Globally, media arts is increasingly being included as part of the standard education curriculum. UNESCO has announced “Road Map for Arts Education” in 2006 with the collaboration of InSEA, ISME, and IDEA. This road map advocates digital arts, film, media, and photography as part of the tentative field of arts education. Prior to these global movements, Japan has been included image media expression in the national art education curriculum of secondary school since 1998. Also, the high school national curriculum of art has included image media field since 1999. In Japan, the School Education Law of 1947 set elementary school (grades 1-6) and junior high (grades 7-9) as compulsory education. Also, though it is not compulsory, 98.8 percent of students in Japan went on to high school, and 80.6 percent of high school students continued on to higher education according to 2017 statistics. Around 99 percent of elementary schools, 93 percent of junior high schools, and 70 percent of high schools are publically operated (Figure 3). Therefore, it's fair to say that most Japanese students receive an education that is based on the Japanese national standards.In 2021, 23 years have passed and several points to consider regarding image media education in Japan have emerged.

This current research is focused on how, as part of art education in Japan, image media <media arts> can play a role in our 21st-century knowledge-based society. In short, we are the generation that has acquired the most knowledge through digital images compared to any time in the past. Looking back on how image media has been included in our national curriculum, and considering the discussion on this topic by several art educators, a unique and characteristic viewpoint emerges. This point is about how we can humanize image media according to the art education researcher Fujie. Focusing on connecting visual images and bodily sense is very important for (media) art education. Previous research by the author shows that connecting bodily sense and visual images through interactive manipulation, such as enlarge details, color, and edit footage repeatedly, will raise interest and reality to the context of visual images. Such practices would be very effective as an introductory stage for media arts education. It is because by giving students a high sense of reality, the learners will care more about the world. Therefore, the author defined this phenomenon as visually triggered ideated somatic knowledge (V-TISK). In the phase of this research, the author focused on clarifying how visual stimulus activates tactile sensations in our brain and how visual image manipulation is related to them. For that purpose, NIRS (Near-infrared spectroscopy) was used to measure the targets of Brodmann areas 5 and 7 in the parietal lobe, which integrate the somatic sense and visual input.
In the experiment, subjects were shown various images in a quiet dark room while sitting on a chair. The images were displayed in sequence, and the target images that had undergone specific operations by subjects, such as coloring black-and-white photographs in Photoshop, were also interwoven. As a result, it was confirmed that the tactile area neurons of the brain sparked very strongly only when the target image was visually perceived. In other words, by incorporating the process of media arts education, there is a tendency to cognitively feel the tactile sensation as if you were touching, even if the input is only a visual stimulus.

In conclusion, media arts education may be the only educational subject field to train students to obtain this type of knowledge which is defined as V-TISK. Image media only gives indirect experience, which generally is shown to be cut off from our sense of substantial reality. Therefore, media arts education must focus on connecting indirect experience and bodily sense to be able to develop a kind of aesthetic sensibility which helps students to better perceive the substantial reality of visual images. This discovery can be a strong rational reason for teaching media arts education in standard education. Not only that, but it also suggests that this common creating process is very effective in various fields such as reminiscence therapy using photo images in medical institutions. This is because the tactile stimulus is associated with various memories and aesthetic sensibilities.