The Research Questions

- How does an international student express their culture in a foreign academic environment?

- What tensions arise between authenticity (reproducing tradition) and creativity (reinterpreting it)?

- How can performance and playable storytelling reveal cultural understanding?

- How can an interactive platform (visual novel + website) facilitate collaborative meaning-making?.

Why Connect It to Language Teaching & Learning?

A part of the Language Teaching & learning theory is that it is ecological, sociocultural approach that views language acquisition as inseparable from cultural arts, cultural identity and cultural performance. All of these can be explored when learning and teaching a language, and researching on the field. Here, I made a satement that explains my manifesto in a more declarative and organized format.

Theoretical Foundations

What is Autoethnography?

Autoethnography is a qualitative research method that combines elements of autobiography (writing about personal experience) and ethnography (studying cultural and social phenomena). The researcher uses their own lived experiences as the primary data to explore and interpret broader social, cultural, or political contexts.

In autoethnography, the researcher is not a detached observer — rather, they are the subject. Their personal voice, memories, emotions, relationships, and reflections become both data and analytical material.

I use autoethnography in this project because my own lived experience is directly connected to the themes I aim to explore. As an Indonesian student living in Japan, the cultural tensions, questions of authenticity, negotiations of identity, and shifting perspectives I encounter are not only personal events but reflections of broader social, historical, and political forces in Southeast Asia. By presenting these experiences through a visual novel, I allow the audience to engage with my narrative not only as readers but as participants who move through scenes, choices, and emotions that shape the story. This interactive format mirrors the way identity and migration are actually lived—moment by moment, uncertain, and deeply contextual. In this way, the project becomes both research and experience, aligning with ISAN 2026’s emphasis on narrative, reflexivity, and creative forms of scholarly inquiry. Through this approach, personal narrative becomes a method of understanding how individual lives are shaped by larger cultural structures, while also offering a new, multimodal form of autoethnography.

Digital Design Space: Choice of Website and Visual Novel

Using autoethnography and creative design-based research, I built a digital environment that combines a visual novel, an interactive website, and theatre-based design. Rather than simply reporting on my experiences, I chose to stage them—transforming my cultural journey into a form that others can step into, play with, and reflect upon.

I chose theatre because Indonesian cultural performance—such as traditional dance, wayang, and ritual gestures—already operates as a kind of living stage where values like sopan santun are enacted through movement, tone, and narrative conflict. Theatre allowed me to reconstruct the feeling of performing my culture in Japan, where “authenticity” and “creation” pulled me in different directions.

I chose the visual novel format because it mirrors the way cultural learning actually happens: through dialogue, interpretation, and participation. It is narrative-driven, interactive, and allows players to move between story, cultural tasks, and reflection. Combined with the website, it becomes a digital learning space where performance, narrative, and cultural inquiry intersect.

What is this contributing to?

Through engaging with this digitally designed space, participants are expected to deepen their understanding of how cultural identity is performed, negotiated, and re-created in intercultural contexts. By following my autoethnographic narrative—as an Indonesian student learning to express culture in Japan—players encounter the tension between authenticity and creativity that emerges when presenting one’s heritage abroad. The interactive tasks, including language-based activities rooted in concepts such as sopan santun, demonstrate how cultural values appear not only through artifacts but also through linguistic choices, gestures, and social interaction. Meanwhile, the website’s collaborative features encourage participants to co-construct meaning with others, reflecting on their own assumptions about culture and communication. Through this blended format of visual novel, theatre-inspired staging, and design-based research, the project illustrates culture as an ongoing process rather than fixed content, inviting audiences to reconsider how culture is learned, embodied, interpreted, and creatively transformed.