THE SHIGA PROJECT represents an attempt to comment upon various representative aspects of Japanese life and civilization, both traditional and contemporary, by using as illustrative material locations, artifacts and situations specific to Shiga Prefecture in Japan.
This project was created in December 1996 by the sixteen students enrolled at the Japan Center for Michigan Universities in Hikone, Japan, for the Fall Semester of the 1996 - 1997 Academic Year in appreciation for the hospitality provided by their hosts, the citizens of Shiga.
Our operating premise throughout this project has been the abstract notion that, if visitors had the opportunity to visit only one location in all of Japan, they could find in Shiga Prefecture a representative overview of the entire culture and civilization. Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines located in Shiga, for example, can be seen as representative of temples and shrines throughout the entire nation. Forms of traditional architecture -- rural and urban, plebian and elite -- found in Shiga are typical of premodern structures found all over the Japanese islands. So, too, the modern life reflected in Shiga’s shopping malls and video stores and restaurants is representative of contemporary life elsewhere in Japan.
Read on, then, and you will come to know both more about life in Shiga Prefecture today and more about numerous other aspects of life in contemporary Japan.
To move on to another page, click on the right facing arrow. Click on The Shiga Project logo below to return to the initial Shiga Project page.
