One hundred percent. Not a single one of the 30 students in the Japanese Language Education Study Program at Universitas Riau questioned the benefits of the local tourism learning videos used in their classes. A study published in the February 2026 edition of the Journal of Japanese Language Education (JPBJ) found that Japanese-language conversation videos featuring tourism in Riau Province increased tourism-related knowledge among all respondents while boosting learning motivation to 93.9 percent. The study was conducted by a research team from Universitas Riau between March and May 2024 in response to the limited availability of Japanese-language teaching media incorporating Indonesia's rich local culture.
When An-Nur Grand Mosque Becomes
Japanese Conversation Material Imagine a student looking at a screen and seeing an image of An-Nur Grand Mosque in Pekanbaru, the capital of Riau Province. Beneath it appears a sentence in Japanese: もし興味があれば、見学してください—“If you are interested, please come and take a look.” This is one of the excerpts from the instructional video examined in the study.
The video features more than a single cultural site. It also introduces the bakar tongkang tradition from Bagan Siapi-api, Rokan Hilir, a Chinese ethnic thanksgiving ritual that has been practiced since the 19th century. In the video, a young person can be heard saying: それはバカル・トンカン呼ばれる伝統が有名ですよ—“This place is famous for a tradition called bakar tongkang.”
This approach distinguishes the teaching material from conventional textbooks. Rather than using generic conversation examples about Tokyo or Kyoto, students learn Japanese through contexts that they already know: their own hometowns.
The Numbers Speak
The study employed a quantitative survey method using a five-point Likert-scale questionnaire. Thirty students from the 2023 cohort enrolled in the Nihongo Kentei 3 course were asked to evaluate eight criteria, ranging from cultural relevance and vocabulary completeness to visual appeal.
The results were striking. As many as 97 percent of respondents considered the video to accurately represent Riau culture. Regarding grammar, 90.9 percent stated that the video helped them understand Japanese sentence structures in a tourism context. Meanwhile, 84.8 percent felt that the vocabulary presented was adequate for communication in the tourism sector.
The only relatively lower score was recorded for everyday applicability, at 78.8 percent. This suggests that some students felt that the video content could not yet be fully applied to everyday conversations outside formal tourism contexts.
“The findings emphasize the importance of integrating local cultural themes into foreign-language learning, particularly Japanese, and demonstrate that instructional videos can be an effective solution for meeting educational needs in the tourism sector.”
— Research Team, Universitas Riau, JPBJ Vol. 12 No. 1, 2026
More Than Just a Learning Tool
The researchers emphasize that the video is more than simply a replacement for the classroom blackboard. In practice, students use the video as material for paired role-play exercises. They act out conversations between local tour guides and Japanese-speaking tourists, situations they may realistically encounter in the workplace.
This approach is considered effective because it combines three elements: familiar visuals, the foreign language students seek to master, and a culturally meaningful context. When students see images of places they have visited and then learn how to describe those places in Japanese, the learning process becomes more engaging than memorizing vocabulary from decontextualized word lists.
The study also raises a relevant question for other educational institutions in Indonesia. How many regions possess cultural richness comparable to Riau but lack foreign-language teaching media that highlights that heritage? If videos about An-Nur Grand Mosque and bakar tongkang can motivate 93.9 percent of students to engage more deeply with learning, what could happen if a similar model were implemented in Yogyakarta, Makassar, or Flores?
Authors: Achmad Zam Zam Aghasy, DDS, M.Kes.; Hazra Alifia Muharam
Photo: Pexels
Sumber DOI: https://doi.org/10.59837/jpmba.v2i4.963