A View From Japan (2011)
Yujin Yaguchi, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Department of Area Studies, The University of Tokyo
I used the “Request for a Good Relationship” scroll, available on the “Perry in Japan” website as part of an English-language class for first-year students at the University of Tokyo. The overall theme of this class, assigned by the university, was “academic writing.” That is, the students were expected to learn how to write an academically-oriented paper.
As this was a class that was a part of the required curriculum for all the first-year students, the academic interest of the students varied, from science to engineering to economics to law, but none had much knowledge of, or interest in, art history or Japanese history. The common thread was that they were in my class, some willingly and others not so, to learn English.
I challenged them to go beyond the idea that English was simply a technique they had to learn and urged them to think through English. The Perry Scroll turned out to be a brilliant resource for this. I encouraged them to take a look at the scroll carefully and pay attention to the details of each image and go to the library to investigate relevant materials. I made them work in groups and asked each group to come up with an image and a theme. They were told to brainstorm, exchange ideas, and later critique each other’s writing. Because the students had no art history background, it was difficult to get any discussion going initially but once they learned to see many idiosyncrasies and discrepancies as well as charms of the images they became more vocal, sometimes disagreeing quite openly (which is rather rare among students in Japan). Based on these discussions, students wrote their essays and went through several drafts. My teaching assistant and I met them individually and helped them develop their ideas and translate them into logical and coherent English.
At the end of the class, the students gave presentations based on their essays, using powerpoints. They practiced their presentation style, from pronunciation to eye-contacts so that they could to emulate the kind of presentations seen in academic conferences.
Overall, the final performance of the students exceeded my expectation. Although relatively short and still underdeveloped in many respects, please remember that these are English essays written by non-(art)history students in a Japanese-speaking university. I attribute this success mostly to the material — the scroll. It effectively piqued the interest of the students and inspired them to be imaginative because they were able to discover, through their research and discussion, that the images themselves were a product of great imagination. The class, therefore, served as a site where students were able to explore the meaning of such important themes as history, art, and inter-cultural history in some depth through the use of a second language. In the end, I think these essays show that the fundamental aspect of language education in higher education is to provide the students with food for thought, rather than simply going over tedious grammatical technicalities.