Using an artifact of some kind (or another primary / original cultural resource) representative of CONTEMPORARY Chinese or Japanese civilization and culture, design a brief instructional experience designed to introduce your students to the culture represented by the artifact as a focus of educational inquiry.

Be sure to place your activity in an appropriate larger instructional context, articulating how this introduction might lead into an particular and specific on-going series of lessons, one considering the culture in a comparative setting or as the focus for an historical review or as illustrative of abstract sociological / anthrolpological / economic principles being developed, whatever the case might be.

Explain, too, how this brief introductory exercise would help meet those long-range goals rather than merely being used to engage student interest (a goal the activity should also meet). Try to incorporate as well some of the notions we discussed in the seminar session this week, if at all possible.

For example, you might show a brief excerpt from a video illustrating a day in the life of a Japanese "salaryman", requesting students to discuss observations of family life derived therefrom, prior to engaging students in a cross-cultural comparison of contemporary family organizational patterns in Islamic Iran, the (Christian) United States and Buddhist Japan in quest of an appreciation of the influence of religion on contemporary social systems.