MLO 4: Secondary Culture Knowledge 4.1 Students describe concepts of culture and use that understanding in their comparison of Hispanic cultures with a second culture other than those. 4.2 Students will analyze and make connections between the perspectives, ways of thinking, behavioral practices, and cultural products of a second culture other than Hispanic cultures.
Course I have completed: JAPN 308: Japanese Pop Culture
In a major that respects linguistic and cultural diversity is encouraged, it is important to be familiar and aware of other cultures. With that being said I took the class JAPN 308: Japanese Pop Culture to fulfill MLO 4: Secondary Language. I took this class in the fall semester of 2022 with Dr. An Pham. When I first enrolled into this class I was not sure what to expect because I had no personal knowledge of Japanese Pop culture besides some anime and manga that I watched when I was a kid. Throughout the semester, during every class session we either discussed an assigned reading and/or watched a film about Japanese Pop Culture to further understand their culture. What I thought was most interesting was learning about cosplay, how huge cosplay events can be, and most amazingly how serious Japanese culture takes cosplaying. Cosplay is when people dress up as their favorite character. As mentioned above, cosplaying was taken very seriously and people would spend months, days, and hours making the clothes to dress as their favorite character. Furthermore, during class we also discussed assigned readings where we learned about Japanese foods, snacks, etc. For our final paper we wrote a 6-7 page essay on a subject that is directly related to what we studied through the semester. I choose to talk about a manga series called Captain Tsubasa. In this essay I talked about the influence that this manga series had on people in Japan and around the world. Some challenges that still remain in this area are that I still need to understand Japanese culture in more depth because pop culture is just a small part of Japanese culture. However, I did enjoy learning about a new culture. It's fascinating how passionate Japanese people are about their culture as well as I mentioned about cosplay where people take months to make a costume to feel some kind of connection with a character. I hope one day I can go to Japan to visit and explore the culture further. Assignment: JAPN 308: Final paper 308