Local Problems, Global Solutions? Using popular cultural texts in the humanistic classroom: How Japanese stories can work for Hong Kong students

With the increase in university student numbers over the world, university education has changed from the elite to the general. University education has also changed from a kind of gentleman-training to career oriented training and shifting to more general humanistic training today. The education sector has called for changes not only in the content but also the approaches to university education in view of the changing environment (i.e. globalization, the internet age, etc.) and the changing people that are produced by this environment. To adequately teach the new generation of young people and prepare them not only for the work life but life in general, we must get to really communicate with them. To do this, designers of curriculum need to comprehend how they think, how they relate to the world, and what kind of decisions they tend to make in given circumstances. Educators must do some research to understand the youth culture before they can utilize suitable and effective strategies to create a learning
experience for this generation of young people.

One of the most effective ways of doing this would be to get through to students via the cultural world they inhabit, and ideally borrow insights from those texts they enjoy. In Hong Kong, for example, comics, animation, games and popular reading are most important components of their cultural life. I propose to use a Japanese literary text which is very popular among youngsters in HK to illustrate how we can perhaps make use of popular texts welcomed by young people in our classrooms. Yumemakura Baku’s Onmyoji series is first a successful popular novel series, then adapted into comics series, and film adaptation and TV mini-series have also followed. I hope that through a textual analysis of this Japanese literary series and its other products, I can show how interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and even bilingual teaching and learning materials can be created for use in a humanistic classroom.