JOURNAL ASSIGNMENT THREE - A: 
  
Discuss your reaction to the artifacts, materials, web sites and videos considered as part of your exploration of contemporary Japanese popular culture.

What aspects particularly attracted your interest? Why? In what ways did the aspects of popular culture discussed appear to reflect notions associated with traditional culture and civilization? In your opinion, does popular culture express more tatemae or honne values? How has popular culture integrated aspects of the modern and the western without losing its essential Japanese character?

Does popular culture in Japan today tend more to reinforce or to undermine contemporary interpretations of traditional cultural values, institutions and/or systems? Does popular culture reflect a rejection of gemeinschaft elite culture or merely a difference in approach to the same cultural and philosophical values? Defend your perceptions with concrete examples.

How does an understanding of the above contribute to a better appreciation of contemporary Japanese life? Have you come away from your encounter with popular Japanese contemporary culture more convinced that Japan represents a gemeinschaft or a gesellschaft culture? Why?

JOURNAL ASSIGNMENT THREE - B:  
  
Which of the aesthetic values explored in our consideration of the traditional Japanese fine arts most appeals to you or holds the greatest interest for you? Why?

Discuss how traditional Japanese aesthetic values as expressed in literature and architecture maintain themselves in modern Japan. Are these values manifestations of reinvented, maintained or transformed tradition (or all three)?

Can traditional values like these maintain themselves as "alive" in the face of the pressures of the twin processes of modernization and westernization?   

How essential are such values to the sense of cultural uniqueness maintained by the Japanese today? How do the values animating traditional aesthetics and those animating contemporary popular culture in Japan intersect (if at all)? 
  
JOURNAL ASSIGNMENT THREE - C:  
  
Consider how the Japanese garden both reflects traditional values, attitudes and understandings as well as ways in which the garden inspires contemporary artists, musicians and others active in the arts in Japan today. What makes the Japanese garden -- like the calligraphy studied in class --a particularly apt example of the way in which the traditional maintains its influence in contemporary cultural life?