Associate Professor of Japanese Kyoko Omori, gave an invited talk, “Usher Unsilenced: Benshi Performance, Modern Japanese Film Cultures, and Global Modernity,” at a symposium at Syracuse University on Sept. 13. The conference was titled “Japan Today: Interdisciplinary Symposium in Japanese Studies.”
Omori discussed the transmediatic underpinnings of modanizumu (modernism), which took shape around the turn of the twentieth century as a broad set of cultural and aesthetic movements against the backdrop of rapid technological advancements and the resulting impact of “new” media on human experience and perception. In particular, her talk focused on the career and achievement of Tokugawa Musei (1894-1971), a leading benshi (live narrator/lecturer for silent films) and popular writer.
