Karaoke Castle

History: Castles in Japan - Matsumae Castle

We chose the historical topic of castles because we do not have castles in Calgary. No one in our group has ever visited a place that has castles before so we thought it would be interesting to understand the history behind them. It turns out that Japanese castles were originally built as fortresses for military defense to guard important or strategic sites along trade routes, roads, and rivers.

                                                             

We will focus mainly on Matsumae Castle because it is the only traditional style Edo period castle in Hokkaido. We will research this in the field by visiting Matsumae castle and exploring the castle ourselves. There are also tours offered in Japanese so we will try to understand as much of the information as we can.

Another way we plan to research this in the field is by conducting surveys to see how many people actually know the history of Matsumae Castle. The story of important historical monuments is usually included in the curriculum so we want to ask Japanese citizens about the castles and learn about the history from every day people. 

We expect to learn about the history behind the castle and see what the castle was made of today. Originally, the castles were built of earth, stone, and wood but the castle has actually been rebuilt several times. The most recent time was in the 1960’s and the reconstruction involved concrete so it will be interesting to see how close the reconstruction looks to the original.

Social: Modern Entertainment - Karaoke

We chose the topic of traditional and modern entertainment because we will be spending a lot of time in Japan hanging out with each other and we want to experience Japanese social culture and see how it compares to the social outings in Canada.

There are a lot of different group activities offered in Japan but we will be focusing on researching karaoke. Karaoke is a popular activity for amateur singers of all ages. It originated in Japan in the 1970’s. The first appearance of karaoke was in hotels and bars to help facilitate socializing and drinking. In the 1980’s karaoke evolved into small businesses that had small private rooms to karaoke in where you could also order food and drinks. The Karaoke machine later evolved to a remote that was connected to a karaoke box that had video and audio. A new popular trend in Japan is called Wankara (Solo Karaoke). This removes having an audience and allows the user to sing individually without the pressure or embarrassment of anyone else watching.

We will investigate this in the field by singing karaoke ourselves to see what it is like. We also want to conduct several polls to see how many people actually go out and do karaoke as a social activity. We expect the singing to be very fun and very embarrassing and we also expect that the poll will show that karaoke is a very popular pastime in Japan for people of all ages.