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St. Olaf College Professor of Asian Studies Rika Ito will deliver the 42nd annual Mellby Lecture on November 21 in Viking Theater.

Her lecture, titled “The Role of Language in Reproducing Imagined ‘Others’: Critical Views from Anime and Manga,” will begin at 11:30 a.m. It is free and open to the public, and will also be streamed and archived online.

The lecture will blend Ito’s background in sociolinguistics to analyze popular media, showing how anime creators construct a “virtual reality” by emphasizing or downplaying linguistic and visual clues to differentiate “normal” people from “outsiders” like dialect users, foreigners, and gender-unknown characters.

“Popular media, especially anime and manga, is a key place where these value judgments are embedded as ‘entertainment,'” Ito says, noting that they can create and perpetuate stereotypes in viewers’ minds.

Her latest project on an anime series titled Golden Kamuy explores Ainu representations. Ainu are an Indigenous group that mainly inhabit the island of Hokkaido in Northern Japan, as well as northern parts of mainland Japan and Sakhalin, an eastern Russian island. Ito noticed that despite featuring an Ainu co-protagonist and Ainu culture positively, the show still portrays Ainu as a “dying race,” the discourse prevalent in the early 20th-century Meiji Japan.

“The Ainu as a dying race discourse is reproduced in the anime show by contrasting between monolingual/bilingual characters, where the young bilingual Ainu woman is seen as modern, while the older monolingual Ainu woman is portrayed as stuck in the past,” Ito says.

“I hope students and colleagues begin paying closer attention to how media represents the contrast between ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ even when it’s presented as mere entertainment. I want them to start questioning why certain things seem ‘normal’ and consider whose perspective defines that norm. It’s crucial to be aware of our biases when interpreting visual and linguistic representations in media.”

— Rika Ito

She believes it’s essential to foster awareness of the dangers and divisive discourses these biases create. The narratives embedded in entertainment play a big role in shaping perceptions and reinforcing stereotypes, Ito says. “I hope a broader community audience will understand this topic because it raises awareness of our biases when interpreting what others say and, more importantly, where those biases originate. Language is a fundamental part of everyday life — talking, texting, or consuming media,” she says.

Ito hopes students pay attention to the messages the media is sending. “I hope students and colleagues begin paying closer attention to how media represents the contrast between ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ even when it’s presented as mere entertainment,” Ito says. “I want them to start questioning why certain things seem ‘normal’ and consider whose perspective defines that norm. It’s crucial to be aware of our biases when interpreting visual and linguistic representations in media.”

About Ito
Ito was born and raised in Bibai City, Hokkaido, Japan. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Hokusei Gakuen University, with licensure in English Education. She was the first female in her immediate and extended family to pursue higher education. During her senior year, Ito studied abroad at Buena Vista College in Iowa. While it was challenging to take courses in English and adapt to life in a small Midwestern town, an experience unfamiliar to most Japanese, the experience deepened her appreciation for family, friendships, and cross-cultural understanding.

After four years of teaching English at a middle school in Japan, Ito returned to the U.S. to teach Japanese at a community college in rural Michigan as an intern. Before starting her graduate program at Michigan State University, she taught Japanese part-time at Central Michigan University, where she reconnected with her passion for sociolinguistics developed in her college days. She earned her Ph.D. in linguistics at Michigan State University, where she examined sociolinguistic variation in Japanese and American English while teaching Japanese as a teaching assistant. 

Ito then moved to York, England, to join a research team analyzing Yorkshire English at the University of York before joining St. Olaf College in 2002. At St. Olaf, she has taught Japanese language, Asian studies, and linguistics and led several January study-abroad courses in China, Hong Kong, and Japan as part of the Asian Conversations program.

Ito’s research focuses on sociolinguistics, exploring language variation, media representation, and language ideologies. Lately, her work has analyzed how linguistic differences contribute to reproducing stereotypes in Japanese popular media, particularly TV dramas and anime. Her 2022 article on anime Golden Kamuy examined the portrayal of the Ainu language and the dynamics of “edutainment,” critiquing the sanitized depiction of Ainu-Japanese relations. She is working with St. Olaf Assistant Professor of Art and Art History and Asian Studies Christina Spiker on a journal article analyzing Ainu representations in Ainu-themed museums in Hokkaido.

In her free time, Ito enjoys gardening, cooking Japanese breakfasts, watching MLB (she’s an Ohtani fan!), and spending time with her husband, Mike, and their 21-year-old cat, Hana-chan.

About the Mellby Lectures
The annual Mellby Lectures remember St. Olaf faculty member Carl A. Mellby. Established in 1983, they allow professors to share their research with the public. Mellby, the “the father of social sciences” at St. Olaf, started the college’s first courses in economics, sociology, political science, and art history. He was professor and administrator from 1901 to 1949, taught Greek, German, French, religion, and philosophy, and developed the college’s honor system.