Week Six Essay: Assessing The Unit

I really enjoyed the Japanese Fairytales unit! I had so much fun reading and learning through these stories. They were entertaining and interesting, plus none were so extensively long that I got bogged down in the length. The morals and themes of good and evil were very prevalent, but like I mentioned in my reading diary, none of the stories referenced a God or higher being as the justice-maker. Magical powers, talking animals and underwater worlds were just completely normal and not due to any type of established religion or religious views. Evil characters were punished just because they were evil and mean, not because some higher power punished them. I thought was interesting, especially after reading Bible Women and reading other fairytales that focused a lot on that religious aspect.

Additionally, I liked learning more about how the Japanese culture was worked into the stories. I learned about a Tanuki, which is a Japanese raccoon dog (picture below). The character was usually a trickster and greedy, he was always making bad things happen to good people. In most of the stories the Tanuki was punished for his actions.

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I also noticed how graphic some of the stories got. In The Slaying Of The Tanuki, he tricks a husband into eating his own wife! And in The Crab And The Monkey, the monkey beats the crab almost to death. The evil characters are pretty brutal with their jokes and many sell out their own family or spouses, like in How The Wicked Tanuki Was Punished and The Sparrow With The Split Tongue. In many of the other culture fairytales the evil characters aren't always direct family or spouses, so it's interesting that the bad characters come from so close.

I really enjoyed reading this unit and had the opportunity to see the Japanese culture through the lens of the stories. I learned about a new animal and got to see how the evil and good themes are represented in the stories.