Moral Values in Rieko Nakagawa’s Children’s Story “Kujiragumo”

Morals are the principles that direct people’s behavior. Hence, moral education should be taught from an early age. One of the alternative moral delivery is through children’s stories. Therefore, this paper focused on moral values in Rieko Nakagawa’s children story “Kujiragumo” in the Japanese language textbook Kokugo for 1st graders in elementary school. The moral values discussed in this paper are based on Japanese moral education for elementary school by Klaus Luhmer because the story’s characters are an elementary school teacher and his students, set in a school, and the readers are elementary school students. This qualitative literary research used the sociolody of literature design. Data were collected using the closereading techniques by identifying and categorizing the moral values found in “Kujiragumo”. The results found in this study are that the actions perfomed by all characters have fulfilled Luhmer’s four points of moral education and can be used as disscussion material for teachers with the students. Those points are on the level of understanding of elementary school students, so the students who read it can identify themselves with the characters in the short story, and the morals conveyed can be internalized.