Title: Ambassador Yōkai: Facilitating Non-Japanese Visitors in Learning Japanese Culture Through Japanese Folklore in Anime
Abstract: The popularity of Japanese animation (a.k.a anime) has grown exponentially outside Japan over the past few decades despite being made primarily for Japanese viewers. This growth has garnered an increased awareness and interest in Japanese culture among scholars on the topic, particularly on the medium’s history or impact on non-Japanese viewers, who would be drawn to visit Japan. Notably, Japanese anime feature yōkai, or supernatural beings, which were drawn from Japan’s rich folkloric heritage and adapted to reflect Japanese society’s changing thoughts and feelings. This author conducted a study to investigate if yōkai anime could make the implicit aspects of Japanese culture, such as worldview and beliefs, more accessible to non-Japanese viewers who were interested in visiting Japan. To do so, this study applied the phenomenological method alongside the Cultural Iceberg Analogy theoretical framework to analyze the responses of a focus group of non-Japanese audience to a yōkai anime clip. All focus group participants could connect the three different levels (Surface, Intermediate and Deep) of Japanese culture in the selected anime by connecting the anime’s yōkai-based visual cues with their pre-existing knowledge of Japanese culture. The study has also found that the participants further deepened their understanding of Deep Japanese cultural aspects through shared analysis and discourse on the anime, concluding that the consumption of anime adaptations of yōkai folktales fostered deeper understanding of Japanese culture amongst non-Japanese viewers.
Publication Year: 2020
Publication Date: 2020-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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