Star Festival is based on the real-life experiences of Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, who grew up in Japan and left at the age of 10 to move to Alabama. It is a cross-cultural exploration of east and west – a personal look at how Japan has changed since World War 2 and, ultimately, what it means to go home again.

In the story, “the Professor” returns to Hiratsuka to attend Tanabata, the “StarFestival.” As he visits the places and people from his past, he records videos and notes in a fantastic PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), and is unexpectedly drawn deeply into questions of his cultural identity and heritage.

Sites, Field Notes, and Diary
“The Professor” created a Site in the PDA for each location he visited – 20
altogether. Each evening at the family home, he analyzed the material he had
collected, writing the Field Notes and Diary. With the help of Japan expert, Merry “Corky” White, he uncovered differences and some of the cultural assumptions we make, becoming, like the Magpies of the Tanabata myth, a bridge between two
cultures.

Special thanks to Mitsuko Miyagawa for her stories.
Photographs provided by the Miyagawa family.

The StarFestival Project has been supported by generous funding from:
ASCII Corporation, Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning, Funabashi Business and Computer School, Kochi-Manjiro Fund to MIT, Japan-America Institute of Management Science, MIT Provost NEC Fund, MIT Center for Educational Computing Initiative, National Endowment for the Humanities, Nippon Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education.

StarFestival, Inc.
P.O. Box 401025
Cambridge, MA 02140-0011
USA

www.starfestival.com
info@starfestival.com

Based on the StarFestival CD-ROM
© 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Click here for the original CD-ROM credits

The Star Festival website was developed for the “Visualizing Cultures” course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and presented on MIT OpenCourseWare.

Project Directors

John W. Dower
Ford International Professor of History

Shigeru Miyagawa
Professor of Linguistics
Kochi Prefecture-John Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture

Design and Production

Ellen Sebring
Scott Shunk
Andrew Burstein

OpenCourseWare

Anne Margulies, Executive Director
Tamara Cupples, Faculty Liaison
Ben De Long, Programming

Critical funding for this website was provided by:
The National Endowment for the Humanities
The d'Arbeloff Excellence in Education Fund
The Center for Global Partnership
The Andrew Mellon Foundation

Technical Notes:
Visualizing Cultures videos are created in QuickTime format. Some content is created in Shockwave format. You need these plug-ins to see Star Festival in its entirety.
Click hereto get QuickTime.
Click here to get Shockwave.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology © 2006 Visualizing Cultures