2- Panel 1
Japanese Language Education and History
N. Ota: Narrative-based advanced and post-advanced Japanese language courses
Since the advent of IT, language programs have gone through various changes; now due to the pandemic, languages are taught online using videoconferencing. Online teaching and learning is expected to be the new normal, even after the pandemic subsides. Besides technological considerations, language professionals must develop a new framework, new content, and new approach in order to establish meaningful and developmental language programs in university education. In this presentation an attempt is made to revamp the advanced and post-advanced Japanese courses with purported narratives. Introducing narratives into the curricula will enhance the opportunity to place language programs at the next level with new content and intent. With various narratives the language program will be given a new portal to further development of language program, as an established university discipline for university education.
M. Long-Nozawa:
Japanese Canadian curriculum scholar Ted T. Aoki conceptualized a pedagogical space called in-between (Aoki, 2004), where lived experiences of students and planned curriculum intersect. Aoki’s depiction of the pedagogical space has directed my attention to the diversity of my classrooms with Japanese language learners and multiple identities of each student.
It is a widespread notion that language and culture are deeply intertwined. While fully acknowledging the importance of studying about and with culture in language classrooms, I have questioned whether my Japanese culture and language teaching methods were one-directional, primarily framed by the perspectives of Japanese people and customs.
The idea of translanguaging provides a possible direction for my line of questioning. The fundamental premise of translanguaging is that people refer to their whole linguistic and cultural repertoire while communicating. Translanguaging practices, according to translanguaging scholars, emerge “in the cracks and crevices of communication with others who language differently, gradually becoming in and of itself a way of languaging through complex communicative interactions” (Ibid., p. 16).
Selecting certain linguistic features from one’s repertoire has much to do with one’s identity. While students are translanguaging in language classrooms, teachers help them construct identities using the target language at the same time with the reconciliation with the norms of the target language community.
In my presentation, I argue that the ideas of in-between and translanguaging would help Japanese language teachers reframe our teaching methods as the diversity of Japanese language classrooms increases.
Akiko Sharpe: Virtual Group Study Program on Zoom – Challenges of designing and implementing the program
At the University of Calgary (UofC), we have been offering a four-week length group travel and study program in Japan. In 2021 we could not travel; therefore, we converted the program to a virtual format. In this presentation, the new opportunities, and challenges of designing and implementing the Virtual Group Study Program in Japan will be discussed.
The original Group Study Program has been offered since 2005, except 2011 due to the Tohoku Earthquake and 2019 and 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In this original program, students participated in the Japanese language course offered by Senshu University in the morning and executed their group and individual research or travel to various places in the afternoon and weekends. Participants stay in the dormitory with Senshu students and spend one weekend with Japanese host family. The program format was well received by students at the UofC, there has been twenty participants since started the program.
The Virtual Group Study Program in Japan was successfully completed on May 21, 2021. For the 2021 Virtual Group Study Program, there were fifteen participants from the UofC from various disciplines, two students joined from China and Hong Kong. More than thirty participants from Seisen Jogakuin College in Nagano were joined in the total of seven virtual conferences and sessions. Seisen students were recruited by the International Office of Seisen and their majors were Psychology or International Communications. The three-week intensive program was challenging but became an unforgettable memory in many of our hearts.
Jacob Kovalio: Abe Shinzō: Transformational Leader in 21st Century Indo-Pacific and Global International Relations.”
The title above is the Home page of my https://freeandopenindopacific.net . It went online on September 10, 2021, one year after the end of the second Abe administration – the longest in Japan’s history. The continuing impact of Abe Shinzō’s ideas on Japanese foreign and security policy as well as on regional and global security and international relations is unmistakable: from the Quad [Japan, the US, Australia, India] Plus (Britain, France, Germany, Canada?) and FOIP to the just announced AUKUS alliance, etc.,- all defensive in nature and aimed at coping with the relentlessly aggressive (not assertive) global Chinese foreign and security policy. Those ideas are anchored in a concise yet visionary strategic and political manifesto titled Asia’s Democratic Security Diamond [ADSD] Abe published in English on December 27, 2012, one day after his unprecedented return to power.
I suggest that we have a broad discussion on as many aspects as possible of the evolving political and strategic situation in the Indo-Pacific (Abe’s semantic initiative ) and beyond (including what I see as the rapidly emerging BIMPAT [Beijing/Islamabad/Moscow/Pyongyang/Ankara/Tehran] totalitarian axis vs. the democracies’ Quad Plus) and of course, the global scourge of the New Coronavirus. The pandemic hit Japan – like most other nations- very hard and in many ways: about 17.200 dead at this writing and monumental financial losses including the US$13 Billion linked to the devastating emasculation of the 2020/21 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. Abe Shinzō had been instrumental in bringing the Games to his nation – as a means of enhancing Japan’s international stature (which he achieved handily in the realm of international security). He donned the red hat of Nintendo’s video-game plumber/hero Super Mario – one of many symbols of Japan’s global cultural power – in 2016, at the passing of the flags ceremony from Rio to Tokyo. He invited the world to Japan’s second Olympics/Paralympics and as many as 40 million tourists had been expected. But it was not to be. Instead, the Japanese leader like countless of his countrymen, decided not to attend the opening of the Tokyo Games in observance of the strict pandemic emergency quarantine regulations in the Tokyo area. The plague even contributed to the collapse of the Suga administration after less than a year.