East Asian Languages and Cultures: Faculty Books

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  Passing and Posing in Colonial Manchuria in Murō Saisei's Koto of the Continent

  Kimberly Kono

  Book summary: Passing, Posing, Persuasion interrogates the intersections between cultural production, identity, and persuasive messaging that idealized inclusion and unity across Japan's East Asian empire (1895-1945). Japanese propagandists drew on a pan-Asian rhetoric that sought to persuade colonial subjects to identify with the empire while simultaneously maintaining the distinctions that subjugated them and marking their attempts to self-identify as Japanese as inauthentic, illegitimate forms of "passing" or "posing." Visions of inclusion encouraged assimilation but also threatened to disrupt the very logic of imperialism itself: If there was no immutable difference between Taiwanese and Japanese subjects, for example, then what justified the subordination of the former to the latter? The chapters emphasize the plurality and heterogeneity of empire, together with the contradictions and tensions of its ideologies of race, nation, and ethnicity. The paradoxes of passing, posing, and persuasion opened up unique opportunities for colonial contestation and negotiation in the arenas of cultural production, including theater, fiction, film, magazines, and other media of entertainment and propaganda consumed by audiences in mainland Japan and its colonies. From Meiji adaptations of Shakespeare and interwar mass media and colonial fiction to wartime propaganda films, competing narratives sought to shape how ambiguous identities were performed and read. All empires necessarily engender multiple kinds of border crossings and transgressions; in the case of Japan, the policing and blurring of boundaries often pivoted on the outer markers of ethno-national identification. This book showcases how actors--in multiple senses of the word--from all parts of the empire were able to move in and out of different performative identities, thus troubling its ontological boundaries

  Provided by publisher.

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  “Ekkyo bungaku” as Crossing the Border of Language: Implications for Learners of Japanese

  Yuri Kumagai

  This volume investigates the "global education effect"—the impact of global education initiatives on institutional and individual practices and perceptions—with a special focus on the dynamics of border construction, recognition, subversion, and erasure regarding "Japan". The Japanese government’s push for global education has taken shape mainly in the form of English-medium instruction programs and bringing in international students who sometimes serve as a foreign workforce to fill the declining labour force. Chapters in this volume draw from education, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and psychology to examine the ways in which demographic changes, economic concerns, race politics, and nationhood intersect with the efforts to "globalize" education and create specific "global education effects" in the Japanese archipelago.

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  Korean Grammar Essentials for Fluent Speaking

  Suk Massey

  This innovative Korean e-textbook series, Korean Grammar Essentials for Fluent Speaking has been upgraded/revised every semester according to students’ needs. These e-books feature variety of activities such as:

  • video recordings for writing the Korean alphabet
  • audio recordings of each letter of the Korean alphabet
  • listening and pronunciation practice activities
  • recordings of conversations with new expressions with links to Quizlet
  • focused grammar used in the conversations
  • short videos introducing the grammar points of each lesson
  • grammar practice exercises
  • speaking practice activities with practice examples

  In addition to these activities, the e-books contain other useful resources such as:

  • translations of all conversations and essays in English
  • theme-based vocabulary lists (approx. 250-300 words) for each level
  • homework assignments for each lesson
  • answer keys to the grammar exercises
  • links to Quizlet with new vocabulary and key sentences for dictation
  • links to online resources such as a Korean dictionary
  • a Korean alphabet video - resources on Korean culture

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  Learning Japanese/Japan in a Year Abroad in Kyoto: Discourse of Study Abroad, Emotions, and Construction of Self

  Yuri Kumagai

  What draws people to study abroad or volunteer in far-off communities? Often the answer is romance – the romance of landscapes, people, languages, the very sense of border-crossing – and longing for liberation, attraction to the unknown, yearning to make a difference. This volume explores the complicated and often fraught desires to study and volunteer abroad. In doing so, the book sheds light on how affect is managed by educators and mobilized by students and volunteers themselves, and how these structures of feeling relate to broader social and economic forces.

  Source: Publisher

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  Multiliteracies in World Language Education

  Yuri Kumagai, Ana López-Sánchez, and Suzhuan Wu

  Putting a multiliteracies framework at the center of the world language curriculum, this volume brings together college-level curricular innovations and classroom projects that address differences in meaning and worldviews expressed in learners' primary and target languages. Offering a rich understanding of languages, genres, and modalities as socioculturally situated semiotic systems, it advocates an effective pedagogy for developing learners' abilities to operate between languages. Chapters showcase curricula that draw on a multiliteracies framework and present various classroom projects that develop aspects of multiliteracies for language learners.

  A discussion of the theoretical background and historical development of the pedagogy of multiliteracies and its relevance to the field of world language education positions this book within the broader literature on foreign language education. As developments in globalization, accountability, and austerity challenge contemporary academia and the current structure of world language programs, this book shows how the implementation of a multiliteracies-based approach brings coherence to language programs, and how the framework can help to accomplish the goals of higher education in general and of language education in particular.

  Source: Publisher

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  The Routledge Intermediate to Advanced Japanese Reader: A Genre-Based Approach to Reading as A Social Practice

  Noriko Iwasaki and Yuri Kumagai

  The Routledge Intermediate to Advanced Japanese Reader: A Genre-Based Approach to Reading as a Social Practice is designed for intermediate to advanced learners of Japanese and presents twenty-five authentic texts taken from a wide range of media and literary sources, which promote a deeper understanding of Japan among readers. The book is divided into ten genre-based chapters, allowing the learner to focus on the textual features relevant to that genre.

  Key features include:

  Selected texts covering topics related to Japanese language, society and culture encountered in the Japanese media, from news reports to interviews, book reviews, short stories and editorials. Word lists for challenging vocabulary and kanji provided throughout to aid comprehension and learning. Pre-reading activities to enable familiarity with the topic, the text's background and words to be encountered in the reading passages. Short grammar explanations of essential structures. Questions to help comprehension, raise awareness of genre features, promote critical reading, and to encourage the reader to think more deeply about the content. Opportunities to write passages, utilizing what has been learned by reading the text. Vocabulary and grammar lists at the back of the book.

  The Routledge Intermediate to Advanced Japanese Reader emphasizes reading as a purposeful social act, which requires readers to make meaning of the text by considering the authors' choices in language (scripts, vocabulary, styles) in the text. The learners are guided to situate each text in society (for example, the author, target audience, social-cultural background related to the subject) in order to understand the social significance of reading and writing. This book aims to help learners develop the ability to critically read and write in Japanese for their own social purposes. It is suitable for both class use and independent study.

  Source: Publisher

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  On Learning Japanese Language: Critical Reading of Japanese Language Textbook

  Yuri Kumagai

  How does language or culture come to be standardized to the degree that it is considered 'homogeneous'? How does teaching language relate to such standardization processes? How can teaching be mindful of the standardization processes that potentially involve power relations? Focusing on the case of Japanese, which is often viewed as homogenous in terms of language and culture, this volume explores these questions in a wide range of contexts: the notions of translation and modernity, the ideologies of the standardization of regional dialects in Japan, current practices in college Japanese-as-a- Foreign-Language classrooms in the United States, discourses in journals of Japanese language education, and classroom practices in nursery and primary schools in Japan. This volume’s investigation of standardization processes of Japanese language and culture addresses the intersections of theoretical and practical concerns of researchers and educators that are often overlooked. Source: Publisher

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  The Process of Standardization of Culture & Language in a Japanese Language Classroom: Analyzing Teacher-Students Interactions

  Yuri Kumagai

  How does language or culture come to be standardized to the degree that it is considered 'homogeneous'? How does teaching language relate to such standardization processes? How can teaching be mindful of the standardization processes that potentially involve power relations? Focusing on the case of Japanese, which is often viewed as homogenous in terms of language and culture, this volume explores these questions in a wide range of contexts: the notions of translation and modernity, the ideologies of the standardization of regional dialects in Japan, current practices in college Japanese-as-a- Foreign-Language classrooms in the United States, discourses in journals of Japanese language education, and classroom practices in nursery and primary schools in Japan. This volume’s investigation of standardization processes of Japanese language and culture addresses the intersections of theoretical and practical concerns of researchers and educators that are often overlooked. Source: Publisher

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  Romance, Family, and Nation in Japanese Colonial Literature

  Kimberly T. Kono

  "Kono's book is admirably bold in subjecting to literary scrutiny work long dismissed as derivative and marginal to the modern Japanese literary canon. It is a timely contribution to studies of Japanese colonialism and to the dynamic, growing field of transnational Asian Studies."--Brett de Bary, Professor, Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, Cornell University "Kono examines the representation, production, and reproduction of the tropes of romance and family in Japanese Colonial Literature. Combining dexterous textual interpretation with gender, ethnicity, and postcolonial theory, the book provides a rare and insightful glimpse into the private realm of the colonial enterprise. Kono makes a compelling argument that it is essential to explore the literary renderings of romance, marriage, and family not just for the entertaining melodrama, but also to understand how the state apparatus used these familiar tropes to make their policies 'attractive' and win popular support for them. The book covers the hemispheric scope of the Japanese colonies and takes us on a literary excursion of the empire. A compelling read and a significant contribution to the growing interest in the studies of Japanese colonial literature."--Faye Kleeman, Associate Professor of Japanese, University of Colorado at Boulder. Source: Publisher