In Review
Coursework
CLASS CHARACTERS: “One of the reasons why I love this class is that it draws an eclectic mix of students. You have a mathematician sitting next to a computer scientist, next to a Japanese studies student, next to a creative writer who wants to become an author of science fiction,” Bridges says. (Photo: J. Adam Fenster)Japanese Science Fiction and Planetary Possible Futures
Fall 2021
William (Will) Bridges
Associate Professor of Japanese, Department of Modern Languages and Cultures
Astro Boy by Osamu Tezuka
The Astro Boy series is an anime classic in which a scientist builds a robot to replace his son, who has been killed in a car accident. Dissatisfied, he discards Astro Boy, who is then adopted and raised by a loving father. Astro Boy shows that “being human is not about which parts you have; it’s about living up to a set of ideals,” says Bridges. “One thing the author is interested in is the creation of a global community—in which the Japanese, if they live up to a certain set of ideals, can be accepted as members of this global community, even if their ‘parts’ look different than some of the parts of the folks of other nations.”
The class focuses on the third volume of the series, in which a villain creates what he believes is the strongest robot in the world and attempts to destroy robots of other nations. He finds he needs Astro Boy, who shows him the need to be loving and kind. Says Bridges: “It’s almost impossible to read this work of Japanese science fiction without thinking, why is it that Japan is trying to serve as a kind of model for pacifism for the rest of the globe?”
The Emissary, by Tawada Yoko
The novel by Yoko, the final work in the course, is what Bridges calls a “bittersweet dystopia” written in the wake of the March 2011 earthquake and Fukushima nuclear plant disaster. A contamination of Earth leads to a mysterious mutation causing children to be born ill and at risk of death, while the elderly begin to grow stronger as they age. “Yoko has set up a literary world in which the older generations have to see the damage they have done and what it does to the future generations,” Bridges says. “I leave students with this text because that is what I hope the course will do, and what science fiction does. It urges us to think about how our actions reverberate into the future. It forces us to consider what some of those reverberations might be, and how, in turn, we should act in the present. That’s kind of the culminating idea for the course.”
Films: Godzilla and Japan Sinks
Inclusion of the classic Godzilla (1954), in which a rampaging monster reflects Japan’s reeling from the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a must, says Bridges.
Japan Sinks (2006), based on a 1973 novel, imagines shifting tectonic plates that lead to the sinking of Japan. The film, recently adapted into a Netflix anime series, “initiated a conversation in Japan about Japan’s place in the modern world and the possibility of its vanishing given its entry into a global community,” Bridges says.
About Will Bridges
Bridges joined the Rochester faculty in fall 2017. An expert on modern Japanese literature and culture with an interest in cultural exchange, he’s the author of Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature (University of Michigan Press, 2020). In addition to science fiction, his courses explore topics including anime, Japanese calligraphy and graphology, and modern Japanese literature. This fall he was recognized with a Goergen Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
This fall students in JPNS 245: Japanese Science Fiction and Planetary Possible Futures are engaging with a variety of media—short stories, novels, films, manga, and anime—in an exploration of “the far-flung possible worlds imagined in Japanese science fiction.”
Taught by Will Bridges, an associate professor of Japanese, it has attracted students across disciplines. The course and all its materials are in English, and while its “home” is in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, it doubles as a course in the film and media studies program.
Japanese popular culture in general has broad appeal among students in the age bracket that makes up the overwhelming majority of Rochester undergraduates. Forms such as anime and manga have been wildly popular in the United States since at least the time Bridges was a high school student in Austin, Texas, in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Bridges traces his interest in Japan back to his elementary school days, when a project piqued his interest in the nation’s recovery after World War II. As a college student at the University of Texas, he took a class with Susan Napier (now at Tufts), one of the first scholars of Japanese literature to recognize “that we should consider anime and manga as objects of inquiry just as rich and deserving of study as any work of literature,” he says. Hooked on the field of Japanese literature and culture, Bridges decided to continue his studies in a doctoral program at Princeton.
There are benefits to teaching popular subject matter beyond the numbers of students who enroll.
“One of the reasons why I love this class is that it draws such an eclectic mix of students,” he says. “You have a mathematician sitting next to a computer scientist, next to a Japanese studies student, next to a creative writer who wants to become an author of science fiction.”
That can make for rich class discussions. “Some students will be very familiar with some of the scientific underpinnings of a given story, where there’s another student who will be more familiar with thinking through literary analysis, another will know Japanese cultural history,” he says.
Science fiction is of particular interest to Bridges. It took off following World War II in many cultures, but especially in Japan. While Bridges includes precursors to post–World War II science fiction, the bulk of the course begins after the war, which, he says, “requires us to think about Japan’s place in the postwar world and how it’s envisioning its place in that world.”
Science fiction also speaks to Bridges’s interest in “imagined futures” more broadly. He has even proposed a new minor called “imagination and forethought,” under consideration by the College Curriculum Committee as of late October.
“Science fiction is fundamentally interested in imagining possibilities and possible futures,” he says. In doing so, “it almost forces us to wrestle with which of these futures are preferable and which ones are undesirable—which, in turn, pushes us to think about the humanities as a field of study that not only helps us know things about the past and the present, but also gives us ways of thinking about possible futures.”
—Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)
Rochester Review
Fall 2021
Vol. 84, No. 1
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