Lachlan Jackson

'What if [your] boyfriend was a foreigner?' Romance, gender and second language learning in an edutainment context

Language edutainment involves the utilization of various forms of technology in the teaching and learning of languages. One such form recently to have emerged is the ‘What if [your] boyfriend was a foreigner?’ iPhone app. This ‘iBoyfriend’ app is marketed to Japanese female learners as a tool for learning English conversation through the alluring context of romance with three virtual foreign boyfriends. In this paper we question the pedagogical value of the app and the cultural representations of women and the virtual boyfriends in the storylines. This form of language edutainment is predicated on problematic discourses of native speakers, foreign language learning, gender, and Japanese cultural identity. Finally, the app is shown to be indexical of the localized meanings with which English can be ascribed in particular cultural contexts.

A Review of “Language and Citizenship in Japan”

Copeland, R. and Ortabasi, M., eds, 2006. The modern Murasaki: writing by women of Meiji Japan. New York: Columbia University Press. Molasky, M. and Rabson, S., eds, 2000. Southern exposure: modern Japanese literature from Okinawa. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Wender, M., ed., 2010. Into the light: an anthology of literature by Koreans in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

(Book review) Notes from Toyota-land: An American engineer in Japan

This edited volume presents a collection of nineteen essays on a variety of themes pertaining to the ways that China and the Chinese are being looked at (and represented) in Australia and New Zealand. According to the editors, the volume is “primarily about Australasian Orientalism” but it also includes works “marking the ideological limits of such Orientalism”. The findings are inordinately rich: at times provocative, but always refreshing. The first six chapters of the book are on ‘Socio-Political Perspectives’ and broadly fit under the theme “Sinophobia”. These chapters examine the early racism of white Australia and New Zealand. China was seen as sinister, and the Chinese as sickly, crafty, insidious invaders of the new immigrant nations that preferred white settlement. The first three chapters are historical studies. Mark Williams’ introductory chapter proposes that the root cause of anti-Chinese attitudes in both Australia and New Zealand is “sentimental racism”, which is part of the process of new nation-making. Paul Jones’ chapter is a succinct account of the Chinese Australians and of China from the early beginnings to the founding of the People’s Republic. Tony Ballantyne argues that New Zealand’s official “bicultural approach” has so far rigidly crowded out a proper examination of the role of the Chinese in that country. Three cultural studies chapters follow. The first (by Noel Rowe) examines the poetic representations of the Chinese in the Australian journal The Bulletin. The next chapter (by Timothy Kendall) explores the white invasion anxiety by looking at a range of Australian novels. In the third chapter, David Walker contends that the pseudo-scientific representation of the Chinese threat in contemporary American bestsellers has no parallels in the Antipodes. The next seven chapters grouped under Section 2, entitled ‘Aesthetic Perspectives’, amply show that sinophilia and sinophobia are inextricably intertwined. The first chapter, by Paul Millar, on the Pakeha depiction of the Chinese in twentieth-century New Zealand fiction contains (unsurprisingly) largely stereotypical and negative images of the Chinese. The author highlights some remarkable exceptions, when the Chinese characters are rather benign and even kind. The following chapters show even more “mixed” Chinese images. For example, the elegant Chinoiserie of Katherine Mansfield’s household, carefully depicted in refined detail in Duncan Campbell’s chapter, stands in paradoxical contrast to the consistently negative Chinese figures that appear throughout her writing. Jane Strafford’s chapter is on New Zealand travel writings of the 1930s, Asian Studies Review December 2006, Vol. 30, pp. 411–441