Draw and Tell

1990

The conversational narratives of 17 Japanese children aged 5 to 9 were analyzed using stanza analysis. Three distinctive features emerged: (1) the narratives are exceptionally succinct; (2) they are usually free-standing collections of three expariences; and (3) stanzas almost always consist of three lines. These features reflect the basic characteristics of "haiku," a commonly-practiced literary form that often combines poetry and narrative, and an ancient game called "karuta," which also displays three lines of written discourse. These literacy games explain both the extraordinary regularity of lines per stanza and the smooth acquisition of reading by a culture that practices restricted, ambiguous, oral-style discourse. The narratives can be understood in the larger context of flomoiyari" (empathy) training of Japanese children. This empathy training may explain the production, comprehension, and appreciation of ambiguous discourse in Japanese society. An 84-item bibliography is included, and narrative samples and discourse analysis results are appended.

2018

This study investigated culturally authentic representations and perspectives on historical events and political issues presented in children’s picture books on Japanese culture. Our analysis of the representation of Japanese culture in the texts and illustrations was based on a sample of 37 children’s picture books written in English or English/Japanese and published in the United States between 1990 and 2016 for ages 3–8. The majority of the sampled books were found to portray a visible and concrete level of Japanese culture, including clothes, food, holidays, festivals, and traditional activities, some of which had outdated and inaccurate descriptions and illustrations. Social customs and behaviors described in the children’s books reflected traditional Japanese values and beliefs well, including respect, harmony, and wabi sabi. Books dealing with the crossing of different cultures showed conflicts, confusion, or identity issues in young Japanese protagonists who were often immig...

RES, 2008

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Dear Educator, Japan has a rich literary heritage that offers readers a doorway into Japanese history and culture. For high school readers Japanese literature can bring alive the historical characters they may meet in social studies class. Japan also offers a fascinating comparison to the literature of western or other Asian countries. Japanese literature has always been closely related to the visual arts and offers countless subjects that can be transformed into a variety of art forms.

Japanese Language and Literature, 2021

This paper examines three manga adaptations of The Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi, early 11th c.) published in the past thirty years to show how popular culture challenges Japanese school education and its approaches to teaching classical literature. It argues that manga rewritings of the Heian-period text aim to increase modern interest in this ancient work and help to rectify misconceptions of it generated by national literature (kokubungaku) scholarship and traditional methods of teaching classical literature in Japan. Prioritizing the content instead of its formal features, these rewritings offer a new approach to the eleventh-century work by presenting the material in an engaging and relevant way that resonates with modern readers.

This paper questions the relation between narrative and symbolic violence in a Japanese context. It stresses the importance of children’s literature for socialization into a specific socio-cultural reality and it especially focuses on the role played by folktales and picture books with their representations of narrative violence. By assuming a structural perspective on the sociology of childhood, the present work engages the concept of symbolic violence and its mechanisms to stress the structures of domination present in children’s literature. Particularly, the analysis of eight renditions into picture books of a Japanese folktale shows this relationship through a causal-tracing process approach to a case study employing multimodal discourse analysis in its data generation and discussion. The data examined how the faulty normalization of symbolic violence in twenty-first century realizations in picture books of Kachi Kachi Yama reveals a shifting idea of children and childhood in Japan.

Journal of Japanese Studies, 1992

This article is a review of the book The Japanese psychemajor motifs in the fairy tales of Japan, written by Hayao Kawai. After a brief contextualization about the author and his work, which aimed to transform analytical psychology in a body of thought and practice that could grasp the Japanese mind, there is a critical analysis of the Kawai's work and his theoretical formulation.

David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie–Laure Ryan, eds, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (London, New York: Routledge, 2005), 2005

KÉPZÉS ÉS GYAKORLAT • 2017. 15. ÉVFOLYAM 1−2. SZÁM., 2017

In the field of art education, it is imperative to use new and innovative methods to study visual culture, and to adopt multicultural and intercultural approaches to interpret art in different cultures. It is interesting to study the way in which the intertextual method (the interrelationship between texts, whether written, oral, past or present; the implicit or explicit connection between a set of texts forming a context which conditions the understanding and development of the discourse) can be employed to interpret art from a western or eastern perspective. The kamishibai art form should be integrated into preschool and elementary school curricula to promote reading. This proposal goes beyond simply understanding a text with images. The focus is on how a text can be performed theatrically and involve the participation and interaction of children as protagonists in the process. We start by introducing the concept of kamishibai, including its origins and different stages of evolution throughout history until the present day. Then, we discuss the potential new roles that contemporary kamishibai could assume in the educational context. Finally, we present an educational proposal to promote its use in early childhood education. We consider that the development of artistic interpretation, the potential value of a text when performed theatrically facilitates the introduction of multiculturalism to children.