Miso Happy!

Having taught in China, South Korea, and now Japan, one question that is sure to create a snag in the mental processes of many of my students is a simple but effective one: "why?". It doesn't matter if it's asking for an opinion or asking to explain some other phenomena, the students that I've had while teaching in East Asia have had a very difficult time answering the question which serves as the basis of critical thinking. The other day, my advanced writing class was having a fun, end-of-the-year lesson that allowed students to use pre-drawn manga panels to create their own stories via blank conversation bubbles (we had studied narratives earlier in the semester). As a warm-up, I asked students to think about their favorite manga and their favorite manga genres and WHY they like those specific manga and manga genres. All of the students were able to tell me the different manga and manga genres they like very easily, but many of their reasons were often f...

We visited the Ghibli Museum a couple of weeks ago. The building itself has a slightly cartoonish design on the exterior with it's pastel colors, but the interior is made to look like older European architecture mixed with the playfulness of the architecture of Hayao Miyuzuki's films. For those that don't know, Hayao Miyuzuki is a very famous animator, director, producer, and screen writer in Japan. He is most famous for being one of the founders of Studio Ghibli (for which the museum is named), which has produced some of Japan's most iconic animated films of the last 30 years. Miyuzuki's name is the one that comes up first when speaking about Japan's world famous animation. Walking into the museum was like walking into a child's dream. The different areas of the museum all served different purposes and displayed different aspects of Miyuzuki's work, but the museum as a whole has the ability to pull you into Miyuzuki's imagination and evoke p...