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ようこそ ATJOへ!
by Joseph Willis, Fall 2021
From when I was a Japanese student myself to my firsthand experiences as a Japanese language teacher, one thing has not changed: most Japanese language students are interested in Japanese pop culture, specifically the entertaining stories, settings, and characters in video games, manga, anime. Many students also have an art hobby so they can draw their favorite characters or write their own manga. For more on this topic, see the sources at the end of this article.
This corner, however, is dedicated to covering popular topics from Japanese culture and literature so that you, the Japanese Teacher, know what your students are talking about and how you can plug their interests into your lessons to charge student engagement while bringing cultural learning into your classroom.
Demon Slayer (鬼滅の刃)
Demon Slayer (鬼滅の刃)
Demon Slayer (Kimetsu no Yaiba) is a manga by Koyoharu Gotouge which birthed an anime series and a movie that, according to Reuters, was not only the highest grossing movie in Japan but the highest grossing anime in the world as of May 2021. There are many Japanese culture topics we can draw from it.
Taishō
The story is set in the Taisho period (1912-1926). Kimono, Western clothes, traditional Japanese and Western architecture, trains, and cars can all be seen in this series, especially in the characters' visit to Asakusa in episode 7.
Your students may be mostly familiar with imagery from the Sengoku and Edo periods, so this is an opportunity to broaden their mental images of Japanese history.
Click here for a video comparison of the anime with historical photos.
Oni
Like in many traditional stories, most of the oni in Demon Slayer eat humans (as in the tales of Shuten Dōji and Momotarō) and were once human themselves before being transformed by some past tragedy (similar to the tales of Lady Rokujō and Kiyohime). For more on different oni in Japanese folklore, see Noriko T. Reider, Japanese Demon Lore.
For videos on the cultural tie-ins found in Demon Slayer’s oni, Gaijin Goombah’s Youtube videos on the topic are both entertaining and informative:
Demon Slayer’s oni are otherwise more varied than the stereotypical oni, and some seem more like general yōkai – also spelled "youkai" (妖怪). In fact, the term "oni" (鬼) historically could refer to a wide range of baleful things before the term "yōkai" during the Meiji period solidified as the general term for the strange, unexplained, and mysterious. Two videos that could introduce your class to the rich, folkloric world of yōkai are:
(1) Beyond Ghibli’s “A Yōkai by Any Other Name”
Yōkai and their cameos in English-language media are covered until 5:22; the rest of the video is about A Letter to Momo, an anime movie reminiscent of My Neighbor Totoro featuring yōkai.
(2) Gaijin Goombah’s playlist of videos on yōkai appearing in popular media – the first video introduces the concept of yōkai and its history in Japan.
Yōkai feature prominently in the Hiroshima legend of Ino Mononoke Roku here (English captions available):
Part 1: https://youtu.be/nuYp4HmfhHw
Part 2: https://youtu.be/oN3f0Pd-8Rg
Part 3: https://youtu.be/bu_mM_RueW4
(A good phrase to learn from this story might be「平太郎は平気です」as it is repeated after each yōkai fails to perturb the main character.)
https://yokai.com is a good source for learning more about traditional yōkai. For yōkai class activities, click the yellow button below.
Hanafuda earrings
Some oni have a motif referencing a traditional Japanese object, such as the ball-throwing Susamaru’s temari and Kyōgai the drummer’s tsuzumi. The main human character in Demon Slayer, Kamado Tanjirō, wears earrings themed after hanafuda. Students might be interested to know Nintendo, founded in 1889, got its start printing hanafuda cards. Hanafuda plays a bigger role in the anime movie Summer Wars, where the conflict hinges upon a climactic match of Koi Koi. Koi Koi is fairly simple to learn in a few matches. One can buy hanafuda decks at Asian bookstores like Kinokuniya (still printed by Nintendo!), which come with English instructions and a scoring reference sheet.
Japanese Masks
Many demon slayers in this anime wear traditional Japanese masks: the main character’s mentor Urokodaki Sakonji wears a long nosed tengu mask, while the mask of Hotaru the smith is the comedic charcoal fire blower Hyottoko, and still others appear wearing white fox and cat masks. Students may enjoy making their own versions of these masks, even out of paper plates, and acting out their own skits in Japanese. Other traditional mask designs – and their explanations – may be found here.
Additionally, the magician Taijyu Fujiyama uses many Japanese masks in his shapeshifting performance on Penn & Teller's Fool Us.
Explore Further
Bringing up references in Japanese media during class invites students to ask their own questions about things they keep seeing. We teachers might not know all the answers, but it is a good opportunity to show we too are human and explore something together.
For Those Who Go Further
The first season of the Demon Slayer anime is currently officially watchable for free on Funimation. It is also available on disc and other streaming platforms.
The manga is published in Japan by Shūeisha in Weekly Shōnen Jump and in the US by Viz Media.
On popular media motivating formal Japanese study
Armour, William Spencer. (2011). “Learning Japanese by Reading ‘manga’: The rise of ‘Soft Power Pedagogy’”. RELC Journal, 42(5) p.125-140.
Armour, William S. & Iida, Sumiko. (2016). “Are Australian fans of anime and manga motivated to learn Japanese language?”. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 36(1), p.31-47, DOI: 10.1080/02188791.2014.922459
https://doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2014.922459
Han, Chan Yee & Ling, Wong Ngan. (2017). “The Use of Anime in Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language”. Malaysian Online Journal of Educational Technology 5(2), p.68-78.
Chan, Yee-Han, and Wong, Ngan-Ling. (2017). “Learning Japanese Through Anime”. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 8(3), p.485-495. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.0803.06
Fukunaga, N. (2006). “Those anime students: Foreign language literacy development through Japanese popular culture”. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 50(3), p.206-222.
Williams, K. L. (2006). The impact of popular culture fandom on perceptions of Japanese language and culture learning: The case of student anime fans. Austin, TX: University of Texas Libraries.
On movie ticket sales
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