Introduction to Special Issue: Teaching and Researching Japan Through the Pandemic and Beyond

ABSTRACT

This special issue of Japanese Studies provides a snapshot of the teaching and researching of Japan through the initial years of the pandemic. It records experiences and reflections by scholars of Japan in South Korea, Australia, England, and Kazakhstan grappling with the challenges and potential of online learning and digital resources in the context of academic precarity and global uncertainty. The articles reflect on pedagogy, research methods, interdisciplinary focus, and the intersections of premodern, modern, and contemporary Japan with global politics, society, health, environment, and culture. They identify key challenges facing Japanese Studies, especially the corporatisation of institutions and the undervaluing of language and contextual studies, and consider how the lessons of the pandemic can lead to a transformation of Japanese Studies that strengthens its relevance and possibilities both in and outside the academy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been both cause and pretext for the imposition of constraints and pressures on the field of Japanese Studies from governments and university administrations (Aspinall & Crouch, 2023), as well as exacerbating some roadblocks from within the field itself (Matanle & McIntosh, 2020). This has resulted in cuts to programs, less secure employment, and a restrictive and competitive funding environment for Japanese Studies scholars. The pandemic, with its initial focus on STEM disciplines such as epidemiology, served to support government and tertiary management opinions that questioned the value of the humanities in contemporary societies. However, as we have endured the various restrictions and adversities of the pandemic, it is the role of the humanities – subjects that focus on making sense of being human and promoting cross-cultural understanding of human activities and cultures – that will aid us in community building, recovery, and resilience (Reisz, 2020). As Teresa Mangum states,

Humanities scholars bring historical perspectives, intersectional approaches to complex problems, attentive to cultural and social differences regarding the impact of Covid, and valuable awareness of nuance in language, communication style, public narratives, ways to move and persuade the public to commit to collective, altruistic action.

(cited in Reisz, 2020)

If the disruption of the pandemic has shown us anything, it is the importance of teaching and researching about other languages, cultures, and societies such as Japan.

This special issue of Japanese Studies provides a snapshot of the teaching and researching of Japan through the initial years of the pandemic, when we, along with every other discipline, experienced a rapid pivot to online teaching and research practices, as well as lockdowns, social isolation, and international border closures. We asked scholars of Japan to write reflectively because we felt that it was important to have educators’ and researchers’ experiences documented at a time like this – not only to record these experiences but also to consider how they can lead to a transformation of Japanese Studies that strengthens its relevance and possibilities both in and outside the academy. We also note that key challenges facing Japanese Studies, especially the corporatisation of institutions (Morley, 2023) and the undervaluing of language (Zhou, 2021) and Asian Studies (Kuang, 2021), have emerged unbidden as a connecting theme in the articles of this special issue.

As the scholars we have brought together in this special issue demonstrate, the variety of challenges and obstacles that have emanated from and been amplified by the pandemic are being met with resilience and innovation in different regions and contexts, here illustrated by academics in South Korea, Australia, England, and Kazakhstan. The aim of the issue has been to reflect on these experiences and their associated positive and negative outcomes, as we face the challenges and possibilities inherent in distance education and digital resources in a context of academic precarity¹ and global uncertainty. We include articles which reflect on pedagogy, research methods, interdisciplinary focus, and the intersections of premodern, modern, and contemporary Japan with global politics, society, health, environment, and culture.

The first three articles in this issue are concerned with how Japanese Studies scholars adapted to the disruption of COVID in terms of teaching. One aspect affecting all scholars has been that of physical restrictions related to social distancing. Those who teach at tertiary institutions have had to adopt new pedagogical methods and materials, and to teach in online environments. In the first article of this special issue, Sally McLaren discusses using short YouTube videos in Japanese history courses at a university in Sydney as part of her ‘pandemic pedagogy’ – the rapid response to online teaching that required innovative methods to support students’ learning in distracting and isolating situations. McLaren used videos produced by well-known YouTube history channels alongside required readings to stimulate student engagement with historiographical issues. She argues that it is vital for Japanese Studies students to develop critical media literacy skills and be aware of the role and power of social media sites such as YouTube in the creation and representation of Japanese history, especially because gender and minority perspectives are frequently absent. McLaren also discusses how Japanese Studies teachers must reflect on their pedagogical role and influence, as well as the exacerbation of academic precarity brought on by the pandemic and its adverse effect on learning conditions. After three years of the pandemic in which we have seen a marked increase in the online dissemination of misinformation and disinformation, it is evident that critical media literacy skills, as well as pedagogical reflection, are crucial for the future of humanities in higher education.

Again, in response to stay-at-home restrictions, Levi Durbidge and Gwyn McClelland focus on the increased adoption of technology-enhanced teaching practices for Japanese language learning. They highlight the difficulties of replicating face-to-face classroom experiences, and see the most important challenges as building community in the digital classroom and promoting autonomous learning amongst their undergraduate cohorts, who can access the ‘digital wilds’ – the huge variety of materials now available online that provide opportunities for language learning such as vlogs, music, livestreams, shopping, entertainment, as well as the interactive possibilities of social media. Durbidge and McClelland, teaching Japanese language in the first year of the pandemic at an internationalised metropolitan university and subsequently at regional universities in Australia, outline the new challenges to teaching online, such as the lack of non-verbal feedback available to the instructor and the reduction in an ability to ‘look over students’ shoulders’ and provide impromptu feedback. As the opportunities for community and relationship-building, and informal interactions, that occur between classes are also limited, Durbidge and McClelland stress the importance of allowing for exchange and dialogue despite the loss of proximity between teacher and students.

Like McLaren, Anna Vainio and Mark Pendleton recognised that teaching students to critically interpret media representations of Japan they encounter in their daily lives was vital to their understanding and development of research skills. This conclusion was based on their digitised ‘field trip from home’ class that they ran for undergraduate students at the University of Sheffield in 2020 as a substitute for in-country fieldwork. The embodied and multi-sensory aspects of on-site fieldwork that underpinned their East Asian studies course on fieldwork methodologies could not be undertaken during the pandemic. However, Vainio and Pendleton developed a hybrid research class with a digital research component focusing on Tokyo that enabled students to engage with physical, sensory, and embodied methodologies through practice in their home environments. The course focused on embodied aspects of fieldwork such as the use of sight, sound, and taste by encouraging students to engage with online videos, virtual museum tours, digital maps, and even engaging in preparation of Japanese food. They found that digital approaches can offer a preparatory ‘slower’ way of entering and exploring the field, and can help prepare students for the field by deepening awareness of their identities as field researchers.

Tomoko Seto’s article bridges the teaching/research divide by documenting her experiences in both areas while working at an international college for Korean and international students in Seoul, South Korea. Seto taught Japanese history courses in English to Korean and international students, and experienced a sense of isolation at the beginning of the pandemic when online courses reduced her interactions with students, and scholars in Japan cancelled her joint research activity in Korea. This eventually shifted to a sense of possibility, solidarity, and a renewed awareness of the problems of Japanese Studies. In contrast to Durbidge and McClelland’s findings concerning limits around relationship building in online classes, Seto found that email exchanges with individual students in lieu of class discussion produced unexpected candour on the topics of Japanese colonialism and postwar politics. Seto also engaged in research during this time, finding, as noted by Hall later in this issue, that Japanese digital archives, although plentiful, are often inaccessible. However, in collaboration with colleagues, she discovered that some primary materials were available from Korean national libraries’ websites. This unexpected finding led to a richness of sources produced in colonial Korea, which in turn revealed new lines of research inquiry regarding the empire as a lived experience.

The final three articles in this special issue concern field research, an aspect of Japanese Studies that continues to be affected by the pandemic travel restrictions in terms of forfeited opportunities and suspended work. Erika Alpert begins her article reflecting on the feelings of ‘loss’ in terms of her 2020 fieldwork. She goes on to compare this lost fieldwork to past research in Japan, reading both through a lens of vulnerability. As mentioned by Vainio and Pendleton, and by Hall, in this issue, the traditional epistemology of fieldwork requires co-presence, being there to fully experience Japan with the senses. But as Alpert points out, this simultaneously requires a degree of vulnerability on the part of the researcher. This is the case for all researchers, but perhaps more so for Alpert working on the Japanese marriage industry. She notes that being forced to stay at home in isolation removes some kinds of vulnerability for the researcher and keeps our bodies safe, healthy, and untouched. However, a disadvantage of this is that it limits our access to certain kinds of data. She opts for a middle ground in which starting research online enables researchers technological affordances for limiting their vulnerability, and for which, as Durbidge and McClelland note for online teaching, building community is key.

This idea of community is also a central aspect of Megan Rose’s digital ethnography of the Nintendo video game, Animal Crossing New Horizons. Confined to home during lockdowns in Australia, she employed a textual analysis of online spaces as a way of exploring the significance of online encounters for players who were also practicing social distancing during COVID-19. Here, she argues that digital technology during the pandemic offered Animal Crossing players ‘feelings of connection’, ‘co-presence’ and ‘comfort’ that supported their wellbeing during a vulnerable period. Rose details the kawaii design features of non-player characters in the game that elicit a caring and loving response from players. Much like Alpert’s argument above, the timely release of the game provided a safe place in which to play, a place where bodies were able to remain safe and healthy, and which provided an all-important escape from reality. The act of sharing their online experiences of play in online forums offered players an additional means of contact and support during periods of social isolation.

Jenny Hall’s article on not ‘being there’ in the field reiterates many of the themes already mentioned above, such as physical restrictions directly affecting the ability of researchers to conduct fieldwork, and the limited access to Japan-based digital archives. Hall advocates for a broad interpretation of fieldwork which includes visiting libraries, archives, and museums, and also the literature gathered in the field, such as pamphlets, magazines, and newsletters, as mentioned by Alpert in her article. Hall argues that the discovery of resources through serendipitous or guzen encounters, is difficult to replicate in the online environment. She notes that browsing shelves in a library offers affordances that browsing online does not. As part of exploring accessibility to such resources, she interviewed librarians to ascertain the direct effect of pandemic-instigated institutional budget cuts, as well as travel and postal restrictions, on academic library collections. Because scholars have not been able to physically visit Japan for fieldwork, Hall documents how they have been initiating projects closer to home such as ‘room-scale fieldwork’, or turning to digital ethnographic approaches to gain access to fieldwork subjects and gather data, providing a case study that illuminates this aspect of research.

Finally, as the authors in this special issue have pointed out, scholars of Japan, along with many others in the tertiary education sector, are facing unfair working conditions and precarity that is directly impacting teaching and research (Curtis, 2022; Knezic & Radford, 2023), conditions which have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Anne Allison writes, that ‘collective struggles to face precarity together also hold the potential for social, economic, and political change’ (2020) and it is our hope that Japan scholars work together to resist these challenges so that the field remains fair, viable, and strong.

Acknowledgments

We would like to specially thank the reviewers who have given their time and expertise in reviewing the articles for this special issue.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The co-editors of this special issue are both precariously employed as sessional academics and have no institutional support or recognition for research or service work such as journal editing (Connell, 2019: 67, Mackie, 2021).