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This corner 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.
by Joseph Willis
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 bottom of the page. For popular topics covered, please see the articles below.
World-popular manga/anime series Demon Slayer (鬼滅の刃) offers a trove of fun material, from Taishō history, oni, and yōkai to traditional crafts like festival masks, hanafuda, temari, and tsuzumi. Activities await!
Kokeshi are wooden dolls that come in a variety of shapes and styles, inspiring Nintendo's Mii video game avatars. Included is an interactive and creative activity for students that may also appeal to Minecraft fans.
Teach beginning students how to count with a ghost story's spooky saucers, and why there are so many wailing women in white in the wells of Japan. Teachers, please display the slides in "presenter view" to see the story script and notes.
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.
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