Examining the Effectiveness of Popular Culture in Japanese Language Learning – Special Lecture by Hiroshi Aoyagi
11 March 2026, 17:00 – 18:30
Veritas Hall B, #319, Underwood International Campus Songdo
The consumption of Japanese pop culture – otherwise known as “Cool Japan” since the beginning of the current millennium – has been much more evident in the contexts of language learning in South Korea than ever before. One could now find high school-, college- and university students who demonstrate their enthusiasms in learning and communicating in Japanese language as a token of demonstrating their tastes for Japanese anime, pop songs, pop idols and popular mascots, hotspots, soul foods and/or traditional crafts. This is partly due to the Korean government’s lifting of the long post-Second World War ban of Japanese mass culture in 1998, but more so to its recent pedagogical policies to use Japanese popular culture as an instrument for developing academic skills that can contribute to the navigation of complex interpersonal dynamics in our global era, and in particular international relationships with neighboring Asian nation-states – Japan in this case. The 2007 curricular revision specifically encouraged the use of popular-cultural materials in Japanese textbooks and classrooms. In the current “interactive event,” Aoyagi intends to ethnographically elaborate on such a circumstance in reference to an ongoing joint investigation since 2021, and collaborate with everyone in the forum to examine the potentiality of using popular cultural materials in language learning and acquisition. The audience is asked to participate as workshop interviewees rather than as listeners of a presentation.
