Aleia Ando MLO 2: Culture

Spring 2013

2.1 During my time at CSUMB, I have taken Japanese courses with a strong emphasis on culture that meet the MLO 2 requirement of CSUMBs Japanese Language and Culture major. By taking these courses, I learned many things about the Japanese culture. Through the class JAPN 215 (Cool Japan Today) I learned an extensive amount about pop Japanese culture and how many aspects of it developed. In that class we study both traditional and modern forms of Japanese art. Then we connected the ideals. For example, we learned in class that to popular art form manga, derived from the traditional art form of wood-block prints, also known as ukiyoe. In this class we wrote various essays and gave presentations on different forms of Japanese culture such as traditions. I gave a presentation concerning Japanese New Years customs. This helped develop my knowledge of Japanese culture by giving me a better understanding of why Japanese people go to temples and eat certain foods during the New Years holiday. Through the courses JAPN 305 (Intro to Japanese Culture and Civilization) and 310 (Japanese Cinema), we explored Japanese history through weekly readings, movies and weekly feedback sheets. We were also required to write final papers pertaining to Japanese culture that we studied throughout the course.

2.2 JAPN 311 (Social Issues in Japan) allowed me to learn about social issues in Japan which are then used to understand certain aspects of Japanese life as well as compare them to American issues and lifestyles. In this class we are also required to complete weekly readings and submit feedback sheets. Sometimes we also watch movies are and discussed how these movies reflected the social issues we went over in class. One movie in particular called, Nobody Knows, particularly stood out to me. It illustrated the issue of young Japanese mothers neglecting their young children. In class we had discussed case in which a Japanese mother had left her children alone in their apartment for so long that the children had died long before anybody realized they were dead. The only reason the neighbors from them was because the stench of their decaying corpses filtered into the hallway. Aside from the weekly reflections readings we also had a number of class discussions in which the whole class participated and gave insight to the topics. While in Japan I took a class on Japanese martial arts. In this class we listen to lectures and watched videos on different forms of Japanese traditional martial arts such as kendo, aikido, judo and many more. To culminate this class we had half a semesters worth of practical lessons in which we learned basic kendo. The final for this class was a practical in which we were required to

perform a basic kendo routine in front of our professor as well as the rest of our class. This gave us not only the academic understanding but also a physical understanding of Japanese martial arts. The