
Third Edition Eye Magazine | 19

Challenging Reaganismthat contemporary Americans could,
PSGM
promotesaReagan- in effect, have it all. Reagan’s success atfriendly ideology in the way that it forging a new political coalition was
is pro- marriage/anti-divorce, and predicated on his strongly optimistic
in how it promotes “traditional” orientation toward the future, whichfamily values. Underneath the film’s ironically, would not resemble thenostalgic veneer, PSGM represents a harsher antagonistic tone taken bycompelling endorsement of Reagan’s, today’s neoconservatives who haveand the country’s, political swing to appropriated their own mythological
the right, while ignoring the most version of Reagan’s legacy. What often
important economic, political, and is overlooked is the oversimplificationsocial issues. Feminist critics have also of that optimism, which carried overbeen especially harsh on the film. As into Reagan’s policies, and whicha grown, mature woman, Peggy Sue’s failed to address the still-entrenched
potential outside her marriage with problems of a market economy
Charlie is given little attention. By unapproachable for millions ofchoosing to stay with Charlie, the film Americans. Admittedly, searchingseems to reverse the gains made in the for those subversive anti-Reagan
women’s rights movement. PSGM, elements in PSGM must be centered
like BTTF, underscores Reagan- almost exclusively on these limited
centric ideology in suggesting that the fatalistic contexts.
nuclear family must be preserved at all
costs. On the surface, the film served The Subversive Deconstruction
an ideal platform for arguing that the Of Reaganism
nuclear family should—and could—
be preserved.
PSGM refuses to view the turbulent
1960s and 1970s as a period of healthy
Yet, these same fatalistic elements— self-doubt and self-interrogation.
that Peggy Sue has no power at all Instead, it attempts to offer us solace
over her past or her future—constitute in its fatalistic, nostalgic depiction
potentially subversive challenges to the of a “better” past, which never really
Reagan rhetorical peroration about existed. Unfortunately, Peggy Sue
the American Dream being equally will never reap the full benefits ofaccessible to all who aspire toward it. pleasure from a sense of timelessness,
Critics can turn these lamentations being only connected to her intuitive,
into incisive and deeply critical instinctive, subconscious experiences
commentaries that can expose the for the extremely limited purposesutter incoherence of Reagan’s promise of making sense of the shortcomings
20 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

Photograph by Jaysin Trevino / Flickr

Gordon Gecko in Wall Street, PSGM
echoed the more affable, personable
tone of Reagan’s message that one’s
self-interest was justified, especiallyfor the purposes of empowering theindividual to reap for his or her family
the symbols and manifestations of
the American Dream and economic
success. Absent of irony or satire,
the film engendered a gentler yet
still disturbingly skewed view of
Reaganism, and a championing of
capitalism with no worries about
wider social or ethical responsibilities.

in her marriage. Still, this fatalistic
realization reveals that in order toachieve anything approaching theReaganesque vision of the American
Dream requires individuals to settle formediocrity and lowered expectations
when it comes to a stable family andindependent career-driven wealth.
However, the prevailing analysis
can be extended. On the surface,
the film gratifies a broadly definedaudience willing to accept a nostalgic
depiction of a time as believable yet
uncomplicated entertainment. On
the other hand, because the film
skips over so much social, economic,
and cultural territory, which surely
anyone would have been confronted
with had he or she been in Peggy
Sue’s circumstances, one wonders if
the best to be hoped for in a world
influenced by Reaganesque ideals
about family and capitalism amounts
to settling for a lot less life-sustaining
value. The subversive deconstructionof Reaganism may not be readily
apparent, but it becomes evident as
the film is viewed more than a quarterof a century after its release.
Dr. Douglas E. Forster is an
Associate Professor in the
Department of English at Japan
Women’s University in TokyoJapan,
whereheteachesAmerican Culture and English.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

From the Midwest
to the Middle East
Gary Swanson interviews Richard Rothabout his life and work in journalismAt our most recent MediAsia Conference held in Osaka last November, the 2013 MediAsia Conference Chair andKeynote Speaker Professor Gary Swanson interviewed highly respected Journalist and Educator Professor Richard
J. Roth Jnr. Professor Roth was the IAFOR MediAsia 2011 Keynote Speaker, and is a journalist with over 40 yearsof experience, a former Pulitzer Prize Nominee, Newspaper Editor and is currently the Dean of the Medill School of
Journalism at Northwestern University (Qatar). Professor Swanson, a former NBC News correspondent is currently the
Mildred S. Hansen Endowed Chair in Journalism at the University of Northern Colorado, USA and is an internationallyrecognized and highly acclaimed documentary producer, director, editor, photojournalist, media consultant and educator.
GS: Richard. How long have you been involved with
IAFOR?
RR: For 3 years. I came 3 years ago as a keynote speaker andcame back last year with a couple of my faculty members
and we had a panel presentation and was a keynote of thatsession. Came back this year to sit in the audience andwatch. It is always fun to be here. You know it is interesting
to know what happens here, especially as this becomes agreat venue for young faculty members to present theirresearch, which they often cannot do in giant venues, so
this is great for them.
GS: In 2011 you gave a keynote speech. What was thatabout?
RR: I was talking about the Arab Spring and how themedia really in the Gulf and the broader Middle East
covered it and how social media the new media really drove
the Arab Spring.
GS: What is your professional background?
RR: Well my background is really as a journalist, anewspaper journalist. I started off as a kind of a generalassignment reporter in Buffalo, New York back in 1971
and a few weeks later I found myself involved in the
famous Prison Riot at Attica, New York and that was
inside the Prison for 3 or 4 days before what turned out tobe the bloodiest confrontation amongst Americans since
Antietam. After that, I got into being an investigative
reporter for a while, but I drifted sooner or later into beinga financial writer. So I spent a lot of time in Wall Street
and other things like that and then the newspaper wentout of business and I came to a crossroads. I wanted to dojournalism, I was offered a job in television and really atsome point I could not find myself doing that so I went
off to Indiana to be editor in chief editor of a newspaper, a
middle size newspaper, and did that for 6 years, and I kindof serendipitously fell into academia at Du Bois University
where you and I met. I was there for I guess 7 years at
which point I had been tenured and I found myself inthe business of teaching these students about a world injournalism that I realized didn’t exist anymore, the internet
had come along and so I left there and went to the WallStreet Journal in New York to become part of the editing
team for its – then new – online division. I did that for awhile and then went to North Western in 1998 and been
there for, I guess, fifteen, sixteen years. So…kind of bothnewspaper journalism and the teaching of it!
GS: Which do you enjoy the best? The professional sideor the teaching?
RR: I don’t know…I guess the teaching part because I
can now influence young people to go do this new kind ofjournalism and new technologies of journalism. I must say
that, when I was a young reporter those were kind of thebest days of my life. Better than being editor-in-chief andright now being a Dean is one thing, but I like the teachingpart. It’s better than sitting in the office shuffling papers.
GS: What’s it like in the Middle East?
RR: Well, it is way different than I thought it would beback in 2008 when I went there. I had lived this kind of
notion…my view of the world. While I traveled my view,of the Middle East anyway, was colored by my colleagues– the press in the US. There is so much conservative
information and misinformation. I have gotten there and I
found the people to be lovely and the religion to be a real
force in their lives. Islam is something that is demonized
Third Edition Eye Magazine | 21

Photograph by Alexander Pratt

22 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

so much in the US, but one gets there and finds that thesepeople actually stop and pray five times a day. They live
their lives around their beliefs, and yes there are certainly
people who read the Koran the ‘wrong’ way or different
way and they become over the top. Yet, the same is true
with Christianity, in the US anyway, with the right wing
Christians. I have really just come to enjoy it and froma personal side where I am situated in Qatar it is kind oflike the center of the world. I have been able to visit somany places so that when I lived in Chicago I had to go to
New Delhi sometimes from there and it was an all-night,
18 hour flight or something…now I can be in New Delhi
in under two and a half hours, Istanbul in three hours.
I have been to all kinds of places. Down in South East
Africa, Darussalam, Zanzibar and Kenya in five hours, one
five-hour flight. I couldn’t do these things when I used
to believe Chicago was the epicenter of the world. One
could always fly non-stop from Chicago to any place in theworld, but it was also fourteen or eighteen hours of doing
it. So, it’s been great.
GS: Now, Dr Brad Hamm gave the keynote speech today
for the MediAsia - Film Asia 2013 and it sounds likethere is a new direction that North Western is taking.
What can you tell us about that?
RR: Well I’d say that Brad’s biggest idea, the one that hebrings to the school, is he believes every undergraduate
student there, should spend time outside United States.
At least two weeks for a short program or go away for, youknow, ten or twenty weeks. And get involved in something.
I think it is a genius big idea that if he can pull it off, if he
can raise the funds for it…So many Americans don’t travel
outside of the US and right now only about forty percentof Americans have passports and of those, half of thosepeople with passports are over age 60. And a lot of those
who have passports only have gotten them recently so that
now they could go to Canada or Mexico. Used to be you
didn’t need a passport for that. So Brad wants them to havethe cultural and intellectual opportunities to travel, to cometo Asia particularly is of interest to him. So, I think that it
is a great idea, a big idea. He is also very much aware of theneed to get students involved in the new media, the newtechnologies because they are ever changing. He still wants
to teach them journalism. He wants them to all learn all of
the things, you know. Why is it that I am a newspaperman?
If I were a newspaper student today he would say that’s notenough. You also have to be a television student, you haveto learn how to use the television; you have to learn how to
use all of those things. Yes things are changing, the school
is changing – it ought to be ahead of the curve, but it needs
to catch up really fast and then be ahead. He, I think, is
way ahead in this notion of these international experiences
for students.
GS: What would you say to students now, or aspiring
journalists, about the future?
RR: Well, I would say that the future of journalism isprobably greater than it has ever been. So much of theworld is now open, gosh, we can go to Burma now andeverybody, in some ways, becomes a journalist, but it ismore important for people to become trained in such a
way that we can verify. And that’s kind of become the newpart of journalism…Verifiability is, I guess, the thing thatthe internet has brought to us. Dan Rather couldn’t verify
what he had to say and he lost his job as, perhaps, the most
famous news anchor in the United States. He went on
the air, made some statements and there were bloggers allover the country within hours proving him wrong. So weteach our students about verifying what they have. If you
can’t verify it you cant go with it. That’s the big change injournalism brought to us by the internet.
GS: I guess my last question is…you talk about
verification and bloggers, but how do we know, as
journalists, what we were getting from freelancephotographers, videographers, freelance writers,
bloggers…how do we know that’s accurate?
RR: We don’t always and one sees…there aren’t any, ormany, journalists right now who are involved in Syria rightnow. Who can get in and do things. And if they can thesejournalists had to use iPhones to capture their video. In the
beginning they didn’t know they had to turn it horizontal,
but they figured it out after a while, because they weren’t
trained in it. They were trained to be some other kind ofjournalist and they were suddenly handed an iPhone andsaid ‘This is the only way you are ever going to get it’. But,
there is a lot of video that comes out of there, there was a
lot of video out of Tunisia first and those networks thatused it took a chance. They usually went on and said ‘this isa video we can’t verify’ and you have to tell the public that.
There are a lot of people who have planted stories wrongly,
you know, falsehoods with the press and if they can getaway with it they will. So the press needs to figure out
how to verify and, you know, there are ways of doing that.
Triangulating through not just taking what somebody gives
you as a source, but finding someone who was, perhaps, awitness to the same thing and they would describe it in thesame way and so forth. It is a big problem, but there are a
lot of people out there with cameras and cell phones andtaking pictures…Can you fake a picture? Look, we havebeen faking pictures in history since, in the US, ‘Honest
Abe’. Of all people Abraham Lincoln faked a picture of
him using a senator’s body, Senator John C Calhoun…
Lincoln liked the pose so they took his head and put it on
the Calhoun’s body. And this is before photo-shop and wasstill nicely done, one can hardly tell. This has been goingon for forever, and now people have the chance and theability to do it in the most seamless ways. The can move acharacter in and out of a scene…it is hard, but I think there
are techniques for detecting it. It’s a problem but it is our
future I am afraid.
Prof. Gary Swanson is the Mildred S. Hansen
Endowed Chair in Journalism at the Universityof Northern Colorado, USA. Prof. Richard Rothis the Dean of the Medill School of Journalism at
Northwestern University (Qatar).
Third Edition Eye Magazine | 23

IAFORKEYNOTE
languages have always been part ofthe curriculum in the Soviet systemof education, but the official attitude
to them was far from being positive.
Languages of “capitalistic countries”
were seen as a suspicious subject that
led straight into the arms of “potential
enemies”, which actually meant therest of the world. People who studied
foreign languages as their major
subject as well as their teachers
were also suspicious for they werepotential spies, potential emigrants
and/or potential cosmopolitans. They
lacked loyalty and patriotism because
they did not seem to be satisfied with
their own language, culture, country,
and world. This attitude, thoughslowly growing milder over the years,
remained dominant to the end of theSoviet period. Consequently teaching
languages of potential enemies wasa dangerous profession. My father
THE FOLLOWING IS AN EXCERPT FROM PROFESSOR SVETLANA never stopped worrying about
TER-MINASOVA’S
KEYNOTEADDRESSATTHE
ASIAN my having chosen to study andteach English as my way in life. For
CONFERENCE ON EDUCATION (ACE), IN OSAKA, JAPAN
decades, under such circumstances,
During her address to the ACE 2013 delegates, Professor Ter- generations of teachers, who never
Minasova reflected on the past attitudes and practices that set, their eyes - or ears – on a native
she experienced first hand as a young student then ambitious speaker of a foreign language,
professor of foreign languages under then Soviet Russia.
taught generations of students
without any proper equipment, andDuring the Soviet period the situation with Foreign Language without authentic ELT materials, Theyand Learning Teaching (FLLT) as part of the educational system developed chalkboard theories andwent through a series of dramatic ups and downs. In the early poor-but-honest,
necessity-is-theyears of Soviet power the attitude to foreign languages was mother-of-invention techniques, andnegative: they were treated as luxuries of “people’s enemies” they did it brilliantly!
- aristocracy and bourgeoisie. The most unfortunate one was
French as it was most closely associated with the Russian elitesociety. However, in the late 1920-ies, after heated debates, Prof. Ter-Minasova is the President offoreign languages were returned to secondary school curricula. the Faculty of Foreign Languages andAs usual, a pendulum swung forth, one fashion substituted Area Studies at Lomonosov Moscow
for another one; the new campaign with the slogan: “Foreign State University, in Russia and is thelanguages - to the masses” introduced foreign languages Honorary President of the IAFOR’s
into educational institutions with the same enthusiasm as the International Language Researchprevious campaign had banished them. Since that time foreign Institute.
24 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

flowering cherry
in my orchard of one tree
my Yoshino
Willy Cuvelier, Belgium
The Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award
Runner Up - 201126 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

INTERVIEW | Severn Cullis-Suzuki

S E V E R N
CULLIS-S U Z U K I

ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST, SEVERN CULLISSUZUKI, GIVES EYE MAGAZINE AN EXCLUSIVEINTERVIEW. AS A 12-YEAR-OLD SEVERN GAINEDGLOBAL ATTENTION WHEN SHE SPOKE AT THE
UN RIO EARTH SUMMIT IN 1992 AND BECAME “THE
GIRL WHO SILENCED THE WORLD FOR 6 MINUTES”

Rebecca Irby recently caught up
with Severn Cullis-Suzuki on
her latest speaking tour ‘Love is
the Movement’ on Valentine’s
Day – February 14th, 2014 in
Nagoya, Japan. Cullis-Suzuki was
touring with the newly releaseenvironmentalist film ‘Occupy
Love’ by Velcrow Ripper.

Canadian based culture andenvironment campaigner andwriterSevernCullis-Suzuki,
who
at
the
comparatively
youthful age of 34 describes
herself as a veteran activist for‘intergenerational justice’ recently
visited Japan speaking to packed
auditoriums during her Love is the
Movement tour. Cullis-Suzuki isthe daughter of David Takayoshi
Suzuki, a prominent Canadianacademic, science broadcasterand environmental activist. David
Takayoshi Suzuki is best known
as host of the popular and longrunning CBC Television sciencemagazine, The Nature of Things,
seen in over forty nations. He is
also well known for criticizing

governments for their lack ofaction to protect the environment.
David Suzuki was awarded theRight Livelihood Award in 2009.
His 2011 book, The Legacy, won
the Nautilus Book Award. He
is a Companion of the Order ofCanada. In 2004, David Suzuki
was selected as the greatest living
Canadian in a CBC poll.
Severn began following in
her father’s footsteps from avery young age. She founded
the Environmental Children’s
Organization with friends atnine years old. She made a namefor herself internationally as “thegirl who silenced the world for 6
minutes” where she famously told
world leaders at the UN Rio Earth
Summit in 1992 ‘if you can’t fix theenvironment please stop breaking
it’, she was twelve years old.

for the Canadian Earth Summit
Initiative 2012 WE CANada,
host of the APTN-TV series‘Samaqan – Water Stories, andboard member of the Haida Gwaii
Higher Education Society and theDavid Suzuki Foundation. Severn
is an Earth Charter Commissioner(earthcharterinaction.org), and she
and the Skyfish Project broughtthe ‘Recognition of Responsibility’pledge to the World Summit
on Sustainable Development in
Johannesburg 2002. Severn has
participated in four speaking tours
in Japan with the Namakemono
Club.
When looking at the world today incomparison to 1992, many activists
like Servern argue that the state of
the environment is in a worse place,that globalization and corporate
power has had devastating effect on
the environment. Severn contends
that the political landscape is very
different now. “We have world
leaders that can’t actually lead forthe good of the people, I almost
don’t believe my words. WhenI see how beholden they are tocorporations that have facilitatedtheir rise to power in the current
system, they are not able to makethe leadership moves that will
get us towards our carbon freeeconomy, that will get us towards
a world that will limit our global
warming to under 2 degrees, so
where does that leave us?

Servern has recognized through her
travels and after meeting all kindsof what she describes as incredible
people – that the real leadership
exist more often at the municipal
and grassroots level and that global
governance is in real crisis. “I
think we have really ignored theIn the 20 years since Rio, Severn strength of our democracies, we’ve
has continued to engage with really ignored our governmental
world leaders and everyday processes - we have to strengthen
people as her activist activities that, we have to reform that.”
continue. She is a Champion
Third Edition Eye Magazine | 27

For people concerned with the environment or othersocial issues in the world today Severn recommendsa very un-fashionable though orthodox idea - “wehave got to start running for office”. She understands
this goes against what most people working forsocial change may think is a effective action. But she
believes “we have to bring the honor back to politics
because that is the system, the structure that we havefor guiding our society and if it is not working wehave to completely toss it out and find somethingnew.”
According to Severn the best thing we can do is,“look at our own sphere of influence. I really believethat where you are passionate, where you are skilled,
where you are interested, that is the place in which
you are going to make your mark in the world. Thatis the place where the world needs you to encouragesustainability. Every aspect of our lives is unsustainable
so there is room for improvement everywhere. We
need our media to be actually reporting what isgoing on. We need the public more informed. We
need engineers to develop new technology, we needteachers to be educating children about the natural
world we need everybody. We need doctors to be
thinking about wellness, how health is affected byour environment and look at the holistic picture. We
need all hands on deck at the moment. Where ourhearts are - that is where we are going to make ourmark on the world.”
Often people say, “What can I do? Really? I feellike I can’t create any positive change.” Severn
believes in the power of everyday people making
small powerful actions. She believes in “the little
tiny actions that I take like not drinking bottled
water or drinking out of my own reusable cup.
The conversations from other people noticing thatinstead of me lecturing them have been far more
effective because it’s showing, it’s modeling anotherpossibility. And it is doing it in a way that is not heavyhanded. It’s a way of showing a brighter future and it isreally the spirit of building a vision other than fighting
the negative paradigm, that I think we really need to
be involved in because it is far more empowering, farmore enjoyable, and I think it is far more effective.
So don’t underestimate the power of those small
efforts because they are actually extremely powerful.”
Severn Cullis-Suzuki holds a B.Sc. in Biology
from Yale University and a M.Sc. in Ethnoecology
from the University of Victoria, Canada

28 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

Third Edition Eye Magazine | 29

FEATURE : Hawkins and Natusch
30 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

JAPAN’S
ABENOMICS
STORY A QUINTESSENTIAL
DIALOGIC NEWS EVENT
by Beryl Hawkins
and Barry Natusch

Photograph by APEC 2013 / Flickr

Ever since Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
implemented his aggressive, controversial “Abenomics”
economic policy in 2013, the international and domestic
news outlets have churned out an array of stories, resulting
in recent headlines foreshadowing an increasingly
ambivalent economic picture, ranging from the adulatory
to outright attacks.

claims that, on the one hand, Abenomics is a “splashy andfascinating marketing campaign,” but on the other hand,it “has so far failed to deliver quite what it promised”. In
Japan the Nikkei Asian Review of Feb 20, 2014, publisheda recent commentary, “Fading Japan”, in which the writerwent so far as to declare, “many see (Abenomics) as areckless bet on untested economic theories.”

In a recent German (Deutche Welle) news article dated
February 12, 2014, entitled “Is Japan’s ‘Abenomics’ losing
its luster?,” Bloomberg News analyst William Pesek

While the media pundits continue to test Japan’s“economic waters”, it is our belief that the increasing roleof social media in shaping public perceptions may also

Third Edition Eye Magazine | 31

have an influence over the future direction of Shinzo Abe’s
policies. This is in large part due to the inherent nature of
the Abenomics story itself. The Abenomics story is what
we have termed a “dialogical” news event.
In our study of the international and domestic media
coverage of Abenomics in English language print andsocial media from January – October 2013 (click here toview the full article in the conference proceedings), we haveattempted to illustrate the story’s applicability to a dialogic
news model. The most important feature of the dialogic
news model is the ability to participate instantaneously in anews event through new media technologies. As more social
media users and bloggers generate their own content andfeed in more comments, the proliferation of newer stories
and comments in turn affects the ongoing dissemination of
the Abenomics story. At the same time these social media
comments breathe “new life” into an existing story, hence
the story continues as part of the public debate for a much
longer period of time than stories have in the past.

MONOLOGIC NEWS MODEL
President Ronald Reagan’s economic policies duringthat period, also led to a serious shift in U.S. economic
policy. The mainstream media covered the public debate
by parading out a host of financial and political experts
to support the pro-Reaganomics faction. However, atthe same time, the media covered the ongoing massdemonstrations, town hall meetings and other social protest
events occurring on the local, statewide and national level
sponsored by the anti-Reaganomics faction. In the midstof these skirmishes, radio and television talk shows reached
an unprecedented level of popularity, becoming the newest
participatory forum for citizens. Both factions could freely
air their sentiments, sometimes resulting in blustering, fiery
debates. These talk shows were a precursor to the social
media interactions that we are witnessing today because
these programs allowed citizens to actively engage in the“Reaganomics” debate.
ABENOMICS 101
Stirring up as much controversy and public debate as its
U.S. predecessor, Abenomics is currently considered oneof the most prominent economic stories in the news and islikely to have staying power among media audiences. Thisis predicated on the fact that in Japan certainly, and to someextent beyond Japan, it was a big story throughout 2013, asshown by measuring its impact through the Galtung andRuge (1965) analysis. The Abenomics story scored highlyon all the following Galtung and Ruge criteria:

DIALOGIC NEWS MODELIN RETROSPECT: REAGONOMICS
Whereas the Abenomics story fits into a dialogic news
model, the Reaganomics story of the 1980s (the originof the term “Abenomics”), was what is known as amonologically reported story. The monologic model ofnews dissemination is a one-way flow of news informationfrom the news event to the media audience throughjournalists.

• it has been in the news continuously since late 2012,• it contains a mix of good news and bad news,• it is easy to understand even complex economic issues
thanks to its use of the “arrows” story metaphor,• it is about a topic that affects people’s daily lives (i.e.
economics),• it is about a celebrity politician (Shinzo Abe),• it is both a domestic story (about Japan) but withapplications internationally.
The story thus built a momentum throughout 2013.
Central to understanding Abenomics is the concept of“three arrows”, which is derived from a traditional Chinesestory. This is a story of a man at the end of his life who
was trying to teach his three sons a lesson about working
together. He asks each of them to take an arrow, and snap
it, which they all do. He then tells them to take three
arrows and try to snap them. They cannot. The moral of
the story is that while one arrow can easily be broken, threecannot.
In economic terms, the three arrows of Abenomics are
flexible fiscal policy, aggressive monetary policy and growthstrategy. The economics is actually more complicatedthan this but the three arrows policy provided a simple
summary of the Liberal Democratic Party’s economic
policy throughout 2013.

32 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

OVERALL MEDIA RESPONSE
The overall press response to the three arrows policy
fluctuated from the beginning of 2013 to the end of theyear, both domestically and internationally. While the
Abenomics story garnered positive press responses in early
2013, by the middle of the year, stories were beginning toreflect an increasingly ambivalent economic picture.

the election success of the Liberal Democratic Party on
December 16, 2012, a mood of optimism appeared in thenews stories together with the hope that the economy
might recover with the implementation of the Abenomics
policies. In the middle of the year, a major correction to
the stock market occurred which appears to have coincidedwith some skepticism in the news reporting after that.

Moreover, it became evident that Abenomics news stories
reflected differing perspectives across different countries
and regions. To investigate the story more closely, morethan 220 stories on Abenomics were collected from major
news publications using the LexisNexis database. Articles
from twelve newspapers from Asia and 22 newspapers fromthe U.K., U.S. and Canada and Australasia were selected
for content analysis. The news items were classified as
generally supportive or critical of Abenomics.
An overview of the country-by-country analysis in ourstudy reveals that the perspectives of the stories were largely
influenced by the nature of the relations between Japanand other countries. In the U.K., for example, the news
reportage focused heavily on whether or not Abenomics
policies could exacerbate the European economic crisis.
Australasian countries are most concerned about theirtrade relationship with Japan, so after closely monitoring
Abenomics, they began to lose confidence in this policy
as the year progressed. As might be expected, the Chinese
media took a dim view of the Abenomics policy from the
middle of the year onwards, perhaps stemming from thedeteriorating relations between the two countries over the
Senkaku Islands territorial dispute.
To illustrate the diversity of story headlines, the following
are offered as examples.
Positive news stories:• “Abe’s second honeymoon” (New Straits Times
Malaysia, February 1, 2013)• “Japan’s urban rich loving Abenomics” (The Nikkei
Weekly, Japan, April 29, 2013)• “‘Abenomics’ is big in Japan as economy takes upturn”(The Daily Telegraph, London, July 8, 2013)
Negative news stories:• “Abenomics isn’t trickling down yet” (The Japan Times,
March 5, 2013)• “The dangers of Abenomics” (South China Morning
Post, April 8, 2013)• “Fate of Japan’s PM hinges on economy: Failure todeliver growth may rapidly erode support” (The Straits
Times, Singapore, July 22, 2013)
JAPANESE MEDIA RESPONSE
In Japan, most articles were positive at the start of theyear but turned negative after that. In the aftermath ofJapanese Positive and Negative News Coverage of
Abenomics in English (Quarter 1 to 3, 2013)
WESTERN MEDIA RESPONSE
Among some Western countries (the UK and the US),
there appeared to be a relatively even split between positive
and negative Abenomics news articles. The United
Kingdom articles, for example, began with a somewhat
higher proportion of positive news stories, but reacheda balance of positive and negative stories on this issue
towards the end of the year. Several journalists took theangle that Abenomics could be a strategy for coping withthe ongoing European economic malaise.
In North America, there was greater initial enthusiasm
about the effect of Abenomics policies. By the middleof the year, however, more of a balance was being struck
between positive and negative articles. Possibly, with Japan
being part of the G8 member nation group, there wasconcern about how Abenomics would pay off its internal
deficit. Perhaps also, there was some reluctance among G8
delegates to directly criticize a member nation, resulting inan overall balance of positive and negative coverage. Other
political factors, such as the Obama administration being
under increasing pressure to manage federal spending,were referred to in the Abenomics articles.
Similarly, in Australasia, a fairly positive trend was apparent
for Abenomics policies at the beginning of 2013. As theyear progressed, a rise in negative reports assessing theimpact of Abenomics appeared. This might be due to thefact that Australasian countries depend on trade with Japanconsiderably. They therefore watch economic developments
in Japan closely because it directly affects their trade
Third Edition Eye Magazine | 33

34 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

Photograph by Chuck Hagel / Flickr

relationships. For example, if Japanese consumer spending
is reduced substantially through Abenomics, primary
goods exports (farm and agricultural products) from
Australasia might fall. Furthermore, Australia depends on
China and Japan for exports of raw materials. Therefore,
any downturn in those economies would adversely affectthe Australian economy.

in China. Secondly, reporting might reflect the sharedeconomic problems between other countries and Japansuch as in North America and the United Kingdom.
Third, reporting in other countries might be affectedby a dependent trade relationship with Japan such as inAustralasia, Singapore and Thailand.
OVERALL SOCIAL MEDIA RESPONSE
Following a news story by accessing a variety of print andsocial media underscores the fact that different methodsof analysis are required to approach contemporary
content analysis. Print media, with its basis in rational
argumentation, can be analyzed in terms of traditional
discourse-based content analysis, whereas social media,
may be better understood by using a social media
communication model.

International Positive and Negative News Coverage of
Abenomics in English (Quarter 1 to 3, 2013)
ASIAN MEDIA RESPONSE
Some Asian countries showed a reverse trend in news
coverage as compared with Western countries. For example,
the Singapore press carried a rising number of positive
Abenomics stories and a declining number of negative
ones throughout the year. This is possibly reflected inJapan and Singapore’s generally cordial relations. The twocountries also experience fewer territorial or trade disputes
than Japan’s closer Asian neighbors.
Although Thai newspapers produced a relatively small
sample of news stories, they showed a slightly more
ambivalent stance on Abenomics throughout the year.
Japanese companies have a strong presence in Thailand.
The country also depends on Japan for industry suchas tourism, which may have some connection with theambivalent nature of reporting on Abenomics.
By contrast, in the Chinese media, most articles from the
middle of the year and onwards were overwhelmingly
negative. This could be due to China’s lack of interest inJapan’s economic success. It could also be attributed toChina’s dispute with Japan over territorial issues in theSouth China Sea (Senkaku Islands) during this period. A
combination of these reasons could explain why there wasso little coverage of Abenomics by Japan’s close neighbor.
To summarize the major print media coverage, it is clearthat reporting of Abenomics differs in print media stories
according to country. This may be due to factors such as theattitude of reporters towards the Japanese government. For
example, there may be more pro-government reporting inJapan, as opposed to anti-Japanese government reporting

Social media generates a markedly different news flow
compared with print media. It is immediate, opinionated,individualistic, conversational, and sometimes idiosyncratic.
It challenges accepted orthodoxy bordering on theadversarial. It is the democratization of news dissemination
where professionals engage directly with informed anduninformed readers.
Comments on posts about Abenomics on blogs and online
news aggregators were collected throughout the year froma variety of sites. The categories of comments fall into
four main groups: (1) Positive Comments, (2) Negative
Comments, (3) Discussion Comments, and (4) Other, as
can be seen in the examples taken from The Economist
below.
The Economist blog comments are mainly technicalarguments including statistics to support the writers’
viewpoints, suggesting that the readership appears tohave been a mix of informed professional economists andfinance experts. There are also instances where discussion
between the commentators themselves occurred forminga thread.
(1) POSITIVE BLOG COMMENTS
ADDING TO OR SUPPORTING POST:“A large portion of Mr. Abe government spending is isfinanced by debt. Such anomaly can happen in Japan only
because the debt market is over 90% held by Japanesebanks including Bank of Japan itself (holding about 10%)and domestic Japanese savers, particularly pensioners.”
nkab, Jun 14th, 14:56 - Recommend 29
SUPPORTING OR DEFENDING SUBJECT OF POST:“Have the Japanese people truly accepted the need forreform? We can only blame so much on Abe. ”
Ohio Jun 13th, 17:42 - Recommend 15
Third Edition Eye Magazine | 35

Photograph by Kyle Hasegawa / Flickr(2) NEGATIVE BLOG COMMENTS

in reply to ShOm82, Jun 17th, 05:41 - Recommend 5

ATTACKING VIEW IN POST:(4) OTHER BLOG COMMENTS PRAISING
POSTER PERSONALLY:“Five years of Austerity not meeting it’s targets and we are
all just supposed to sit and wait.”
Generic Dave, Jun 15th, 09:12 - Recommend 24
ATTACKING SUBJECT OF POST:“Mr.Abe himself has no sense of fiscal discipline.”
Akiakich, Jun 18th, 00:25 - Recommend 6(3) DISCUSSION BLOG COMMENTS
ADDING TO OR CLARIFYING ONE’S OWNCOMMENT:“Japan’s government debt is diminishing rapidly because
Bank of Japan is absorbing them at a very fast pace.”
Mike Tyson Ironman in reply to Akiach, Jun 19th, 05:10 Recommend 4
RESPONDING TO ANOTHER COMMENTATOR:“Well. I think you should be more precise. It is the Japanese
media that is against constitutional reform.”
Mike Tyson Ironman
36 | Eye Magazine Third Edition“I think this article correctly observed that “it (Mr Abe’s“third arrow” of structural reforms) is so wide of (off ) themark that one is left wondering if Abenomics has failed
before it even properly began.”nkab, Jun 14th, 14:56 - Recommend 29
ATTACKING POSTER PERSONALLY:“The pseudo scientific nonsense fails yet again and herecomes the galore of justifications by the modern quacks,
the mob stands in awe and reverence.”
Mberg, Jun 14th, 05:06 - Recommend 1
POSTING WITH HUMOR:“An awful lot of money and credibility is being invested
in getting Mrs Watanabe to believe in the likelihood of
any inflation at all. There are few signs yet that she is evenpaying attention.”
TomasHirst, Jun 14th, 11:04 - Recommend 0
Sample of Blog Comments on Abenomics from The
Economist, 2013

As another example of social media, The Japan Today news
aggregator comments are reflective of the views of Japaneseand foreigners living in Japan. While there is technicaldiscussion of Abenomics technicalities on this site, some of
the commentators, however, are highly engaged with eachother, even to the point of hurling deprecatory remarks
back and forth about, for example, the price of local bread.
To summarize the Abenomics social media coverage, it
is clear that social media, being more individualistic andmercurial, reflect the characteristics of the dialogic model.
The growing number of comments on blog postings in the
U.S., the U.K. and Japan suggests a rising international
public awareness of the steps being taken to revitalize theJapanese economy. The increasing number of discussion
threads by informed readers also attest to this. The posters
themselves, and the commentators who respond, defend
their views, give more examples, take the discussion inother directions, supporting and attacking each other,seriously and wryly. This shows how engaged both writers
and commentators become with the story. This appears tolead writers and readers to a deeper understanding of theissues involved, perhaps more than a single long newspaper
article written by a single expert might do.
CONCLUSION
While Reaganomics in the 1980s was a monologicallyreported story, Abenomics in 2013 was a dialogic news
event. In the future, social media involvement could trigger
seismic political movements as has already occurred in
the Philippines in 2001 when millions of people texted
against the corruption of the incumbent president, Joseph
Estrada, and ousted him. The Arab Spring of 2011 resulted
in the overthrow of Tunisian leader Ben Ali, Egypt’s
leader Hosni Mubarak, and Libyan leader Muammar
Gaddafi. The implication here is clear: the dialogic modelincreasingly gives people a voice. On the other hand, some
Advertisment

politicians already use social media skillfully such as US
President Barak Obama in his deployment of Narwhal in
his reelection campaign of 2012. And the voices of social
media participants have become an influence both insideand outside Japan which may even cause Shinzo Abe tomodify his policies.
Much as Wikipedia has diminished the authorityof traditional encyclopedias written by “experts” anddemocratized the process of encyclopedia-writing, thedialogic model of news dissemination has changed
the reporting and discussion of news. Typifying thisapproach to engaging with news stories nowadays, Chris
Anderson, editor of Wired comments that he receives
news from “Twitter, in my inbox, on my RSS feed, throughconversations. I read articles from mainstream media but
I don’t go to mainstream media directly. It comes to me. I
pick my sources and I trust my sources.”
This dialogic approach to news dissemination is not so new.
As early as the 1930s, Mikhail Bakhtin was describing a
dialogic approach to literature where writers fed theircreative imaginations by responding to what others werewriting. As he put it, “Truth is not born nor is it to befound inside the head of an individual person, it is born
between people collectively searching for truth, in theprocess of their dialogic interaction.”

Prof. Barry Natusch is a Professor at the Collegeof Economics, Nihon University in Tokyo who
specializes in international relations, economics
and sociolinguistics. Beryl Hawkins is a former US
radio journalist, talk show host, media strategist,
professional voiceover artist/narrator and producer.
She teaches Broadcast Voice Training and
Journalism at Temple University Japan in Tokyo.

We are now accepting
abstracts for all 2014
European conferences
For more information,
visit www.iafor.org

iafor
Third Edition Eye Magazine | 37

St Jude Storm, Brighton,
England by Thaddeus PopeOn the morning of the 28th of October
2013, I drove to Brighton Marina tophotograph the damage caused by
the St Jude Storm (also known as Cyclone
Christian), which was one of the strongest
storms that England has experienced since
the Great Storm of 1987. The storm was at
its worst during the early hours of the 28thof October – with gusts of up to 99 miles perhour recorded on the Isle of Wight.

Developing
Safe and Civil
Schoolsby Rebecca Irby

I

Photograph by Jan-Erik Finnberg / Flickrn lieu of the ongoing violencein American schools, the US
Department of Education, Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, theInstitute for Educational Science, agrowing number of state Departmentsof Education, foreign Educational
Ministries and UNICEF are looking
for ways to decrease violence inschools and create a positive climate
and environment for learning.
The idea of social intelligence is notnew, nor is the idea that school climate
affects academic achievement. The
concept has been studied for a century
and for over three decades researchersand educators have been recognizing
the increased importance of school
climate. Looking at one state inparticular and their statewide initiative
will help provide some background to
this growing movement.

40 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

The Developing Safe and Civil
Schools initiative, or DSACS,
involved over 250 schools in theAmerican state of New Jersey. Oneof the core issues found during the
research phase was fragmentationof all the different evidence-based
programs being implemented inschools. This fragmentation led
to reduced effectiveness of all the
programs in place, frustration anddemoralization of staff as well as
erosion and interference with theacademic success of students. The
unique quality setting DSACS apartfrom it’s predecessors was that it was aframework from which to coordinate
all existing programs and give
students, teachers and administrators
a common language through which
to more efficiently communicate
and operate. By having a common
framework and language this helped
create a stable and safe environment
where students can excel.
“There is … powerful evidence that
school climate affects students’ selfesteem and self-concept. School
climate also colors school-based riskprevention efforts. Effective riskprevention and health-promotion
efforts are correlated with a nurturing
school climate. It also promotes
academic achievement. As a resultof these findings, fostering socially,
emotionally, and physically safer
schools has become a primary focusof the U.S. Department of Justiceand virtually all state education
departments.” (Cohen, 2006, p. 212-213.)
As students come to grips withan increased pace of life, greater
economic pressure and dependency
on their parents, breakdowns of theirneighborhoods and family, weakened
bonds with their parents due to thedemands of work and school, drugs,
mental health, not to mention the
climate of war and social violence
going on in the world around them,school buildings need to be a place
for children to feel safe. No one canprosper in an unsafe environment.
This is why, as educators and policy
makers, it is our responsibility toensure that when children come toschool not only are we teaching themacademics, but we are also educatingthem in mind, heart, body and spirit. A
student who is smart but not mentally
fit is a danger to society. High testscores do not indicate the well-beingof the school.
In January of 2013 the NJ School
Board Association sponsored a
program, “Safe and Secure Schools:
Perspectives after Newtown”, to assist
school districts in assessing theirsecurity measures in the wake of thetragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary
School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Dr. Maurice Elias, director of the
DSACS initiative, during his keynote
address brought up two important
points: “People with dignity don’t
harm others,” and a quote by Theodore
Roosevelt: “To educate a person inmind and not in morals is to educate amenace to society”.
Dignity as a skill? Can that betaught? Dignity may not be a skill,
yet dignity is something that comesout of self-esteem, and self-esteem isbuilt and realized when young people
have had a chance to learn about andform essential life habits. And thisframework for learning essential life
habits - social emotional character
development (SECD) - is perfectly
suited to be implemented in the place
where children spend the majorityof their time and can be reachedsystematically: school. The skills andhabits needed for success in schooland life can be broken down into fiveareas:
1. Self-awareness: being able torecognize your emotions, values,
strengths and limitations
2. Responsible decision-making: being
able to make ethical and constructive

choices about personal and social
behaviors
3. Relationship skills: the ability toform positive relationships, work wellin teams and deal effectively withconflict
4. Social awareness: the ability toshow understanding and empathy forothers
5. Self-management: the ability to
manage your emotions and behaviors
in order to achieve your goals
Two separate studies in 2006 and2011 show SECD skills are linked
to student gains in social emotional
skills, improved attitudes about
themselves, others and school,
positive classroom behavior and 10
to 11 percentile-points gained instandardized achievement tests. Theseskills also are shown to reduce the riskof conduct problems, aggression andemotional distress. Data coming outof the DSACS initiative, for 48,000
students across all demographic,
geographic and socioeconomic levels,
is remarkably consistent. Bullying
can be linked to school climate and ismost strongly and significantly related
to the respect that students feel inthe school, especially among theirpeers. Where there is a respectfulschool environment, bullying is lesslikely to exist. In the high schools

specifically, sampling 13,593 students
across all socioeconomic levels, higherscores on the school climate survey
correlated to lower incidences ofviolence, vandalism, substance abuse
and weapons possession.
To better prepare our children to deal
with the ever changing world in which
we are living a successful 21st century
school must emphasize a positive,
caring environment inside the schoolbuilding as much, if not more than,high quality academics. Educating achild in mind, heart, body and spirit
will give them the essential skills theyneed to be successful in school andlife.
1. From Cohen, J. (2006). Social,
Emotional, Ethical, and Academic
Education: Creating a Climate
for Learning, Participation in
Democracy, and Well-Being. Harvard
Educational Review, 76 (2), 201-237.
Educated at Rutgers University in
the United States, Rebecca Irby
is a Nagoya-based education &technology consultant.

Third Edition Eye Magazine | 41

Photograph by Alex Murphy / Flickr

stop—are not decisions at all. They
are compromises. A book is whittled
down from hope, and when I start tocut my fingers I push it away from me
to see what others make of it. And I
wait in terror for the judgements of
those others—judgements that seem,
whether positive or negative, unjust,because they are about somethingthat I didn’t really do. They are aboutsomething that happened to me. It’sa little like crawling from a car crash
to be greeted by a panel of strangers
holding up score cards.

THE WRITING LIFEBY VINEET KAUL

Seriously, I don’t know how to write. Which is unfortunate, as
I do it for a living? Mind you, I don’t know how to live either.
Writers are asked, particularly when we’ve got a book coming
out, to write about writing. To give interviews and explain how
we did this thing that we appear to have done. We even teach,as I have recently, students who want to know how to approach
the peculiar occupation of fiction writing. I tell them at the
beginning—I’ve got nothing for you. I don’t know. Don’t lookat me.
I’ve written six books now, but instead of making it easier, it
has complicated matters to the point of absurdity. I have noidea what I’m doing. All the decisions I appear to have made—about plots and characters and where to start and when to
42 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

Something, obviously, is going on. I
manage, every few years, to generate abook. And of course, there are things
that I know. I know how to wait until
the last minute before putting anythingon paper. I mean the last minute
before the thought leaves me forever.
I know how to leave out anything thatlooks to me—after a while—forced,
deliberate, or fake. I know that I needto put myself in the story. I don’tmean literally. I mean emotionally. I
need to care about what I’m writing—whether about the characters, or about
what they’re getting up to, or about
the way they feel or experience theirworld. I know that my job is to createa perspective. And to impose it on thereader. And I know that in order to dothat with any success at all I must insome mysterious way risk everything.
If I don’t break my own heart in thewriting of a book then I know I’ve
done it wrong. I’m not entirely surewhat that means. But I know what it
feels like.
I do no research. Given that I’ve justwritten a book that revolves aroundHOW ABOUT YOU? IF YOU DIDN’T WRITE, WOULD
YOU BE DOING SOMETHING ELSE? DO YOU HAVECREATIVE OUTLETS IN ADDITION TO WRITING?
two Indian Met police detectives, thismight seem a little foolhardy. I haveno real idea what detectives do with
their days. So I made some guesses.
I suppose that they must investigate
things. I tried to imagine what thatmight be like. I’ve seen the same films
and TV shows that you have. I’ve
read the same sorts of cheap thrillers.
And I know that everything is fiction.
Absolutely
everything. Research
is its own slow fiction, a process ofreassurance for the author. I don’t
want reassurance. I like writing out ofconfusion, panic, a sense of everything
being perilously close to collapse. So I
try to embrace the fiction of all things.
And I mean that—everything is
fiction. When you tell yourself thestory of your life, the story of yourday, you edit and rewrite and weave
a narrative out of a collection of
random experiences and events. Your
conversations are fiction. Your friends
and loved ones—they are characters
you have created. And your argumentswith them are like meetings with aneditor—please, they beseech you, youbeseech them, rewrite me. You havea perception of the way things are,and you impose it on your memory,and in this way you think, in thesame way that I think, that you areliving something that is describable.
When of course, what we actually live,
what we actually experience—with
our senses and our nerves—is a vast,
absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.
So I love hearing from people whohave no time for fiction. Who read
only biographies and popular science?
I love hearing about the death of

the novel. I love getting lectures
about the triviality of fiction, thetriviality of making things up. As ifthat wasn’t what all of us do, all day
long, all lifelong. Fiction gives us
everything. It gives us our memories,
our understanding, our insight, ourlives. We use it to invent ourselves andothers. We use it to feel change andsadness and hope and love and to telleach other about ourselves. And weall, it turns out, know how to do it.
I’m still drawing on some questions
I solicited on my Facebook page awhile back. This comes from Gregg
Chamberlain, and it’s one I get asked
a lot in blog interviews: If I wasn’t awriter, what would I be doing? Would
I have some other creative outlet?
What I usually say: What would I be
if I wasn’t a writer? Institutionalized.
Seriously. Like a lot of writers, I feellike if I couldn’t write, or didn’t write, I’dgo crazy. Completely bonkers! Even
taking a step back and considering thequestion seriously, it’s still tough toanswer because I can’t imagine whatelse I’d be doing. I’ve spent so muchof my life on stories and writing, thata huge chunk of my current identity
would be totally different. I’m a writer
because around the time I graduatedfrom college, I decided there wasn’t
anything else I wanted to do with mylife, my career, my time. It took about
twelve years after that to be able towrite full time, but I did it because I
didn’t give myself much of a choice.
I don’t want to consider what othercareer I might have gone into besides
writing, because it would change mylife too much, and I like my life theway it is.
The question of what other creative
outlet I might be doing if I didn’t
write is a little less traumatic toconsider, because I’ve always hadlots of creative outlets. Art, sewing,
theater, and music. Looking back, I
think I could have made a career at
any of them — if I had chosen to put
as much time into any one of them as
I put into my writing. Writing won
out because it’s easy to do any time,
any place. A pen and paper, that’s it.
Art and music have steeper learning
curves, I think, and the rewards aren’t
as immediate. Theater usually needs
collaborators. I sometimes think in
an alternate universe, I did follow
one of those other paths, and in that
universe I’m wondering what would
have happened if I’d become a writer.
I’ve been on a couple of panels overthe last couple of years about othercreative outlets writers have. Lotsof writers knit, make jewelry, play inbands, and so on. I do find I reallylove making things with my hands
after days and days of working mostly
with my brain. But I don’t consider
trying any of my crafty hobbies
professionally.
How about you? If you didn’t write,
would you be doing something else?
Do you have creative outlets inaddition to writing?
Vineet Kaul is a final year Ph.D
student in Media & Communication
at DA-IICT University, Gujarat
India.
Third Edition Eye Magazine | 43

THE MENA SAGA
AND (NOT) LADY GAGABY ANIS H. BAJREKTAREVIC

Photograph by James Gordon / Flickr

LE T ’ S G E T S Y ( I ) R I A - O U S :W H ER E I S T H E CO U N T ER
N A R R AT I V E ?
The MENA theatre is situated in oneof the most fascinating locations of
the world. It actually represents, alongwith the Balkans-Caucasus, the only
existing land corridor that connects
three continents. It also holds overa half of the world’s proven oilgas reserves (56% – oil, 48% – gas).
Further on, the Gulf OPEC statesand Libya have –by far– the lowest
costs of oil extraction, thanks to thehigh crude ‘purity’ which simplifies
and cheapens the refinement process.
These petrol-exporters also enjoy theclose proximity to open warm seas
for the fast and low-cost, convenient

44 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

overseas shipments. Hence, the costs
per barrel of crude for Libya and thePersian Gulf states are under 5USD,
for other OPEC members below
10USD. This is in a sharp contrast
to countries such as the US, Russia,
Norway, Canada and many others thatbear production costs of several tensof USD per barrel – according to theInternational Energy Agency (IEA).
Therefore, it is an absolute imperative
for the external/peripheral powers
to dominate such a pivotal geoeconomic and geopolitical theater bysimply keeping its center soft (e.g. by
pre-empting, preventing or hindering
the emancipation that might comethrough any indigenous sociopolitical modernization and economic

diversification). This is the verysame imperative that has remained adominant rational of inner Europeanand Asian machtpolitik for centuries.
No wonder that the competition in the
MENA theatre, which has a lasting
history of external domination orinterference (and largely the Versailles,
Anglo-French drawn borders), isharsh, multiple, unpredictable. The
region is predominantly populatedby the Sunni (Arab) Muslims. With
its high population density and ademographic growth far outpacing
the economic one, this very young
median population (on average 23–27
years old) – that is frequently lacking
any (universal) access to education,
health and housing – is dominatedby juvenile, mainly unemployed orunderemployed, but socially mobilized
and often angry males.
An exceptional fact that the Middle
East is a cradle of all four monotheistic
religions is thus turned into its own
paradox: Fueled by severe socioeconomic exclusions and exacerbatedby exploitation of the Shia–Sunni
and of Muslim–Jewish–Christianantagonism, political radica-lization
is surely one of the most convenient
instruments of tacit control aimed atpreserving local governing authorities
predatory-alienated, unauthentic andweak, if not incapacitated.
It should not be of any surprise that eachand every one of the predominantly
Sunni-Muslim
Balkans-MENA
countries of the secular republican
type, where the external powers havebrokered the political settlement– often by compromising the very
sovereignty and territorial integrity, isenveloped in perpetuated instabilities,

remaining thus paralyzed. So far, nota single absolutistic monarchy has
been significantly affected. Startingin Bosnia – nearly 20 years ago –followed by Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq
and Libya as well as in the post-Spring
Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, all the way to‘ungoverned’ Mali, South Sudan andAlgeria’s south, and up to the postassassination revolt-torn Tunis oranti-Avanti Mursi‘ Cairo, a purposely
dysfunctional and indecisive central
government seems to have been put
in place.
P O LI C Y O F T I M I N G O RN O S P R I N G O N A S I N G LESTRING
Conclusively, most observers would
agree that while the so-called ArabSpring had a cross-Arab impact, thiswas still far from a pan-Arab ripple
effect: It was more of a spontaneous
social revolt; a series of isolated events(related to each other more by AlJazeera-connecting-pots potting andfanning), rather than a directional
process. To channel something so
unexpectedly inflammatory and crossArab, while studiously avoiding panArabism let alone any hint of real
structural socio-economic reform andpolitical emancipation – that could
have only been achieved by lighting
the torch of Islamism. Lacking any
enlightenment, this torch far too often
and far too easily brought about theextremist blindness of Islamo-fascism.
No Spring on a single string, right?!
How could any social cohesion
indispensible for the MENA
democratization possibly work where
primary loyalties are (returned) tosect, tribe or ethnicity? This dilemma
relates not only to democracy, but also
to the very quest of secularism – for theone presupposes the other – ever since
the French Revolution. In this or any
other part of the (developing) world,
institutionalization of democracy
without secularization of state
inevitably leads to a dysfunctional,

Third Edition Eye Magazine | 45

Photograph by Thierry Ehrmann / Flickr

destabilizing and (self-)debilitating
government: divinization of the post
and personalization of power. The
current state of the MENA republics
affected by the Arab Spring as well asthat of the GCC monarchies provides
the best proof of this.

to a neighboring (increasingly
anticipated as assertive) Iran as well as
to Russia and China behind it. Right
now, Syria pays a proxy-war pricefor that: This multi-religious countryof subtle ancient cultural layers may
end up entirely combusted, thereby
creating a dangerous security vacuum
For one thing, as it now seems, the in the heart of MENA. Or to use
euphorically tam-tamed ‘Facebook the words of frustration of the senior
revolutions’ across MENA were rather French diplomat who recently told me
a strategic distractions ‘innocently’ in Brussels: “we have to demonize anddressed up in the diverting banality quickly delegitimize the legitimateof social media networks. The very Syrian government, and topple alsame role those networks well played Assad in order to convince Israel notelsewhere too. Hence, is it of any to bomb Iran…”
surprise that the broad and universal
right of self-determination has been “Western national interests will
sadly reduced to the right of internet- no longer determine the moral
freedom? Contrary to the established and political impulses of today’s
apotheosis, many fundamental human global community… Whatsoever
rights are currently compressed like a the outcome, Syria’s agony has
zip-file, emailed and entrusted to just a underscored a further irreversible
pair of omnipotent, self-centered and weakening of the West’s dominant
self-interested non-state and semi- global role…” claims India’s former
state actors of unilateral globalism/ Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh.
egoism: private IT corporations and Perhaps so; the West has indeed
shadowy intelligence agencies.
become too weak to architecture, but
it certainly remains strong enoughPresently, the announced reduction to destabilize its conceived politicalof the American physical presence in peripheries:
Afghanistan, the limitations it faces
in the nearly failed (nuclear bomb As recently, the ‘Group of Friends ofholding) Pakistan, and the massive Syria’- induced recognition of the sooverextensions suffered all over the called Syrian opposition means also
southwestern flank of the Euro-Asian that Turkey is now practically at war
continent including the recent US with Syria. At this point, let me be
Army pullout from Iraq, is felt within both instructive and predictive: The
the GCC (and in France, UK, Israel fall of al-Assad will most certainly
and Turkey too) as dangerous exposure trigger the dissolution of Syria. It will
46 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

also lead to a formalized federalizationof Iraq, in a desperate move to prevent
its total decomposition as well as
to a serious crisis of Lebanese andJordanian statehood – in both cases
probably beyond reparation. The
winners in such a scenario would
then seem to be Israel (a country thatremains enveloped in its traumatic
European holocaust past and detachedfrom its present neighborhood) alongwith the GCC monarchies – at least in
the short run. However, over the longterm the ‘winners’ would be the Kurds
and Shias even though the northern
portions of Syria have already been
occupied by the Turkish Army forquite some time.
Consequently, with any proclamationof a Kurdish state (inevitably being ofa Black Sea –Eastern Mediterranean
stretch, a dream line of all Russiantsars in past), the Erdoğan government(as well as Iraq) would not be able
to survive – as it has already createdenough enemies at home and inits near abroad. Ergo, besides thedispersed, rarified and terrified
MENA Christians, the moderate(Arab) Sunnis are definitely the longterm losers.
Anis H. Bajrektarevic, is currently
Chairperson for International Law& Global Policy Studies in Vienna,
AustriaPhotograph Source / Wikipedia

Third Edition Eye Magazine | 47

WAN CHAICAN COLLECTIVE MEMORY REVITALIZE A
CITY? HONG KONG’S VIVIDLY COLOURFULWAN CHAI DISTRICT BY JUN KOBAYASHI
Hong Kong has, besides those shopping spots andskyscrapers, various houses and buildings designed tocontain both Chinese and Western styles. This exotic city
has more than 500 graded historical buildings and most ofthem are waiting for either urban renewal or conservationby the government and neighborhood.
Wan Chai was the area developed earliest in Hong Kong,the origin of the name was “a small gulf ”, and before
reclamation started, it was close to the sea. Nowadays, Wan
Chai is a core area in Hong Kong for both working andliving, has the second smallest population in the 18 districtsin Hong Kong, and most residents have a high income.
Hence, Wan Chai has many buildings that are of historicalvalue and cheerfully colored. Here is the Blue House clusterand some other vividly color building in Wan Chai.
THE BLUE HOUSEThe Blue House was built in 1920 and at some point intime was used as a hospital and school respectively. It iscalled Tong Lau by the locals, (literally, “Chinese building”),
and has adopted both western and Hong Kong styles incollective housing with a store and a residence at colonial
Photograph by Roaming the Planet / Flickr

days. The first floor was used as atemple in the 1920s, and later as
clinic for a physician from the 1950s
afterwards. The Blue House is used
for housing but the amenities are very
old. The residents are using a common
kitchen, and living without a toilet.
Residents have someone remove theexcrement every night and nowadays
most are using public toilets. There isa “Wan Chai neighborhood place”,
newly established in one corner ofthe first floor at the Blue House,
open for everyone who wants toknow more about the Hong Kong
history. The future plan for the Blue
House is opening to tourists andoffering a tearoom as well as a place
for art activities. Furthermore extra
flats are to be created for new eighthouseholds, but those new tenants
must be traditional craftsmen, artists
or social entrepreneurs who agreewith the theme of Blue House.
THE YELLOW HOUSE & THE
ORANGE HOUSEThe Yellow House was collected by thegovernment like the Blue House, has
become a heritage item, and was built
in European style. The Orange Houseis comparatively new, built around1950 and was a part of the Blue Housefor storing the wood. It is due todevelopment that the Orange House
has a gallery and became a place,which promotes civic art activities. In
the Blue House cluster plan, the Blue
House will be a museum of Chinese
medicine and the Yellow House will
be a tea museum.
THE GREY HOUSEIn the beginning, the Blue House wasa grey. However, when the government

48 | Eye Magazine Third Edition

Photograph Source / Wikipedia

decided to paint it, blue was they only
color they had in stock. If you visit
the Blue House you can see there is agray house connected. This grey houseis maintained by an individual ownerwithout ever changing the color inhonor of the district’s past.
THE GREEN HOUSE & THE
WHITE HOUSE
Besides the Blue House cluster, Wan
Chai has many historical buildings
with various colors. For example,
the Green House, same as the Blue
House, was made to adopt the style ofboth Chinese and Western buildingsin the 1920s, with a stylish balcony
and stores. After the renovation in
July 2013, the Green House changed
to a modern “commix home base” asit left the wall, the tiled roof, and thewooden stairs and French door of red
brick. It is opened as a workshop foranimation and comics. Furthermore,
the conspicuous white building islocated in a place, which is separated
by a few minutes walk from the Blue
House. This white building was a post
office, built in 1913, and is now used
as an environmental-resources center.
THE RED HOUSE
Finally, if you go down the main road
Queen’s Road East, and up a steep hillto the top, there is a house called the
Wan Chai Haunted House by local
people. This building was issued by amillionaire in 1918, is referred to as‘Nam Koo Terrace’ and consists of red
bricks laid in western style. Nam Koo
Terrace in Ship Street was very close
to the sea where ships went back andforth frequently in ‘30s and ‘40s. This
was the area in which the Chinese
people gathered in Hong Kong and it

was one of the most prosperous places
within the Chinese community in the‘30s and ‘40s. During the Japanese
occupation of Hong Kong, the ownerof Nam Koo Terrace died suddenly for
unknown reason while in the house.
Later, the Japanese army used thisplace as ‘a guest house’ of the service
club. Nam Koo Terrace remains empty
after the war, and a developer bought
this estate in 1988 but it is still vacantat the moment.
It can be said that the neighborhoodwith the colorful buildings is the area
where the housing division developed
before World War II, and thefeatures of the street of prewar days
is kept comparatively well. The Blue
House cluster is not only a nostalgic
atmosphere, but also indispensable totelling history of Hong Kong.

old coastline in the front of thoseold buildings. Recently people havestarted to talk about “Collective
Memory” in Hong Kong and began
thinking about the importance of
heritage whilst rethinking their own
history. Although many issues are
waiting to be solved it is a good movefor both the government and local
level. If you have chance to visit Hong
Kong, you should try to walk around
Wan Chai area for sightseeing besides
shopping and enjoying the cuisine.
You will definitely discover a different
Hong Kong.
Jun Kobayashi is a Hong Kong based
writer and editor. Originally from
Tokyo, Japan, Jun has an interest in
Chinese Architecture, especially thehistorical Wan Chai district.

Hong Kong is surrounded by
mountains and has less land suitable
for living; therefore people in Hong
Kong expanded the coastline little bylittle through means of reclamation.
If you pay attention to the tramroute in Wan Chai you can see theThird Edition Eye Magazine | 49