On the Side of the Child: Film, Fluxus and Creative Education in Postwar Japan

On the Side of the Child: Film, Fluxus and Creative Education in Postwar Japan

Dr. Justin Jesty - Postdoctoral Associate, Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University

Wednesday, October 7, 2009 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Room 202, Henry R. Luce Hall See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 6511

The Society for Creative Aesthetic Education, Sōbi for short, had an idealistic, even fanciful conviction that natural growth would tend towards the good. They advocated a thoroughly child-centered education, where the teacher’s role was to remove all possible interferences (including themselves) from the path of the child’s development. The form of this emergent, uninhibited balance promised to correct modernity’s tragic overreliance on rationality, and Sōbi proposed their pedagogy as a model for all education in the newly democratic Japan. Though the early postwar in Japan is often represented as a polarized struggle between right and left, Sōbi stands in an unusual third position, as an advocate for a radically liberal commitment to freedom. Its unusualness made it something of a curiosity for the Japanese press, and an appealing place for artists. My paper will introduce Sōbi’s theory and organization, and also show how its idealistic, democratic aesthetic animates the work of filmmaker Hani Susumu, and Japanese members of Fluxus, who had close relations with the group.

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Japan