SHIGERU MIYAGAWA: Hello.
I'm Shigeru Miyagawa, Senior Associate Dean
for Open Learning and Professor of Linguistics here at MIT.
The course you're about to take, VTX, is about Tokyo.
Whether you live there or have never visited Tokyo at all,
this course will help you see some
of the ways this great city came to be.
I grew up in a small coastal town named Hiratsuka,
about 30 miles from Tokyo.
The first time I went to the city
was when I was six years old.
I remember the tall buildings and smells
from all sorts of restaurants and subways
and trains that were so difficult to figure out,
but so much fun to ride.
VTX will bring you into some important moments
in Tokyo's history as it was visualized
by two different artists at two different times.
If you walk the streets of Tokyo today,
you can find the spots depicted by these artists
and almost like flipping through time,
catch a glimpse of how they once were.
In the course, we look at how the city grew out
of a small fishing village named Edo
and how it was reinvented in response to Western influences
and devastation from natural disasters and war.
One of the best things about MOOCs,
that's shorthand for massive open online courses,
is that students all over the world
have access to exceptional scholars.
This is my third MOOC and the third
taught by the eminent historian who specializes in post-war
Japan, John W. Dower.
Professor Dower's work has received many awards, including
the Pulitzer Prize, and you'll find his popular books
on the shelves of many bookstores.
The course brings history together with art history
through the participation of James T. Ulak,
a longtime curator of Japanese art
at the Freer-Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.
We also have Professor Hiromu Nagahara of the History
Department at MIT, who wrote a book with a wonderful title,
"Tokyo Boogie-Woogie, Japan's Pop Era and its Discontents."
We'll be joined by Ellen Sebring, author of "Centerbook"
and Creative Director of the MIT Visualizing Cultures project
on which the course is based.
Please enjoy this bit of time travel through a great city
as you learn about its history, how visualizing history works,
and how the tradition of the 100 views
continues to inspire ways of seeing today.