Meet Patrick Chimenti: Teaching Japanese Media to the Next Generation

Patrick Chimenti joined the Asian & Middle Eastern studies department as an assistant professor in fall 2025. His area of research focuses on Japanese literary studies as well as Japanese television and film.

“My work tends to focus on grassroots networks of media producers and ‘amateur’ creators working across a wide range of media formats and genres,” Chimenti said. “I am particularly interested in theories of documentary/recording, intermedial adaptation and performativity, and the relationship of media to affective sensibilities and social memory.” 

What are your areas of specialty? How did you become interested in what you study and teach? 

My primary educational background is in literary studies with a focus on Japan, although my current projects and research interests tend to lean closer to film and media studies, particularly the study of television, which is a core focus of my current book project. 

In terms of how I became interested in this field, one of the first works of Japanese literature I encountered was Haruki Murakami’s Underground (1997) in high school. The work addresses the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, which resulted in the deaths of 13 people and the permanent wounding of many more. 

In the text, Murakami uses a hybrid method incorporating interviews, newspaper and media coverage, and imaginative reconstruction/analysis to try to piece together the traumatic event in terms of its broader impact and significance on social consciousness and memory in Japan. The work was quite controversial at the time of its syndication as Murakami elected not only to interview witnesses and victims of the event, but former cult members who became social outcasts and pariahs following the incident.

I was already deeply interested in the study of literature prior to this point, but what fascinated me about this work was the hybrid structure of the text. It attempted to piece together the events of the incident through a circuitous and often messy/contradictory series of accounts from multiple partial and incomplete perspectives, including testimonials of the incident’s lingering impact on those not directly involved who were nonetheless “implicated” in the aftershocks of the event. The question of how to effectively represent/document an incident which is always, in a manner of speaking, “out of bounds” both in terms of its taboo nature within public discourse, but also its fundamentally fragmented and part-fictionalized reconstruction within social memory and mediated retellings is a question at the heart of this work, one which poses a fundamental challenge for literature. 

In my undergraduate career, I started learning Japanese language based on my interest in this work and I was fortunate enough to be introduced to several generous mentors who encouraged me that I was fit for this kind of work: Charles Inouye, Hosea Hirata, Susan Napier, and Kiyoko Morita. I would not be here without their assistance. As I often tell my students, I had little knowledge of Japan before started my undergraduate career and I was a very poor student of languages when I first started on this path, but my experiences taking courses widely in the humanities and pursuing my intellectual passions led me to completely change the academic trajectory I had been following to that point. I feel that being open to that kind of transformation is what the experience of learning should ideally be about.

What questions and ideas are you most interested in exploring right now? What problems does your work seek to address? 

A core theme of my work is the question of how media production contributes to the way we understand and connect with the world around us and how it might be possible to intervene within these processes by shifting the way we think about and utilize media in our daily lives. 

In the past few years, there has been a great deal of discussion about the veracity of the media we consume and where our information about the world comes from. Despite the fact that our everyday life is now basically inseparable from the experience of a variety of media platforms, I think it is often taken for granted that the vast majority of the information we receive about the world and the impressions we form about distant places and peoples are and historically have been fundamentally structured by our experience of media. 

In each of my courses, I challenge my students not only to think critically about how media shapes our understanding of the world, but also how naturalized structural and aesthetic conventions we associate with authenticity and realism were constructed through open-ended processes of experimentation and performativity. It is my belief that by apprehending how these sensibilities are shaped, distributed, and evolve through media practice, it becomes possible to intervene within and change the trajectory of these processes. 

To that end, my research tends to focus on points of historical disruption or “crisis,” when popular conceptions of how the world works were fundamentally challenged or transformed through shifting media practice and its relationship to broader cultural, political, and infrastructural developments. The questions posed by many of the actors I examine in my work —how to effectively change the way people think and feel within a quotidian space dominated by overdetermined political and commercial narratives; how to make meaningful connections and new forms of community in a deeply alienating time; and how to make a difference from within the contradictions of a highly commercialized media landscape— are in many ways still as relevant now as they were over half a century ago. 

What courses are you currently teaching or looking forward to teaching soon? What's special about them? 

In fall ‘25, I taught AMES 3458 - Japanese Animation and in spring ‘26 I will be teaching AMES 3437-The Japanese Novel and AMES 5420 - Japan's Television Culture(s), a brand-new upper-level topics course I just finished designing this past summer. Each of my courses is modeled around an interdisciplinary approach combining social and cultural history, critical theory/media studies, and formal analysis of literature, film, and media. The goal is to offer students a comprehensive understanding of how transformations in media production not only exerted a profound effect on intellectual discourse, but also affectively-charged sensibilities of culture, place, and time.  

Additionally, a key part of my approach to pedagogy is to empower my students to become media practitioners by providing them with opportunities to develop hands-on experience working with audio and video production tools. In Japanese Animation, for example, in the latter half of the course where we examine the historical impact of fan culture and the adaptation of anime aesthetics globally in the late 20th century, my students design a creative research project which foregrounds their experience as “fan-producers” of anime’s global popular culture. When students take my courses, they not only learn about how these media works and genres historically take shape, they also have the opportunity to participate in shaping the broader media landscape themselves. 

What projects are you working on right now?

My primary focus at the moment is my first book project, tentatively titled Grasping for the Periphery: Ethnographic Imaginaries of Place and Media Production in Post-High Growth Japan. This research project explores shifting media practices surrounding historical and geographical “peripheries” in and around Japan at the end of the period of high economic growth in the transitional period of the late 1960s and ‘70s. By tracing the rise of ethnographic and structuralist thought across a wide range of media formats including literature, television, manga, film, and national cultural institutions, the book understands the 1970s as a critical moment of epistemic reorganization, the legacy of which continues to shape media imaginaries of Japan today.

This past year I was fortunate enough to be included in an archival research project in Japan centered on internationally-renowned film director Itami Juzo’s work with Japan’s first independent television production company (Terebi Man Union) prior to the beginning of his film career. The edited volume documenting the findings of that project was published in Japanese at the end of last year. Some of these materials were essentially rediscovered from the time of their initial airing almost fifty years prior and their technical and aesthetic innovations arguably shaped the documentary genre in Japan from that point on. I plan to incorporate these archival research findings into my second book project, a media-centered “biography” of filmmaker Itami Juzo and his network of collaborators. In the future, I also hope to bring some of the directors and filmmakers I have met during my fieldwork to UMN so that their work can be shared with the community.

In addition to working on the book manuscript, I have two articles I am currently preparing for submission. The first is about the concept of historical contingency in television documentaries produced in Japan in the mid-1970s, a period in which genres like the docudrama and the financial thriller were being developed in Japan. The second article addresses the relationship of isekai or “other world” anime to streaming platforms like Netflix and Crunchyroll. 

This story was edited by Avery Vrieze, an undergraduate student in CLA.