JAPN 308-01 Japanese Pop-Culture
This course explores post WWII Japanese music, literature, artistic media, and hi-tech products. Investigates social themes ranging from post-holocaust Japanese hedonism to childhood fantasies by looking at Manga comic books, Anime animated movies, and popular music from Enka to J-Pop to Karaoke, as well as fashion and style, popular technology, consumerism, and environmental issues. Explores the evolution of pop culture and its impact on society. Taught in English. (Credit/No Credit Available)
Units: 4
Reflective Narrative
This course meets MLO 3: Secondary cultural knowledge. Contributes the fulfillment of the third MLO by helping me study a different culture other than hispanic or American culture; in this case Japanese pop culture. In this course we studied in depth the Japanese popular culture and analysed how is it different from Japanese high culture. Through mostly class lecture, videos, and movies; we explored a fascinating new world of peculiar traditions and customs. In class discussions we collaborated with Japanese exchange students to exchange beliefs, thoughts, ideas, values and attitudes. In this class I was assigned weekly readings about articles and chapters of the book. I took weekly quizzes as well, this quizzes were based on the book and online articles. I took an in class midterm based on the learning of the first half of the class about Japanese pop culture terms such as kawii, shinto, mascots, etc. For the final, i was required to write a twelve page paper and an eight minute presentation about a pop culture topic. My topic was the comparison between Japanese anime, manga, mascots and their American equivalent. We did several group presentation. Most of the time the professor placed us in small groups of three or four to analyse a different topic every day. In this groups, I was able to openly express my ideas and thoughts on the lecture. All this completed work demonstrates my development on this MLO. I gained a lot of significant knowledge about Japan and its popular culture to fulfill the requirements of this MLO. For example: I learned about an amazing Japanese technological city called Akihabara, it is the otaku center of the world. Not only did I learn about cities and technology but also about food and mascots, bento boxes was my favorite as well as domo mascot. I expect to develop further in the Japanese language, I feel that most of the material that I struggled with in this class was because of language. I intend to further explore this experience by socializing more with Japanese foreign exchange students to learn more about their culture.
work sample 1: japanese_presentation.pdf | |
File Size: | 1038 kb |
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work sample 2: japanese_308_final_paper.pdf | |
File Size: | 74 kb |
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