memorandum 2018.08.23

This week, I had a chance to see a collection of pictures donated by one art director who worked closely with filmmakers such as Kinoshita Keisuke and Kawashima Yuzo in the 1950s. The photo albums included many pictures with famous faces from the second golden age of Japanese film industry. I'm looking forward to analyzing the details and using them as sources in papers in a very near future. Photos are usually considered difficult materials to exhibit because of legal rights, they give us an opportunity to reimagine what those in film industry were seeing.

One of the problems I have right now, however, is a severe lack of time for research and actually analyzing the materials. One reason is that I have not completely settled and rearranged my work habit in a new environment. It's been almost 6 months, but I still find it difficult to work effectively in order to finish the to-do-list on time. One of the reasons for this is that we have too many meetings, sometime unexpected ones. To me, this was a surprise at first because I had heard that professors hate meetings; things seem different here. If they also do not want meetings so often, maybe we should find some other ways to keep ourselves updated.

Not having enough time for research and paper writing is a serious problem, especially to us young scholars whose contract is only up to three years at maximum. It looks like that although those who had my position before me somehow found better positions a few years after finishing the contract, they all had difficulty with regularly publishing papers. I need to figure out ways to have enough time each day to read, watch movies, and write.