UNM mulls major in Japanese

news@dailylobo.com

Students studying Japanese at UNM may soon have the opportunity to major, rather than just minor, in the language.

Foreign Languages and Literatures Chair Walter Putnam said the creation of the major hinges on whaen the department will be able to hire an additional faculty member for the Japanese department. He said student interest and enrollment in Japanese classes has grown steadily over the past decade.

Currently, students who are interested in Japanese must declare as an East Asian Studies major and minor in Japanese, which can present problems, particularly when applying for graduate school.

“Japanese is an identifiable major,” Putnam said. “People may or may not recognize what an East Asian Studies major is; you have to explain it to people.”

Putnam said the UNM Japanese department has only two full-time faculty members who teach courses: Lorna Brau, who specializes in performance arts and culture, and Machiko Bomberger, who teaches mostly language courses.

Both Brau and Bomberger teach 15-16 credit hours per semester, which Putnam said doesn’t leave room to teach the additional courses necessary for a major study program.

“You can’t really run a major with one tenure-track faculty and one lecturer,” he said. “But we started thinking that with a third person, we could make a pretty good push for a major.”

UNM student Katherine Barton, whose major is East Asian Studies, said a Japanese major would be helpful not only in her academics, but in her career aspirations as well. She said she wants to be an international flight attendant.

“Right now Japanese is my life,” she said. “Everything I think about, everything I read about is basically about Japanese culture and the language.”

Barton said one of the issues students face is becoming proficient in the language. Because there are so few teachers, she said students often can’t get the help they need to understand the language.

Barton said there are few outside resources for students learning Japanese, which often causes people to give up on the language. She said CAPS has only one tutor for Japanese classes and that the lack of available courses contributes to the difficulty of learning the language.

“We can only meet three times a week, or twice for upper level courses,” she said. “And because of that, it’s hard to be immersed in the language.”

Barton said majoring in East Asian Studies has hindered her focus on Japanese because many required courses are very broad and don’t relate to Japan. She said religion courses in particular have been frustrating.

“Most religion courses hardly talk about the area of Asia I’m interested in,” she said. “We’re going to study Buddhism, but we’re hardly going to talk about Japanese Zen Buddhism.”

Putnam said the department is in the process of getting approval from University administration to make the new hire. He said the search for new a faculty member could start as soon as December.

Putnam said the department aims to hire someone whose area of expertise is Japanese literature. He said the course will be taught in English but that, eventually, the department would like to offer literature courses taught in Japanese to help counter the current lack of immersion.

“We want somebody who can complement what we already have,” he said. “Then we could have courses that (professors) don’t have time to teach now.”