Ioannis Gaitanidis and Gregory S. Poole, eds.
Teaching Japan: A Handbook
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024. Xxix + 303 pages. Hardcover, €198.00. ISBN 9789048568147.

With every new viral TikTok video showcasing a “hidden side of Japan” and every hot, new online influencer peddling a “secret Japanese art of doing x,” educators in Japanese studies and adjacent fields find their jobs increasingly difficult. On one hand, popular media outlets spark potential students’ interest in all things Japan, which helps fill classrooms. On the other hand, popular media more often than not misrepresents Japan through essentialist tropes and is often the root of students’ mistaken beliefs surrounding Japan, Japanese people, and Japanese culture. With this in mind, the editors attempt to do two things: identify the range of misconceived notions that students have upon arriving in our classrooms, and introduce progressive pedagogical approaches and current teaching practices that have proven to be effective at countering students’ misconceptions.

This leads to the book at hand: through a series of seventeen chapters submitted by twenty-two contributors representing universities and colleges within Japan and abroad (Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, and the United States), editors Ioannis Gaitanidis and Gregory Poole created a handbook in which educators share their approaches to combatting students’ unjustified beliefs surrounding concepts like “Japan” and “the Japanese.” In each chapter, the authors clearly identify which essentialist trope they are confronting, explain how that particular trope harms our understandings of Japan and its people, and, most importantly, the authors share classroom practices or pedagogical approaches that they have developed to help students successfully move past their misconceptions.

Of particular interest to Asian Ethnology readers is that the majority of classroom scenarios presented in the book are directly related to anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and related fields. Also, since this book is focused on practice and pedagogy, the lesson activities and pedagogical approaches suggested in the book are not confined to Japanese studies and are transferable across disciplines. Although the courses represented in the book range from introductory to upper-level university courses, this reviewer finds the ideas and suggestions presented in this book suitable for secondary education teachers as well.

The editors themselves acknowledge that this book is geared more toward the humanities and social sciences, which may leave some readers who “teach Japan” unrepresented. Some chapters, however, describe courses aimed at pre-med and engineering students (Frumer, chapter 3) and business students (Breaden and Ota, chapter 17).

The chapters are separated into four parts: “Critiquing by Reflection on Acquired Knowledge” (part 1), “Critiquing by Comparing (with Oneself and Others)” (part 2), “Critiquing by Creating” (part 3), and “Critiquing Through Curriculum Building” (part 4). Included in the chapters are ample photos, images displaying course-maps, and example lesson-plans that help the reader more clearly understand the suggestions offered by the contributors. Also helpful to readers, most of the chapters include ample, authentic examples of students’ course work and feedback to their instructors that demonstrate the outcomes of the contributors’ varied approaches.

Part 2 introduces pedagogical approaches such as scaffolding, experiential learning, critical literacy, and English Medium Instruction. Using these approaches, contributors suggest ways of engaging with Japan from beyond its conventional, spatial borders by having students go into their communities and explore representations of Japan in one’s own backyard. Chris McMorran provides an example of sending students in Singapore into the field (i.e., their own community) to practice “unbounded ethnography” (96) of Japan (chapter 6). In a somewhat reverse approach, Tomoko Tokunaga describes how we can bring the field to the students by giving a voice to members of the local community and inviting them into the classroom as guest speakers (chapter 9). Tapping into virtual worlds, Yuri Kumagai suggests using technology like Google Street View as a way of having students experience Japan’s spatial and multilinguistic landscapes (chapter 7). Back in the classroom, Nana Okura Gagné encourages students to challenge their beliefs about “work” and “gender roles” in Japan (chapter 8). Jennifer M. McGuire closes part 2 by describing the benefits of bringing key concepts that are not traditionally associated with Japanese studies (i.e., intersectionality, originally from America’s Black feminism movement) to challenge students’ beliefs of gender, class, and disability in Japan (chapter 10).

In part 3, readers find more active-learning suggestions that could be done just as easily in Japan as abroad. Tapping into students’ creativity, Neriko Musha Doerr recommends an activity for students to challenge their own beliefs about “Japanese homogeneity” and then to express what they have learned by making posters, which can then be used for campus engagement (chapter 11). Similar to McMorran’s suggestion in part 2, Christian Tagsold shares ways for students to observe for themselves first-hand how spaces like “Japanese gardens” (found in cities around the world) form the public’s beliefs about Japan and Japanese-ness (chapter 12). Satoko Shao-Kobayashi recommends tapping into students’ creativity by tackling representations of “race” through video projects, which can then be used to engage with the world beyond the classroom walls when shared online (chapter 13). Among these active learning approaches, one novel approach really stood out: Paula R. Curtis shares with readers an object-based learning activity in which the professor’s creative skills are challenged by recreating material culture (i.e., wooden mokkan tablets, popularly used in premodern times), which would otherwise be unavailable to students (chapter 14). In an increasingly digital age, stimulating students’ minds through tactile interactions like what Curtis suggests can make quite an impact on learners.

Part 4 wraps up the handbook. First is a chapter by Steven C. Fedorowicz, who shares his experience of what happens when an excellent, student-centered course is derailed by fickle administrators (chapter 15). Next, Alice Berthon, Alice Doublier, and Charlotte Lamott describe the issues surrounding a possible disconnect between the discipline of anthropology and the field of Japanese studies in France, which poses its own particular challenges to teaching Japan (chapter 16). Finally, Jeremy Breaden and Fusako Ota address a brass-tacks approach to preparing students for Japan-related careers outside academia, something that all educators need to be mindful of when preparing students for their futures (chapter 17).

One criticism this reviewer has is that the books’ chapters seemed to be forced into the book’s four parts. Readers are already likely to be well-versed in the misconceptions of “Japan” and Japanese society that students bring into the classroom with them. Therefore, the value to readers—many of whom may have little to no training in the field of education—is in the pedagogical approaches and classroom practices that the contributors share. I would have suggested grouping the chapters to reflect current educational practices like “planning and preparation,” “learning environments,” “learning experiences,” and “principled teaching” (Danielson, Furman, and Kappes 2024). Doing so would have brought the chapters together in a more pedagogy-focused way and would have better filled the gap between content knowledge and educational training that academics often have.

There are many excellent chapters, but space allows me to only mention two. First, since my own experience has been teaching Japanese literature and culture to engineering and earth science students who come from all over the world to do their studies in rural Japan, I would have appreciated to read more chapters like Frumer’s (chapter 3). Not only did she address the issue of teaching Japanese studies to students coming from outside the typical humanities and social science fields (i.e., to engineers and pre-med students), but her pedagogical approach was refreshing and reflected a positive attitude to teacher-student interactions, whereas I found some other authors to be a little too critical of their students’ conceptual baggage.

Second, the honesty and vulnerability of Fedorowicz’s chapter (chapter 15) is also to be commended. He describes how his own continued intellectual curiosity led him to design a visual anthropology course (somewhat outside of his expertise at the time) that would lead students to challenge essentialist beliefs generated by Japan’s own government. Fedorowicz takes readers through the steps he took to develop his own expertise, reflect on his teaching, and continually revise and improve the course. The course became wildly popular and successful but was then derailed by the powers that be—an incredibly frustrating admin versus faculty scenario that many of us who have worked in Japan have encountered.

Overall, I recommend this handbook to anyone who is preparing graduate students for careers as educators or planning faculty-development workshops across disciplines or to any veteran educator who needs to breathe new life into their courses. Since one could not possibly incorporate all the ideas and suggestions in it into one semester, it is the type of book to which one will surely return year after year when preparing syllabi.

Ben Grafstrom
University of Oslo