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This presentation examines the educational significance of classroom practices that engage with historical memory through film materials in a co-learning setting at a German university, where local learners of Japanese and exchange students from Japan study together. As different cultural backgrounds and understandings of history intersect, differences in how the same events are perceived become visible, giving rise to dialogue in which learners explain their perspectives to one another.

The course used three documentary films—Nuclear Nation, The Ants, and Minamata: The Victims and Their World—to explore different forms of memory: victimhood, perpetration, and the difficulty of understanding. In particular, in the Minamata class, students watched the film without subtitles. While some commented that “I could not really understand what the speaker was saying,” others noted that “even without understanding the words, the pain and suffering were conveyed.” Furthermore, a native Japanese-speaking student remarked that they were “able to learn on an equal footing,” suggesting that sharing “not understanding” transformed relationships among learners.

Through such dialogue, learners did not arrive at a single fixed interpretation but instead reconsidered their understanding by engaging with others’ perspectives. Across the three practices, three common features were observed: (a) an attempt to approach voices that are difficult to articulate, (b) an attitude of remaining with what cannot be fully understood, and (c) dialogue in which learners from different positions negotiate meaning. This process can be understood in relation to the concept of mediation in the CEFR and is closely connected to the domains of cognition and culture in CLIL. Moreover, film enables past events to emerge as present concerns. This presentation thus highlights the theoretical significance of such practices and argues for the potential of Japanese language education in which teachers mediate between different voices by incorporating diverse “media of memory.”