Keiko McDonald

Professor
Japanese Literature and Cinema

Acting Chair, AY 2008

716 Old Engineering Hall
412-624-4923
Fax: 412-624-3458
keiko@pitt.edu

As a professor of Japanese Cinema and Literature at the University of Pittsburgh, I have published extensively on both subjects. My major books include Cinema East: A Critical Study of major Japanese Films (1983), Mizoguchi (1984), Japanese Classical Theater in Films (1994), and From Book to Screen: Modern Japanese Literature in Films (2000). I have also co-edited Nara Encounters (1997) with Thomas Rimer. I recently completed two books -- Reading a Japanese Film: A Cross-Cultural Approach and The World of Hiroshi Shimizu: a Forgotten Veteran of Japanese Cinema. I am currently working on a book on Japanese women directors.

I had fun playing a cameo role in two films shot in Pittsburgh: Ron Howard's Gung Ho and George Miller's Lorenzo's Oil. As an enthusiastic runner, I have completed thirty-three marathons, and as an avid angler, I have written many articles on fishing for Japanese magazines.

I have written extensively on Japanese cinema and literature, lectured widely in both the U.S. and Japan, and received a number of teaching excellence awards, including the Tina and David Bellet CAS Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Award.

Teaching Goals and Approaches:

1) As Teacher/Researcher

Here at the university, I seem to be known as a teacher dedicated to exploring and explaining the complex interaction between language, literature, and cinema/drama. Such is my aim, at least, as I work and re-work my lecture notes. Students today quite rightly refuse to sit still for stale or poorly organized classroom materials. I use lecture notes to prepare for a class, but never read from them. I think eye contact and a relaxed, person-to-person style of delivery are important aids to classroom rapport.

My "other" life of scholarly research makes it easier to look my students in the eye and talk in terms of easy familiarity with my subject. The longer I teach and research, the more convinced I am that (as the song about love and marriage says) "you can't have one without the other." As I understand it, a well-researched book does its best work in the classroom, either directly as text, or indirectly, through the author whose teaching it has enriched.

In my case, work in print and work viva voce both bring me back to the same basic question I have been asking myself for years now: "How does a teacher coming from a non-Western tradition teach Western students how to 'read' a Japanese film or literary work?" All my books address that question one way or another. Titles like Cinema East: A Critical Study of Major Japanese Films, Mizoguchi (1984), getsu (1993), and Japanese Classical Theater in Films (1994) will obviously interest scholars and students of cinema. But I also try to write in a style accessible to the general reader and student with wide-ranging interests.

A number of critics and reviewers have praised my effort to put aside specialist jargon in favor of challenging, but accessible, cross-cultural synthesis. My latest attempt in this line is From Book to Screen: Modern Japanese Literature in Films. It was published in January, 2000. I am currently completing How To Read a Japanese Film, a textbook for Japanese cinema classes.

2) As Student of Students

As every teacher/author knows, response to works in print seems cut-and-dry compared to the real-live response of a classroom when a course is going well. I am grateful to my students and sometimes astonished by their frank and energetic engagement with a culture so different from theirs. I see this at all levels. I see it in the highly motivated majors who take the two advanced Japanese language courses I offer each year. I also see it in the generalized enrollment for the "culture" courses I offer. There, something like 180 students a year let me know how I am doing. In any event, the longer I teach the more like a student I feel--the one most exposed to the need for humility.

It takes some doing to meet the challenge of present-day work loads, but I think it best to handle all aspects of a course myself. I ask each student to write three or four critical essays in addition to a final essay exam, so it seems only fair (not to mention educational for me) to read those papers myself. It is also gratifying to discover that the course at hand has some bearing on a student's academic progress in general. I design assignments with that in mind and do my best to offer written commentary which encourages students to connect and expand their interests.

I do wish my weekends could expand accordingly. Getting students to see (as it were) how cinema fits the larger picture is engaging, not to mention time-consuming. As it is, I seem to devote Saturdays and Sundays to housework, running for exercise, and student papers and more papers.

As a product of the autocratic Japanese system of education, I am especially grateful for the congenial collegiate atmosphere that prevails on a campus like ours. It is a pleasure to schedule crowded office hours for students so refreshingly forthright, so eager to make contact with teacher and subject matter. Japanese students, I fear, would never dare to make suggestions for improving a class they are sitting in. Our students at Pitt do this so naturally, and so helpfully, that I no longer find myself surprised to be a teacher learning in such a non-Japanese way.

Now that higher education is hi-tech saturated too, e-mail gives students access to teachers to a degree unthinkable not that many years ago. I must say, I'm not persuaded that this new mode of access is all that wonderful. E-mail strikes me as a sadly remote convenience, a poor substitute for plain old-fashioned face-to-face conversation before or after class or in the teacher's office.

Another consequence of student/teacher rapport possible in the USA strikes me as quintessentially American too. I find myself taking an interest in all aspects of student life. Two years ago I sat on the Campus Climate Subcommittee organized by the Office of the Provost. The committee read through piles of documents on the subject and met with student representatives from various disciplines. It was a chastening experience. We met with students who clearly had reason to see faculty as inaccessible, even intimidating! I doubt that students in my classes feel that way.

As a native of Japan, I am especially proud to be part of a Japanese language program considered one of the best in the nation. A world-famous Japanese linguist (director of the Middlebury Japanese language summer school) has recently evaluated our efforts in a report that is nothing but positive.

All the more reason (I think) for our program to be actively recruiting the best and brightest. The young are famously quick when it comes to language aptitude so it has to be good news that so many high schools in Western Pennsylvania are offering Japanese. Three of my own former students are teaching it now in Pittsburgh.

Most recently, my own mission to attract new recruits put me in the position of moderator for the 2002 Japan Bowl, an experience I'll be happy to repeat this year. This event, sponsored by the Japan-America Society of Pittsburgh, is a Japanese language contest. Many high school students participate, the best fourth-level team of students being chosen for the final competition in Washington D.C. I was amazed by the energy and joy these youngsters brought to their quest for competence in a language so difficult to learn. I was not the only participant encouraged to think that we need to press even harder for foreign language instruction at earlier ages in American schools.

Publications

	Cinema East: A Critical Study of Major Japanese Films (1983)
	From Book to Screen: Modern Japanese Literature in Films (2000)
	Japanese Classical Theater in Films (1994)
	Mizoguchi (1984)
	Nara Encounters (1997)
	Ugetsu