Professor Kanesaka is super knowledgable and very helpful. I was actually on the waitlist for this class because it filled up so quickly and he emailed me himself to let me know that they were expanding the size of the class. The workload of the class was very manageable. On Tuesdays, we'd watch the films in class and on Thursdays we would analyze them. The films were coupled with readings and we just had to submit 400 word discussion posts by Thursday night. The midterm and final prompts were a bit tricky but all of the TAs were extremely helpful in having extra office hours to breakdown the prompts. As someone with no background in Japanese film or culture, I really enjoyed this class!

I loved Japan 70 with Kanesaka! I was pretty nervous to take the class, since it didn't have many reviews, but it ended up being one of my favorite classes ever. Every week, we got assigned 1 reading and 1 film to watch that both related to a certain topic (i.e. geishas, samurai, etc.) I felt as though the class was pretty reading-heavy though, and not so much with films. For homework, you had to upload a 400-word reading response every week to CCLE. Both the midterm and final was an essay that you had a week to write. The topics were pretty difficult, but both the professor and my TA were such a big help with both essays! If Casey Martin is a TA for the class, TAKE HIM! He was such a good TA, who was so so helpful in his office hours and discussion sections. Overall, the class was very enjoyable and pretty chill if you put in the work!