On december 3rd Kansai University held its first "Waraiko", a public laughter-research-symposium which is planned to be held every year in the future. The Waraiko is part of the project by sociologist Professor Yohji Kimura to make Kansai University a center of interdisciplinary study of the phenomen "laughter".
The panelists were mainly those people who took part in Professor Kimura's seminar before. At the beginning Inoue Hiroshi, the president of the Japan Society for Laughter and Humor Studies, introduced the about 100 visitors to the original "Waraiko", a ceremony which is held every december 3rd in Yamaguchi prefecture and in which the members pass from the old year by giving a big laugh three times - if someone's laugh is not big enough the master of the ceremony will order him to repeat his laughter until it is big enough.
The waraiko was happy to welcome Shimada Yoshichi as a special guest. Shimada Yoshichi became famous as a manzai-comedian in the 80s and has been a succesful writer and creator of the book-series "The gabai granny" which was recently adopted into a movie which was highly acclaimed at international film festivals like Shanghai or the Berlin Asia-Pacific Film Festival. Since the "gabai granny" masters troubles in life by confronting them with her unique kind of humor, Professor Kimura choosed it as a "must-read" for his students. Mr Shimada gave a very entertaining lecture about how his memories of his granmother turned into this bestseller. I will introduce more about gabai granny later here in "Laughter Japan".
After the lunch-break two medical lectures put my own Japanese abilities to a hard test. Dr. Kimata explained the positive effect of laughter for atopy-patients, while Mr Nozawa of Tsukuba-University introduced his neurological research about the brain-processes involved with laughter. Both lecutres in combination were very impressing and illustrated how meaningful laughter can be for medical treatments and how important research can be.
In the evening, our Waraiko turned into a ceremony as well. After Professor Sekiya, an expert on
Kyogen (a comic version of the famou Noh-Theater) held his lecture, we started a little play in which the students and me turned into Japanese gods and acted under the direction of Professor Sekiya. We played a little episode from old Japanese legends: The sun-goddes has retreated into a cave, it becomes dark and cold on earth. The other gods start to shout, dance, laughter and sing (and in the originally story one goddess starts to strip too - unfortunately nobody stripped today ;) ). The sun-goddess is wondering what is going on and leaves her cave again. With the sun back on earth, the laughter becomes even bigger. And here, the audience was asked to join our laughter. For someone who was not involved the scene might have been a little bit scary: About 100 peoples wildly laughing, a sun-goddess wearing an old costume and a Noh-mask and me guiding the goddess around the room. For the people involved it was a very amusing experience.
For me, the Waraiko was a chance to present my just published book on Japanese stand-up-comedy "Manzai" to the audience and to meet a few new people who research in similar fields or whose methods are interesting for my own research as well. I also enjoyed spending time with the many cheerful students who voluntary came to school on sunday to make the waraiko a success.
At the little party after the lectures, we had time for a little chat and say cheers "Kampai" with sweet "Big-Laughter-Sake", brought by Professor Kimura from his little mountain-village.
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Posted by: UK thesis | August 04, 2009 at 01:13 PM