This critical instrumental case study examines a transformative world language learning approach to a unit on culture in an introductory Japanese class in a public high school. Couched in recent post-9/11 language "policy" debates, which strikingly lack mention of religion, spirituality, or environmental issues of climate change and sustainability, this study examines how a transformative world language learning approach develops and identifies students' environmentally based spirituality and how students articulate such "ecospirituality" in their emerging, standards-based Japanese writing. Critical analysis of written, interview, and classroom data reveals that a transformative world language learning approach may be effective in bridging traditional written literacies with "ecospiritual literacies" in the world language classroom. It also provides a lens for students' socio-dialogic learning of environment-related vocabulary and their subsequent use of it in their Japanese writing. Finally, this study suggests that while students rejected identities of religiosity, they embraced and articulated identities of ecospirituality. (Contains 1 table and 2 footnotes.)