ABSTRACT
Satoru Aonuma and Kazuhiko Seno’s Big in Japan examines the limits of what they call “imitation pedagogy” through an examination of responses to and repetitions of 1980s debate theory. Historically, debate theory has served as a joke told in different cultures at different points in time. American policy debaters translated their joke to the Japanese in the postwar era. The joke has persisted, but it has also changed in regional and indigenous forms which play with fidelity and piety. Historians once noted both a lack of humor and a lack of a tradition of debate in Japanese culture. Of course, this conclusion arose from what the scholars counted as humor or debate as defined in Western terms. Translation has always characterized American academic debate in Japan. The type of translation is not tragedy, romance, or horror, but is, in fact, comedy.
