More than fifteen years have passed since the Japanese Ministry of Education’s Global 30 project, which encouraged universities to accept more international students and was followed by a series of other projects that led to an increase in English-medium instruction (EMI) across faculties, newly-designed English-taught programs (ETP), and the concomitant hiring of many scholars with doctoral degrees from non-Japanese institutions. During this period, the term kokusai-nihongaku became a floating signifier for several types of Japanese studies curricula, offered as stand-alone study programs or embedded (implicitly or explicitly) in a variety of liberal arts and area studies degrees. This podcast aims to discuss several challenges that these conditions have raised in terms of what it means to teach Japanese studies in Japan, by bringing into conversation scholars who have experienced these pedagogical changes in distinct ways.

Representing three types of institutional contexts ― a public university where Japanese Studies is explicitly offered as a minor within a curriculum open to all undergraduate departments (EMI), a private university where Japanese studies courses are offered implicitly within a generalized Liberal Arts curriculum taught in English (ETP), and an American university where Japanese studies courses are embedded in a specialized Area Studies undergraduate curriculum (ETP) ― the scholars in this podcast discuss three types of challenges: 

1) how student audiences and class content have complicated the meaning of the multivocal word kokusai when employed as a qualifier for Japanese Studies, Liberal Arts, and many top-down strategies of internationalisation of higher education institutions in Japan.

2) how the reality of in-class translanguaging has put into question assumptions about the association of the Japanese language with Japanese Studies and of English with internationalisation.

3) how the varied backgrounds of faculty involved in Japanese Studies pedagogy have come to supersede the existence (and perhaps necessity) of “Japan-explainers.”

Podcast guests (in alphabetic order):

Ioannis Gaitanidis (moderator) (Chiba University)

Sachiko Horiguchi (Temple University, Japan Campus)

Gregory Poole (Doshisha University)

Satoko Shao-Kobayashi (Chiba University)

Suggestions for further reading:

Gaitanidis, Ioannis and Satoko Shao-Kobayashi. 2022. Polarized agents of internationalization: an autoethnography of migrant faculty at a Japanese University. Higher Education 83:19-33 (published in 2020).

ガイタニディス ヤニス、小林聡子、吉野文 編. 2020.『クリティカル日本学―協働学習を通して「日本」のステレオタイプを学びほぐす―』明石書店

Gaitanidis, Ioannis and Gregory Poole (eds.). 2024. Teaching Japan: A Handbook. MHM Limited and Amsterdam University Press.

Horiguchi, Sachiko, Yuki Imoto and Gregory S. Poole (eds.). 2015. Foreign Language Education in Japan: Exploring Qualitative Approaches. Brill.

Poole, Gregory. 2010. The Japanese Professor: An Ethnography of a University Faculty. Brill.

テーマ

「日本の大学における日本研究教育の課題と対応」

ゲスト

1．千葉大学大学院国際学術研究院総合国際学講座 ヤニス・ガイタニディス准教授 （主催者）

2．テンプル大学ジャパンキャンパス 堀口佐知子教授

3．同志社大学国際教育インスティテュート グレゴリー・プール教授

4．千葉大学国際教養学部 小林聡子准教授

内容

15年以上前に文科省が日本の大学の「国際化」を促進すべく「Global 30」という取り組みを始めたのです。その現状を踏まえ、今日の日本における日本研究教育の課題と対応についてパネリストが議論します。なかでも「国際」日本研究の「国際」という漠然とした概念、日本研究の教育現場におけるトランスランゲージングという現実、そしてこうした取り組みに携わる学者や教育者の世代交代の意義など、日本における日本研究教育が直面する最重要課題のいくつかについて意見を交わします。