Onmyoji's enchanted reality: Crossing boundaries of culture, discipline and medium using Japanese popular culture

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 gentlemantraining 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. globalisation, the internet age, etc.) and the changing people that are produced by this environment. To understand the new generation of young people, to comprehend how they think and relate to the world created by their perception, one of the best ways is for us to explore some of the popular cultural texts that appeal to them and sometimes are created by them. The fantastic, the mythical and the legendary literary texts have increasingly dominated the youth culture and they show no sign of decline yet. As scholars and educators, we should examine some of these texts critically, hoping that these will help to contribute towards our understanding of these young people. This article will use Yumemakura Baku's Onmyoji series as an example of such a cultural text for the youth. Through a textual and cultural analysis of the text, it is hoped that educators can come to a better understanding of the values, the meaning, and most importantly, the language that young people of this generation use to construct and describe their internal parallel world which is reflected in the fictional world they visit in popular culture.