ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates a bilingual approach to a humanities course by illustrating how to design and execute an upper-level course in Japanese cultural and literary studies. More specifically, this chapter provides concrete ways of scaffolding and streamlining six subgenres of flash fiction in Japanese (i.e., contemporary tanka [literally short poems], traditional tanka, haiku, twitterature, cell phone novels, and poem-prose tales) for a 15-week course. The sample lesson plan focuses in particular on the linguistic and cultural strategies of translating twitterature (micro novels using tweets) on 3.11 (a triple disaster that occurred in Japan in 2011). The use of twitter with an absolute character limit amplifies the fundamental and functional differences in Japanese and English as a written language, which in turn invites students to think deeply and creatively about how to negotiate noted differences in the original tweet in Japanese and their own English translation, specifically as illustrations of a subgenre in flash fiction. As such, this chapter identifies the acquisition by students of metalingual awareness and metacognitive awareness, respectively, as two concrete benefits of a bilingual approach to a humanities course in Japanese cultural and literary studies.
