Semester at Sea Fall 2006 Voyage |
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TABLE
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JapanBy Kristin Trapp Ethnoscapes are the ways tourists, immigrants, refugees and guest workers move about a city. This was challenging to observe since 99.3% of Japan's population is native Japanese. The only tourists I witnessed were either students of Semester at Sea or in some way affiliated with the program. Immigrants were also hard to observe within the cities. I only saw three people that to the best of my knowledge were immigrants and they were players on the Japanese baseball team. Refugees and guest workers were also some what of a rare commodity, so if I was going to learn more about the city I had better look to another dimension, for instance mediascapes. Mediascapes are the worldwide distribution of information through newspapers, magazines, TV program and films. This was not as hard to observe since there were TVs, newspapers and magazines everywhere, the only problem was I don’t speak or read Japanese, so to the best of my knowledge the mediascapes for Japan do have a world wide distribution of information. However, the advertisements that were posted every where were in English. This brought me to my last dimension, finanscapes.
Finanscapes
are the global capital flow.
The
way Japanese cities were laid out really surprised me. To
be able to walk around and witness palaces
and temples that had existed for hundreds of years co-existing with the
new
technology that today’s architecture has to offer was astonishing. Time and technology really has had an impact
on the way |
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