著者

Watanabe Takahito

巻号頁・発行日

2016-08-28

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Animations, pop songs and other fictional contents are popular among young people in Japan. In such fictional contents, stargazing is often represented hyper-beautifully. Possible socio-cultural background of the phenomenon is that stargazing and astronomy are not familiar in many people’s life. Thus, in this research, the author held a stargazing party combined with “TOYAKO Manga Anime Festa” and making people experience in reality stargazing represented in fictions. The party consisted of a night part and a day part. Besides, the author aimed to find out things which participants of the party learned through the party, and relations between the participants’ experiences in stargazing, the image of astronomy and the media representation by a questionnaire survey. There were 34 respondents. As a result of the questionnaire survey for participants of the day part of the party, the following was found out: (1) The 65% of respondents was female. (2) The mean age of respondents was 31.0 years old (SD = 12.0). (3) The 17% of respondents answered “Strongly Disagree” or “Disagree” to the question item: “I felt that stargazing became more familiar.” They were in the minority. (4) The 64% of respondents had no one around them who liked astronomical observation or stargazing. (5) A variety of media contents having scenes of stargazing or a starry sky left an impression on respondents’ mind. These facts indicate the following conclusion: (1) The participants of the stargazing party seemed to feel that stargazing and astronomy became more familiar and to have realized new things. (2) What not yet revealed are details of effects of the stargazing party, and the relation between respondents’ experiences in stargazing in the past, their images of astronomy, and media representation.