Cultural Landscapes of Vietnam and Japan from Young People's Viewpoints in Under the Same Sky (2017)

ABSTRACT

A Vietnamese student went to Okinawa to study. He met a Japanese girl, a reporter for Okinawa television, who then visited Vietnam to make a television film. She went around the streets of Hanoi and recorded vivid scenes about the land and people. Afterwards, when she returned to Okinawa, her relationship with the Vietnamese student improved. How does the cultural landscape of Vietnam appear through the eyes and through the experience of a Japanese women? What thread connects memory and present, war and peace, past and future? Love makes two young people, even though geographically distant at times, always look towards each other. How were the cultural landscapes, memories and love represented in this film? This article provides interpretations of the above issues through the characters’ visualisation of the landscapes in a transcultural context.

KEYWORDS:

• Under the Same Sky
• landscape criticism
• cultural landscape
• memory
• war

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was solely funded by University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi under project number USSH-2023.22.

Notes on contributors

Tran Thi Thuc

Tran Thi Thuc is a lecturer at the Faculty of Literature, VNU University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi. She has published many papers in the fields of comparative literature, Japanese and Vietnamese literature, Japanese and Vietnamese films.