Cultural nationalism and representations of Japanese culture in language textbooks

要旨

n This thesis investigates what it means to teach culture in the context of second/foreign language teaching. In the current discourse in applied linguistics, culture is not seen as a problematic concept and is taken for granted as something existing out in the target society, usually the (nation) state, to be specified and taught. However, against the background of the world today where it is argued that culture is replacing the word 'race' and is used prominently in political struggle, the way culture is treated in the second/foreign language context needs to be reviewed. The particular content this thesis addresses is the teaching of Japanese as a foreign language. The study focuses on the teaching of culture in textbooks of Japanese and examines them in reference to Japan's cultural nationalism. Japan's cultural nationalism is defined as textual, rather than political, and is best represented in the Japanese publishing genre known as nihonjinron. The word qnihonjinronq literally means 'a theory of Japanese people' and addresses the national characteristics of the Japanese people and of Japanese culture. While nihonjinron publications have been hugely popular, their contents have attracted criticism from both inside and outside Japan on a variety of grounds, including, for example, that they are not supported by empirical evidence. Even if many of the claims of the genre are dubious, however, its influence cannot be ignored given its popularity in Japan. This study hypothesises that there is an intertextual link between foreign-language textbooks of Japanese and nihonjinron. It is further hypothesised that this link is seen in textbooks sharing the same content and, more importantly, assumptions underpinning nihonjinron. The study uses the principles of content analysis, a quantitative method for processing textual data, to examine the influence of nihonjinron on Japanese textbooks. The results are interpreted in reference to whether the textbooks contain nihonjinron concepts and whether the textbooks and nihonjinron use the same rhetorical device to describe Japanese culture. The results of this study indicate 70 of 79 textbooks of Japanese examined in this study share assumption(s) of nihonjinron propositions, which is significant in considering how the language teaching profession should address the teaching of culture. The implications of these results for teachers' attitudes to teaching and the concept of culture itself are considered.

主題