Book review: Teaching Japanese Popular Culture

In 2012, Deborah Shamoon, Chris McMorran and Kam Thiam Huat organized a ‘Teaching Japanese Popular Culture’ conference at the National University of Singapore. This book is a printed outcome of that event and an interdisciplinary approach to Japanese popular culture (Jpc) as a field of study.

The first and foremost important information readers should be aware of is that this is not a book specifically focusing on animation, or Japanese animation for that matter; rather, it is a general collection devoted to several aspects of Jpc. Teaching Japanese Popular Culture is organized in three parts: ‘The Big Picture: On Curriculum Design’, ‘In the Media Studies Classroom: Teaching about Popular Culture’ and ‘Using Popular Culture in Teaching’. The Editors’ Introduction provides a definition of Jpc and the conclusion, by McMorran, is a discussion of the future of teaching Jpc online. In this way, the approaches to Japanese animation in the book mainly relate to teaching Jpc and not necessarily to expanding scholarship on specific aspects of anime’s history, aesthetics, or techniques.

The goal of Teaching Japanese Popular Culture is certainly not to illustrate the entire universe of Jpc. The chapters deal ‘only’ with film, fashion, TV drama, visual arts and design, while also giving space to manga and anime. This wide range of topics, though, means that some areas are not addressed comprehensively. There is actually space, in specific chapters, for mainstream forms of Jpc, but the higher attention paid in the book to subcultural forms of Jpc is evident. The book, moreover, gives the reader the feeling that the only recipients of Jpc are young people, but we know this is not the case.

Despite these limitations, Teaching Japanese Popular Culture has much to offer, especially to those interested in animation. The book’s wide perspectives on Jpc can be easily and effectively applied to anime in terms of framing, researching and teaching it. In particular, the chapters by Akiko Sugawa-Shimada, Cosima Wagner and Phil Seaton are a precious lifeline not only on how to frame and teach basic notions of Japanese animation to undergraduate students, but also in that they comment on the common (and at times, biased) ways in which anime as a cultural form is perceived among Japanese and international students.

Wagner’s chapter is titled ‘Teaching Popular Culture through Research-Oriented Learning at a German University’. The initiative at Goethe University in Frankfurt (2007–2013) which Wagner recounts included lectures by guest scholars, saw the active participation of teachers and students, and consisted of many classic and less conventional activities, informed by a critical and interactive teaching method. The initiative culminated in a student trip to Japan in 2010. The story told in this chapter shows how crucial it is, for a deeper understanding of Japanese pop culture (and, within it, of animation and its artistic, media-related, and technical features), to go to the sources of a cultural phenomenon and, if possible, analyse it from within and with the help of people in the industry.

Sugawa-Shimada’s essay, ‘Contested Classrooms: Reconstructions of “Japaneseness” through Anime’, is a beautiful piece about a Japanese professor teaching Jpc in a Japanese university to Japanese and non-Japanese students. The author explains her experience of a daily reality of Japanese Studies departments around the world: the main motivation of many students who pick courses on/with Jpc is their previous and current engagement with specific forms such as manga, anime, or subcultural trends linked to Japan’s youth cultures at large. From a relative familiarity with Jpc, a diversified range of ideas about ‘Japan’ and ‘Japaneseness’ forms in the minds of young students, and these ideas largely vary among Japanese and non-Japanese students. Here Sugawa-Shimada illustrates how notions of what is supposed to be ‘Japanese’ in Jpc – and, more cogently here, in anime – may be in mutual contrast not only between Japanese and foreign students but also within the subgroups of Japanese students and non-Japanese students. The experience of teaching to multinational student groups, however, is to be assessed (as Sugawa-Shimada does) positively, in that it constitutes a rough portrait of the variability of anime’s impact on ideas about Japanese culture and society, and can constitute a solid base upon which to conduct educational discourses on stereotypes, prejudices and misconceptions.

In ‘Pop(ular) Culture in the Japanese History Classroom’, Seaton takes the significant position that artifacts pertaining to popular and pop culture may bear a value as objects of historical analysis which can tell us much about the era and the people from which such items come. Seaton does not limit the materials of his classes to Japanese artifacts, historical pictures and comics dealing with historical topics, but also includes cultural products made abroad and representing, in various ways, ‘Japan’. This framework is of utmost interest for anime scholars: anime works, more often than not, are important documents for conducting analyses of what Japanese anime-makers decide (willingly or not) to represent about Japanese culture and society, and of what Japanese and non-Japanese audiences may understand or misunderstand about such representational and symbolic images deployed in the visual and narrative features of anime.

Unfortunately, at the end of Teaching Japanese Popular Culture, it appears that the contributors are speaking only to an audience of Anglophone scholars. The references oscillate between sources in Japanese and English, neglecting those in other languages (or even those originally in other idioms but available in English). The only exception is Wagner’s chapter, which presents two sources in German, because of the author’s nationality. This book’s linguistic ‘monism’, as that of a relative majority of the volumes composed by English native speakers, entails what appears to be a limiting cultural localism, which, in the context of Area Studies, is only mitigated by the presence of sources in the studied area’s idiom – in our case, Japanese.

The collection does offer a rich set of didactic frameworks and practical experiences that could be followed, adopted and reproduced by other teachers who organize courses related to aspects of Jpc. Moreover, and specifically in relation to Japanese animation, a core feature of the book is that it deals with three possible ways of managing Jpc (or any other topic) in the classroom: the ‘on’, the ‘with’, and the ‘about’. These three prepositions should be the filters to use when studying and teaching animation and, in particular here, Japanese animation: the ‘on’ mainly refers to approaching animation and animators’ works for studying them as such, as an art form and as artists, respectively; the ‘with’ mainly refers to how to use animation as a (technical, historical, expressive) tool for particular didactic goals in any discipline, which may well go beyond a specific interest for animation; the ‘about’ mainly refers to how to include animation in broader cultural discourses under an historical or philosophical framework, or in wider studies of media theories and film studies. The magnitude and width of this artistic and entertainment form, in sum, allow for endless materials and didactic paths to pursue with students through a variety of societal, cultural, aesthetic, historical and political issues related not only and ‘simply’ to Japan but to other regions.

As a last remark, Teaching Japanese Popular Culture, though not purporting to be a study on animation, can constitute an interesting, alternative tool or source of reflection for students, scholars, practitioners and teachers of (Japanese) animation. Moreover, this book proves useful in the context of the literature on didactics of animation, and it could be seen as a continuation and specification of previous contributions along this line, such as Paul Ward’s ‘Animation studies as an interdisciplinary teaching field’ (2013), or my Conoscere l’animazione (Pellitteri, 2004), a guide for teachers and educators on how to use animated cinema with kids, or Melissa Kolk’s technical–pedagogical Teaching with Clay Animation (2006).