A while back, while randomly watching YouTube one night, I was recommended a video entitled Big Bird in Japan. Intrigued, I watched it.

This PBS-NHK co-production ended up being quite interesting. It was produced in the late 1980s at the height of US-Japan tensions; not coincidentally, about the time the JET programme began. Big Bird and Barkley somehow join a tour of Japan and immediately get lost in Shinjuku. A friendly stranger of mysterious origins helps them to rejoin their tour in Kyoto while introducing them to Japanese life and culture. In addition to the time capsule aspect of watching something from the late 1980s, I was reminded of my own first day in Japan in 1995.

I was on my way to my study abroad university dorm room outside of Kyoto with my brand new, never-before-used passport and one full year of Japanese language studies at university under my belt. I got on the wrong train line in Osaka at first, but somehow, I made it to my station. I took a bus when I got there, but only way I knew I was at my stop was when the bus driver called "Gaijin-san!" in a friendly voice -- though I felt a bit self-conscious when everyone on the bus looked at me at the same time.

Unsurprisingly, I went in the opposite direction from the dorm I was staying at for the next month. At a loss of what to do, I just walked into one of those local electronics shops that are in neighborhoods around Japan and thrust the paper I had explaining where I was supposed to go towards them. Luckily, the family that owned that shop was just as friendly as the person Big Bird met. They calmed me down and bought me McDonalds for lunch, my first real meal in Japan, which I happily ate while chatting away. So I ended up feeling a strong affinity towards Big Bird and Barkley, watching them become lost and then found while wandering around Shinjuku and the rest of Japan.

When I showed it to my junior high school students, however, I found the visuals interesting enough—Big Bird and Barkley driving through Japan in a car is easy enough to understand while I noticed some students trying to figure out what Shinkansen station Big Bird and Barkley were at— for them to follow along while the language being at a level that can be understood by my mid-to-high level students.

My students English isn't at a level to have the sociological discussions about the video on Japan-US relations in the 1980s or representations of culture that you could have with older, more advanced students. However, I did want them to actively engage with the video. With my colleagues at my junior high school, we decided to make a listening, fill-in-the-blank worksheet based on the pre-school performance of the Japanese folk tale "The Bamboo Princess" that Big Bird and Barkley somehow stumble into watching. It starts at around the 39 minute mark and, spoiler alert, this story is related to the origins of our heroes' magical friend.

I will share two different worksheets here. First is the one we did in class, where we added a few vocabulary words at the beginning and a few review questions at the end. Looking at it again, I decided another way to do it would be to have students only listen for nouns. I hope you can either use these or that they give you some ideas to make materials better suited for your students.

Incorporating cultural materials such as this video is an effective way to help our students with their English. Though often we want to introduce things from our own country that does provide another layer of complexity to their language learning, as they need to learn not only the language but the cultural context, as well. It is always easier to understand something in a foreign language if you know the material well in your own language, so I believe using materials such as Japanese folk tales is one way to help students' confidence in learning languages.