An Analysis Of Contemporary Japanese Students' View Of Japan

Everyone has their own unique cognitive views about something in society. Therefore,people under the similar social environment may have different image about something. TheChinese college students, who are known as the builders and successors to the socialism,walking on the leading edge of Chinese contemporary. Their status, behaviour and attitude insociety cannot be ignored. Usually, their views on major events, will affect the futurebehavior and the stability of the socialist foundation. The college students have seen themisdeeds of the Japanese right-wingers and all kinds of angry protests of sino-japanese peacelovers, so they also tried to express dissatisfaction and protest against Japan through variousways. The researcher want to explore other attitude kept in their mind towards Japan throughsome kind of external forms. Therefore, in order to know Chinese college students’ attitudeabout Japan in the special background of tense relations between China and Japan, theresearcher have analyzed their image of Japan in memory and imagination using implicittheory from the perspective of psychology and revealed their unique cognitive perspectiveabout Japan.The whole study was divided into two stages. The first stage was a pre-survey in whichwe let316college students make free associations of the word “日本”according to theSpreading Activation Model, so that we could collect the feature-words. Then the researcherselected the first100high-frequency associational words (frequency above3.5%) as the unitsof analysis and made100cards (10.00cm×1.20cm), and write an associational word on theleft and write the serial number from1to100on the right. Every100cards as a set and a totalof10sets of cards. These cards will be offered as study tools in the second stage of the study.The second stage was item classification in which100college students were required toclassify the100cards according to the relationship of all the conceptions. The subjects wouldwrite the classification results carefully. After that, the researcher counted the times that eachtwo concept-words were divided into the same classification and built a100×100correlationmatrix and carried on the cluster analysis. According to the primary cluster analysis, the100concept-words were gathered into10basic clusters: Diaoyu Island, territory and cities,traditional culture and food, pornographic model, cartoon, aggression and humanity, literati and politico, resource and disaster, electronics and automobile industry, quality-orientededucation and science. The further cluster analysis results showed that there were5representations of the national concept of Japan in contemporary college students’ mind inChina:(1)traditional culture and diet(14.44);(2)the geographical condition anddisaster(11.96);(3)sex and anime(11.77);(4) invasion and human nature(11.35);(5)nationalquality, science and technology(6.90).This study shows that, in the background of times, the Chinese overall impressions ofJapan is bad, but most Chinese contemporary college students’ cognition of Japan still morerational. Despite they are full of antipathy even angry for Japanese aggression history and allkinds of disturbance made by the Japanese right-wing forces, they didn’t migrate this kind ofmood to ordinary Japanese. Most of the college students hold friendly attitude to Japanesecivilians and hold respect and positive attitude to Japanese culture, science and technology,and so on.