Learning Japanese by Reading ‘manga’: The Rise of ‘Soft Power Pedagogy’

Multimodal examples of Japanese language input (such as ‘manga’ and anime) have now become the default choice for curriculum designers, material developers, and classroom teachers to make learning ‘fun’. More traditional written only text-based materials are now in direct competition with such materials. While there has been a comfortable relationship in additional language (L2) teaching between using text and image, for example, pictures, fuzzy felt boards, and now much more sophisticated technology (e.g. Rosetta Stone™) to explicitly teach the lexico-grammar, the proliferation of ‘manga’ in Japanese language textbooks and as stand alone course materials, for example, has largely been left unproblematized.

In this paper I explore three issues to using material examples of Japanese popular culture in the Japanese language classroom and beyond. First, I focus on ‘manga’ as a case study and relate it to a course that I have been teaching for the last five years using ‘manga’ as artefact. Second, I explore how using ‘manga’ and other J-pop artefacts can impact on how the notions of legitimacy and appropriateness are linked to constructions of learner and teacher identities. Third, I will introduce the concept of what I’ll call ‘soft power pedagogy’ as a way of theorizing the use and potential abuse of ‘manga’, anime and other examples of Japanese popular culture in and out of the classroom.