Once a week I went to Mitsuba Kindergarten (separate from elementary school) for three hours in the afternoon for after school activities. As a volunteer I was a supervisor, but my role was mostly to play with the kids. It felt like I was back in kindergarten for a few hours every week, it was a lot of fun. For this CIP be ready for the kids to want to be picked up and always want piggy back rides.
For my CIP, I volunteered on a weekly basis at 深草幼稚園, (fukakusa yochien), a kindergarten near Fushimi-Inari. My tasks included playing games, drawing, and otherwise having fun with the kids, as well as preparing Japanese picture books to read and translate into English for them. Aside from just playing with the kids, we also got to teach them many English words, sing English songs, etc. to try and raise their English ability.
I really enjoyed this CIP. The kids are all incredibly cute, extremely nice, and very open. My only worry going into this volunteering program was that it would be difficult to connect with the kids, but that wasn’t true in the slightest. They are extremely excited about your presence, and will happily invite you to play games with them. The kids are very passionate and energetic, which definitely brightened up my days.
If you enjoy working with kids and want the opportunity to see how kindergartens in Japan work, I highly recommend volunteering here! The professors provide an excellent support system and are very clear about the rules. The opportunity to see the kindergartener’s gratitude was a pretty unbeatable feeling, so I’d strongly encourage new KCJS students to apply, even if they haven’t worked with kids before and are just curious!
Me and the other volunteers with the Yochien’s Senseis.
I volunteered at Happiness Children’s Cafeteria this semester. Every Wednesday I would help serve free meals to local children. The nonprofit also runs a cafe and does study sessions for the students on Mondays.
Volunteers would set up, serve food, eat and play with the kids, and clean up. There was essentially no English spoken, so I was able to practice my Japanese, too.
Advice: Try to help as much as possible. I found that they didn’t usually tell me what to do, so I had to be proactive in offering.
The CIP activity I chose to do this semester was volunteering at Bazaar Cafe. At the cafe, you will likely be washing dishes and spending your free time afterwards talking to to the other staff/volunteers.
During the first half of my time at Bazaar Cafe, I stayed in the backyard shed with the other staff/volunteers to eat snacks and have fun chats. The second half was mainly centered on washing dishes.
Although volunteering at Bazaar Cafe was a bit unsatisfying at times, I still enjoyed it overall. The memories I made in the shed are what I will remember when I think back to this CIP and it definitely lessened my dissatisfaction with the second half of my time there. If you’re looking for a more low commitment CIP and you’re interested in developing more day-to-day speaking skills, I would recommend Bazaar Cafe. However, my biggest piece of advice would be to volunteer in the last 1-2 hours before it closes on the day you choose to go. This is when the cafe is least busy and is when you can spend more time talking to the other staff/volunteers instead of doing dishes the entire time. If I had done that more often, I would have likely enjoyed this CIP throughout the semester rather than just the first half.
This semester I volunteered at Happiness Children’s Cafeteria. In this cafeteria, every Wednesday dinners are offered for free for kids from low-income families. Every Monday, the cafeteria also serves as a study room for kids to do their homework.
I went there every Wednesday from 5 pm to 8 pm. Volunteers’ duties include serving dinner, washing the dishes, cleaning up, and playing with kids. There were plenty of opportunities to communicate with kids and other volunteers.
Advice to incoming students: the children’s cafeteria had a chill and casual atmosphere. It is great for anyone who enjoys hanging out with kids. Plus, volunteers can also enjoy free meals with the kids.
For this semester’s CIP, I volunteered at Nagaoka Zen Juku! Nagaoka Zen Juku is located in the southern part of Kyoto and is a small Buddhist temple that focuses on giving college students and working people the opportunity to engage in Zen Buddhism and monastic life. At the time of volunteering there, three people lived there: the head monk, a monk in charge of day-to-day life, and a Japanese college student. If you wish to learn more about it, here is a link to their website: https://nagaokazenjuku.or.jp/english/ .
As a part of my time volunteering there, I visited once a week and engaged in a variety of activities: practicing zazen meditation, cleaning the temple, and talking with the other inhabitants. I had a lot of fun volunteering there and I’m thankful I got to meet lots of awesome people and learn a lot about Japanese Buddhist tradition. Furthermore, after this semester, I actually have the opportunity to stay there over the summer, so I’m excited to continue learning more.
Although this CIP is a little far away and requires quite some time to arrange, I highly recommend it to anyone who is inquisitive about monastic life.
I struggled at first with finding a CIP that called to me. However, I eventually settled with joining a friend from KCJS at being an English teaching assistant at Ohara Gakuin. I hadn’t thought of this idea at first, but after hearing him tell me about how he’s able to help students learn English, it immediately piqued my interest. I find that working with kids can be a refreshing change of pace from working with people your age or older, because they are more energetic, and remind me of my I was also very curious about the Japanese English classroom functioned. I wondered how Japanese students learn English differs from learning a foreign language in America and wanted to compare my experience.
I was absolutely stunned when I first arrived in Ohara. It was tucked in the mountainside, and while I occasionally felt weird, likely because of the altitude, it remains to be one of the prettiest places I’ve seen in Japan, and maybe anywhere The most picturesque spot, however, was the path leading to the school. With a colorful spring of flowers on one side, a calmly flowing stream on the other, and a backdrop of the mountains, I couldn’t help but take pictures and share it with friends and family, even though I’m not a big photographer. The beauty of the town was a great introduction to my experience at Ohara Gakuin.
After making my introductions to various teachers and administrators in the office, I began my first period as an assistant English teacher. The activity we had planned for the day, was for me and Jesus, the other KCJS member, to give introductions of ourselves and our hometowns to the class, and have them vote on whose hometown they’d rather visit. The competitive nature of the activity was surprising at first, but it was a fun activity that engaged the class and inspire me and Jesus to sell our hometowns as best we could.As someone who speaks quickly,I was aware I should be conscious of my talking speed.I thought I was talking slowly during my presentation,but the teacher gestured for me to speak more slowly.I then realized this was going to be harder than I thought it would be.he congratulated me for doing a good job but pointed out I should still speak more slowly.He also recommended asking questions as I went through my presentation to make sure everyone was following along.I supposed I should have been expecting that difficulty going into this for the first time, and I told myself I would do better next time.
It was fun getting a chance to interact with the students. While some of them were shy, some were goofy and energetic. It was refreshing to see such a variety. One student even started talking to me outside of class. I was a bit flustered because I wasn’t expecting it, and was worried I would mess up my Japanese. One of the most interesting things, however, was learning the students’ knowledge of America, or American culture. For example, I was surprised to find out that none of the students knew who Elon Musk was. I suppose Elon Musk isn’t only well known in America, and that may just have been because they were too young to know of him. It made me wonder if kids in America are familiar with Musk. I also had the students guess where my hometown is, which gave me a glimpse into how much they knew about American geography. I think my relatively Euro-centric view of the world had me under the impression they would know more when in reality many Americans couldn’t even tell you where the capital is. It made me realize how different of a world we, as Americans, live in from the average Japanese student. They know more about Japan and Japanese culture than I’ll ever know.
I’m really happy that I participated in this activity as my CIP, and I know it will be something I never forget.
Nearly every week beginning in October of the fall semester, I began volunteering at Fukakusa Kindergarten. A small kindergarten nestled in a residential area on the other side of the Kamo River, I remember how nervous I was my first day! However, all the staff were extremely kind and helpful, making sure I knew what I would be doing with the kids. My time with the kids was comprised of lots of English picture books, random vocabulary the kids wanted to know, and lots of free play time!
I was pleasantly surprised by how enthusiastic the kindergarteners were! Every week they entered the room full of excitement, and would come right up to me to ask to play together or just to ask me how to say certain words in English. As excited as they were to learn from me, I approached every visit just as excited to learn from them. Although not in any formal capacity, through the children and staff I learned so much about how schools operate in Japan! From how snack time and free play time works, to just simply how removing your shoes inside the school is a strictly adhered by custom. I was treated with the utmost respect as just a student visitor, and I was blown away by how much of a positive experience my CIP ended up being. More practically, I learned a lot more about Kansai-ben! While this dialect is often heard in Kyoto, across the Kamo River it’s almost all you exclusively hear from the locals. Picking up Kansai-ben in my interactions with the staff and the students really helped me feel more confident in my Japanese as a whole.
My CIP experience is one I’m eternally grateful for, and I’m so glad I got the opportunity to participate in it thanks to the help of the KCJS office. Exploring an area of Kyoto I had previously never seen, interacting with a dialect I was unfamiliar with but wanted to learn, and simply being able to be around the cutest children I’ve ever seen are memories and lessons I will never forget.
For my CIP, I chose to be an assistant English teacher because I find kids interesting, but also because it partially relates to what I want to do in the future (work with children). The kids range from age three to maybe about high school age, though I specifically asked to work with younger children since I find the way they are so different from adults very interesting. I go about once a week for an hour, though I have gone twice a week a few times as well. The lessons are always in the afternoon, since that is when the kids are out of school! Also, since the lessons are private or semi-private (one child or a very small group), they are at Suemitsu Sensei’s home. It almost makes me feel like the next best thing to a homestay, since she also often gives me homemade snacks or desserts after the lesson that she or her sister have made. She is super sweet and I feel like I have experienced some cultural immersion in this way!
During each lesson, Suemitsu Sensei typically starts with a song (recently, we have been singing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” since it is almost Christmas), and then we go through the lesson for the day in the kids’ textbooks. I assist her in pronouncing parts of the books for the kids to repeat after me, and I also play games with them towards the end of the class! She also held an event at her house in the middle of the semester (a Halloween party!), which was very fun. We performed a little skit (Snow White), played games with the kids, and judged costumes. There were maybe 15-20 children, so it was pretty lively (much more than the usual lessons).
I have really enjoyed my CIP throughout the semester, especially because I had a fairly smooth experience since I was introduced to Suemitsu Sensei through Nakamura Sensei, one of the Japanese professors at KCJS! I feel like I learned a lot about Japanese culture, especially in watching the ways the children interact with each other and hearing some stories from them and from Suemitsu Sensei. It was also really fun teaching them about my own culture and showing them pictures, sometimes of my own past experiences and sometimes just pictures that I have been sent from home (today I showed them pictures of my family’s Thanksgiving meal)!
As for language immersion, I do wish in some ways that I could have spoken more Japanese for my CIP, but I also think I got plenty of language practice through my daily life and in speaking to my conversation partners/Japanese friends. It was a little difficult to interact with the kids at first, though, because it felt like there was a solid language barrier between us (since I was asked to speak only English to them). However, I also appreciated that the kids spoke Japanese freely to each other, because it was really interesting to observe the differences in the ways that they spoke and the ways that adults spoke. I think especially because they are pretty young (6/7 and 9/10), they did not adjust their Japanese for me in the way a language partner probably does, and I think I could learn a lot about their slang because of this!
This semester I participated in helping out at Fukakusa Kindergarten every Monday for two hours, one hour of that being 「英語遊ぼう」(English Playtime) and the second hour being free play time with the children aged 4-6. It was such a blast, and such a good opportunity and experience that I would not have had at any other time in my life.
I feel like I got to learn from the kids, playing games with them and then individually with them outside of “teaching” English. I got to see how the kindergartens operate, what they value, and how many Japanese people spend their early childhood years — something we don’t get to see in the classroom. In particular, I think that the day is spent differently than in US kindergartens — from what I was able to observe, they have a lot of free play and are able to really hone motor abilities, communication with each other, and also get to be energetic kids without consequences. I felt like I got to see the basis for what I knew before — how societies, and in this case, Japanese society, are built when people are young.
In regards to learning Japanese, being able to hear the children and the staff speak in Kansai-ben was so informative and the kids using it was just so adorable! I feel like the teachers using it was also just a confidence booster and helped me understand it quicker when they didn’t need to use “standard” Japanese. Getting that experience outside of the classroom was so valuable.
I also thought it was interesting that they sit down and eat together after assembling their tables and chairs alongside the teachers, which is abnormal in the US, but again, I think it reinforces community and that idea of collectivism versus individualism. Physically the space is different as well; it it super conducive to the collective/communal environment by being open, connected to the outdoors/playground, and generally having larger rooms.
I am really grateful that not only the children were awesome, but the staff at the kindergarten as well. It was great to interact with them, learn from them, and help them out when they were busy or had their hands full with other responsibilities. I only wish that I could have started earlier and known about this opportunity sooner!