Official Japanese Government and Tourism Pages

[Aileen Level]

Website Review:
About Japan – Japangov: The Government of Japan

https://www.japan.go.jp/japan/

Looking for an official source for information about Japan, I located the Government of Japan’s official “About Japan” page. I had high hopes for it at first: the main page is a cute and informative infographic presenting basic information about topics ranging from religion to the national anthem. Clicking beyond that page, however, revealed a less user-friendly site. For example, the information about the anthem includes the lyrics in the alphabet we use but no translation or description of what it means. Other sections take readers to various government pages that require many clicks through densely-packed pages of text in order to find the information – often with confusing layouts and sometimes with “fuzzy” fonts that are hard to read. Honestly, the contrast with the official Chinese tourist webpages and YouTube offerings – which are beautiful and user-friendly – is somewhat shocking.  Ultimately, I would only recommend this page if:

-You only have younger students use the main page with the infographic

Or

-Your students are much older and are doing serious research that requires a deep dive into data such that it’s okay they would need to do some serious digging and could manage to navigate unwieldy but official documents.

 

Within the page, there are links to several other official government sources that are also surprisingly not great but which would potentially be helpful for students learning about the Japanese culture.

The first is JNTO, the official tourism website of Japan. Again, it requires a lot of clicking and does not have as much data as you would probably want easily accessible, but there are a lot of photos. https://www.japan.travel/en/

Second, JNTO has an official YouTube channel. Here, too, the information is surprisingly difficult to access. The playlists are not sorted effectively, so you have to dig through videos of all languages mixed together and an inexplicably large number of videos about a specific rural region of the country that is not well-known here. Still, if you have time to sift through it, there are some useful videos. https://www.youtube.com/user/visitjapan/featured

The official Instagram page may be the best of the options: https://www.instagram.com/visitjapanjp/ It has many beautiful photos with informative captions.

 

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