Perpetuating Japanese New Year Traditions Through Place-Based Transmedia Storytelling
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2024
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Many of the traditions of Japanese contract laborers to Hawaiʻi in the late 1800s and early 1900s still exist today, passed down from generation to generation through oral stories and shared experiences. The varied nuance of traditions, like recipes, belie a migration story that connects contemporary life to ancestral homes in Japan. These cultural stories, and especially the significance behind the traditions, are being lost as generations closest to their ancestral homes pass on. These cultural stories, which were first passed around the dinner tables, in casual intergenerational talk story fashion, must be preserved and perpetuated in dynamic, engaging storytelling forms that honor the same value through a place-based transmedia storytelling. My thesis focuses on the Japanese New Year food traditions of ozōni, as a cultural practice that was passed down from the first Issei (first generation) migrants from Japan to the young Gosei (fifth generation). This tradition, history, and familial stories is shared through the application of transmedia storytelling theories, as defined by Henry Jenkins and expanded by Donna Hancox, Marie-Lure Ryan, and others who propose radical new visions for transmedia storytelling for non-commercial application. Through the creation of an interactive picture book digital mock-up and a video game project treatment, I utilize the affordances of each media in a transmedia storytelling approach to perpetuate Japanese New Year traditions, specifically the cooking and consuming of ozōni, through place-based, multi-modal stories. The target age for these transmedia stories is 10-years-old and above, an age commonly identified as middle grade students, readers, and players. For the development of the picture book, I wrote the narrative text, created the accompanying illustrations, sourced articles and archival images, gathered personal, family photographs and artifacts, and combined them together to create a digital mock-up of the interactive picture book. In a professional publishing process, this interactive picture book would be developed with a professional illustrator, graphic designers, and other content and technical experts, but to illustrate the application of transmedia storytelling, having a digital mock-up suffices. The accompanying video game treatment includes concept art, story narrative, formal game elements, and mechanics. The treatment also contains a general story arc, descriptions of characters, environment, generations (called “Eras” in the game), and key artifacts like that of the interactive picture book.
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Multimedia communications, Asian American studies, Literature, Japanese in Hawaiʻi, Japanese New Year, Multimodal stories, Ozoni, Place-based storytelling, Transmedia Storytelling
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141 pages
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