Japanese Affairs |
Spring 2016
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Course Information
Japanese Affairs
MLO 2: Culture MLO 5: Cultural Internalization & Language Immersion Course Description
This course discusses Japanese cultural elements through the introduction of various animated works. This course is taught in English.
Course Work
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Reflective Narrative
In this class, we learned about a different anime each meeting. Each time, the professor would begin the class with an introduction of the anime itself, including the setting, characters, and relationships. Many of the anime I had already seen before (mainly the Studio Ghibli films), but there were quite a few I'd heard of but never seen. The more analytical portion of this class was when the professor would point out significant themes present in the anime and relate it back to Japanese culture. Sometimes there were additional elaborations, such as a short lesson on the history of witchcraft in Europe when we learned about Madoka Magica.
These themes were brought together in the three major assignments throughout the semester: the midterm essay, the final essay, and the group "anime" we created. I felt that this course was very different from any anime-related course taught in the United States. For one, this class was mostly comprised of Japanese students studying English (aside from myself and another American student, there were a few other Taiwanese exchange students in the class as well). Furthermore, there weren't many people who were actually super interested in anime; rather, most of the class had experience with anime, but it was more similar to how American university students have experience with morning cartoons from when they were kids—the experience is there, but it's not a passionate part of their lives. Another thing that really surprised me in this class was that the students were really inexperienced when it came time to make our own "anime" and couldn't decide on a story or characters. To me, it felt like they didn't know how to be creative or have forgotten how to make-up stories (or perhaps it was just my group). I know that we do similar projects in Japanese here at CSUMB, but I wonder if American students have similar roadblocks when being creative. |