公開日 2021年10月22日
On October 6th, the International Center at Shimane University held its 2nd Mukashibanashi Cafe, an online exchange event with students overseas using the topic of Japanese folktales. The story for this cafe was Onibaba to Kozou (Demon Hag and the Young Buddhist Priest). A total of fifteen students participated, seven from Monash University in Australia, and eight from Shimane University.
During Mukashibanashi Cafe, the half of the story is read aloud to the students, and then the Japanese language learners have to guess the ending.
In this story, a Buddhist priest gives three talismans to a young priest to protect him while the boy goes into the mountains. The boy meets an old woman, who turns out to be Onibaba who wants to eat him. Upon finding this out, the boy uses the talismans to try and escape from Onibaba. From here, the students were split up into groups and thought about how the story might end.
The students came up with four very unique continuations to the story: (1) Onibaba created a strong magic potion to defeat the Buddhist priest, but the priest drank the potion first. He defeats Onibaba and throws her into the mountains like a sumo wrestler; (2) The Buddhist priest turns into a good Onibaba and defeats the bad Onibaba; (3) The boy flees to the temple, prays with the priest to Buddha to defeat Onibaba, and Buddha does so; (4) The boy flees to the temple and finds a picture of the Buddhist priest and Onibaba being friendly with each other. As it turns out, the priest and Onibaba are actually old friends and decided to play a trick on the boy.
One student from Monash University commented, “I had fun reading an old folktale while getting the chance to speak with Japanese native speakers.” Students from both universities seemed to be highly satisfied with the event.
Shimane University will continue to actively engage in online global exchange activities.
