In various teaching books I have come across activities where students can fill in a caption to a picture or the word bubbles for comic books. These are suggested for high school students due to the difficulty in creating original stories. But I still wanted to give it a try with my jr. high school classes. I knew I needed to use something familiar to them but also encourage them to create their own dialogue. I decided to take a few panels from the popular manga (comic) series Doraemon, and see what my students would come up with. I did this activity last year but I recently saw someone do this activity with Penny Arcade comics, so I thought I would share what my students did as well.

I had already been using volumes of Doraemon for my own study of Japanese. There is a bilingual edition released by Shogakukan Publishing. It is made for Japanese students studying English, but I just used it the other way around.

I chose these panels, which made up the bottom of page 11 in volume 2 of the comic. As you can see the panels don’t make much sense on their own because they are part of a much larger, 15 page story. Regardless, I thought these frames had some good action and could set up a simple plot.

Next I removed the original text. At first I was going to scan the page and use the program Photoshop to remove the words. But in the end, I decided to use to low-tech solution of putting whiteout on the paper and copying it with the Xerox machine. I think it turned out pretty good.

At this point I should explain the Doraemon Universe a little bit since this series has never really been translated to English other than the bi-lingual comics, which, sadly are only sold in Japan. According to the description written on the cover of the comic, Doraemon is:

His best friend is named Nobita. This boy is described as follows:

They have lots of great adventures together usually inspired by Nobita being too lazy to do something for himself and Doraemon trying to help him with one of his inventions. Nobita of course never listens to Doraemon’s warnings about how to use the inventions properly and they always backfire. It’s predicable but very imaginative and fun. Everyone in Japan knows Doraemon

Students were put into pairs and given about 30 minutes to write their comics. Japanese-English dictionaries were available and many of the students used them. The comics are written Japanese style, what that means is that the comic starts in the upper right hand corner and is read from right to left. I hope you enjoy my students’ stories.

This first example is very straightforward. Shizuka is a girl in Nobita’s class that he has a bit of a crush on.

This second comic has a name erased because I told the students that this would be going on my webpage and they didn’t want to embarrass the student. Recently in Japan the trend is to get plastic surgery to make your eyes look bigger. It is considered very attractive to have “big eyes” like foreigners. Personally I think people should be proud of who they are and not change the face they were born with, but it seems that Japanese pop stars disagree with me on this issue.

This comic is also one of the few where the students finished writing it with enough time left over to create their own “Doraemon Invention”, at the bottom. This pair’s invention appears to be some sort of device for making eyes bigger.

This comic is the first of many that decided to use toilet humor. And you know what? That’s fine. As long as they are using English they can write about whatever they want. This is also a good example of using dictionaries to translate words. Their use of the word “stool” is likely what their dictionary said was a translation of “unko” (poop), which also seems to be one of their favorite words. When it is translated like this it is a bit strange. Still funny nonetheless.

I don’t really understand this one and I fear something was lost in the translation.

Yet more toilet humor, but I think this is one of my favorites. The scan isn’t very clear but the second panel says, “Something is leaking”. I think this story matches the facial expressions very well.

A running theme in the Doraemon series is Nobita using Doraemon’s futuristic tools, which he produces from his magical pocket, to get out of whatever bad situation he is currently in. Doraemon is often reluctant to lend these to the careless Nobita and because of this Nobita will sometimes need to trick Doraemon to get them.

This strip takes it a step farther with Nobita actually trying the steal the pocket itself.

Toilet humor was a popular topic but it was not used nearly as often as the subject of homework. Nobita, in the original comics, is always looking for ways to get out of doing his homework (the same can be said for many of my students, and students in general). So it is not surprising that in a strip with Nobita carrying a book, a story about homework is made.

For some reason this pair decided to number their panels the western way. Their panels read left to right, at least on the top. The second half is back to the Japanese system. Just follow the numbers. In this story they decided that Doraemon wasn’t Doraemon but rather a girl from their class, thus the curly hair. In the first panel they are talking about an anime program named “Evengelion”.

The “Docodemo Door” is a device to transport people from one place to another simply by walking through a doorframe. It is one of the most common Doraemon inventions.

The “8″ on it’s side, (or possibly and infinity symbol, it’s hard to tell from the drawing) is apparently a music group that these students really like. I am not familiar with them personally. Those are hearts in Doraemon’s eyes; they were originally drawn in red.

Another homework related one. The “Aaaaaaa” is not a scream but rather is how this girl decided to write a Japanese sound that I would call a sigh.

Here is another fairly standard homework related story.

“Johnny’s Entertainment” is an umbrella name that covers a number of Japanese boy bands. A few of the most famous are “SMAP”, “NewS” and “Kinki Kids”.

This last pair also made a Doraemon invention. I am always surprised when the students use big words like “concentration”. Some of the vocabulary in their textbooks is surprising. There are very complex words mixed in with the easy ones. Words like “International”, “Encouraging” and “Orienteering” are found in vocabulary list next to words like “Town”, “left” and “big”.

I thought that this project was a lot of fun. The students enjoyed writing the comics and I enjoyed reading them. You will notice that they contain many spelling and grammatical errors. I let these slide because the point of this activity was to increase self-esteem and confidence in English. I wanted the students to find out that they do know enough English to tell a story. They are used to having every error corrected immediately and are very worried about making mistakes, so worried in fact that they often won’t write anything unless they are 100% positive that it is correct. As a result, students will produce very little original creative writing. Since I am rarely in each classroom (I have over 1000 students), my activities stress real communication rather than perfect grammar and spelling. Of course, for feedback, after scanning these comics I made corrections to them and gave them back to the students. I also leave comments letting them know that I liked their stories. I really enjoyed all of them. I hope you did too.