What does ''sensing Japan'' mean?


What is sensing Japan?
It is an initiative to rediscover Japan as a place and a culture from new perspectives. Concretely, it features on a semi-monthly basis certain people from a variety of fields, people who probe Japan from their unique viewpoints and activities. Their reports should shed new light on Japan.
  • For the first installment of sensing Japan, Masanobu Shibuya dove in the sea near the port city of Kobe, almost exactly one year to the day after the Great Hanshin Earthquake. We have all heard a lot about ground-level reconstruction efforts in the press, but Shibuya tells us how Kobe looks underwater.
  • Also from Kobe, we interact with Takashi Tsumura, a reconstruction organizer, and with Mariyo Yagi, an artist.
    In future installments of sensing Japan, we will meet a religious scholar and ethnographer who spends much of his time in Japan's sacred sites.
All of the sensing Japan guests are walking (or swimming) "sensors" with unique gifts that they will share with us.
For Japanese people, sensing Japan should serve to renew their sense of self-identity. For non-Japanese, the probe should offer new and alternative views and images of the land, the people and the culture. Our special guests seek to give us answers to such questions as "What is the condition of Japan's environment today?" and "How has the Kobe earthquake changed our views of the city?"



[map page of sensing Japan]

Theme pavilion "sensorium" (sensorium home page)
INTERNET 1996 WORLD EXPOSITION (World Public Park) / JAPAN (Japan EXPO home page)