Since I arrived in Kyoto in January, the Osaka Central Church of Christ has welcomed me in with open arms. A small church of mostly married couples and working singles, I was connected to it via my church in Boston, a sister congregation within the worldwide International Churches of Christ. Our meetings consist of meaningful lessons and much conversation on a never-ending variety of topics, usually over an after-church lunch. From these friends of mine, I have learned about the care and creativity Japanese exhibit in apparently every aspect of life, a prime example being a cake they made for me out of avocado slices and nuts, since I cannot eat cake. Other experiences include making sushi by hand and witnessing the traditional mochi-making process. I’m afraid much of what I’ve learned in the realm of the Japanese language consists of Kansai Ben, the dialect particular to this region in Japan, and niche church phrases. They must think I’ve progressed, for I had the opportunity to make a welcome speech in front of the congregation one Sunday morning! The most important thing I have learned, however, is certainly that I have a home here in Japan if I ever choose to return.
「Boston University」カテゴリーアーカイブ
Amanda Grice: Klexon and Kyoto Cooking Circle
I am doing two activities for my CIP: taking cooking lessons with the Kyoto Cooking Circle, and volunteering my time at Klexon to help people practice English.
The Kyoto Cooking Circle was made to teach foreigners how to make Japanese food. It only meets once a month so I have only been to two meetings. The first one we made a Japanese stew dish called Nikujyaga. The second was a special meeting to teach a group of high schoolers studying abroad from Boston and took place in a very old style Japanese house. We cooked ramen over a very old wood-burning stove, and washed the vegetables from a hand-pump in the backyard. It was really interesting to be in a very old style Japanese home.
At Klexon we sit in rows at tables and talk to the person across from us. Every ten minutes we all shift one seat down so we get to practice with new people. After that, we split into groups and have a discussion.
Klexon is for anyone wanting to practice English, so it has been helpful for meeting a wider variety of people. I’ve seen college students, English teachers, pharmacy technicians, shopkeepers, Disney World workers, and chemical engineers, to name a few. I have also met other English speakers from all over the world — France, Holland, Syria, India, and Canada. I have been very thankful for this opportunity to meet and talk with such a variety of people and have made many friends at the meetings.
We’re always given a sheet of paper with a conversation topic on it but there have been many times where we have gotten sidetracked and never discussed it. Some topics have been favorite childhood foods, favorite childhood games, favorite thing to do in winter, dream vacations, or clubs you joined in high school.
I like the assigned topics sometimes because it gets you talking about things that usually don’t come up in regular conversation. For example, the night we talked about childhood games, I was seated at a table with three Japanese people, a Dutch man, and a French man. We discovered that we had played all the same childhood games, though we had different names for them. We bonded over these shared childhood experiences that I would not have guessed were so universal.
Some things I have to talk about again and again. I always have to talk about where I’m from and what is famous there and why I came to Japan and what is difficult about Japanese.
Many people I spoke to at Klexon did not understand why I wanted to learn Japanese because they felt like most people in the more visited areas of Japan spoke at least some English. In addition, most of them seemed to have felt forced to learn English for their careers. This was not true of everyone, though, and I met others who were learning English as a hobby along with other languages.
I think Klexon has helped me be a better communicator. I was able to practice my Japanese during and after most meetings. But I also learned how to communicate better in English. Speaking to non-native English speakers forced me to speak clearly and learn how to word things so that they would be more universally understood.
Many people were shy with practicing their English. I can understand, since I’m very shy with using my Japanese. Over time I got better with keeping a conversation going, so that there would be no awkward silences.
I am really thankful I had this opportunity to meet so many different people and talk about culture.
Yiwei Ding: Shamisen Lesson
During the course of learning Shamisen, not only did I learn how to play this classical Japanese instrument, but also did I know more about how Japanese people greet each other and treat people of different relations with varied ways.
Every time Okada-san（one of the fellow students） or Iwasaki sensei came back from a trip, they would buy us souvenirs such as Taiwan okashi or cookies from Hokkaido. For easier distribution, the souvenirs always have dozens of small packages within the large box. Sometimes Okada-san would show us pictures from some events. Personally speaking, it’s really a good tradition to bring stuff for friends or co-workers from a trip. It’s always a good thing to share the happiness with other people of a journey. And it also surprise me how considerate Japanese people are that they would remember to buy the right the amount and size of gifts so as not to bother people.
I’m also glad to have the opportunity to attend Okada-san’s graduation recital. It’s in a Japanese style room in a beautiful building complex. All the performers were wearing Kimono and sitting on their knees. For the first time that I experienced the Japanese performing culture in real. I was told by Nakamura-sensei that everyone should at least behave properly, although the audiences are not necessarily required to sit on their knees, it’s important to mind your behavior and keep quiet during the performance. At the break time, Iwasaki-sensei had prepared Japanese Matcha and okashi for all the people present. It’s really a great tradition to always treat your customers nicely.
All the beautiful songs that had been played have gentle and intriguing rhythms which are different from what I have ever heard before in modern music.
After experiencing how nicely and neatly Japanese people treat each other and how this kind of culture affect their way of being, I really appreciate this great opportunity of doing CIP and learning new skills and traditions in this country.
Xiaoyu Liu: Sumie
I did Sumie for my CIP activity. It was very fun. Sensei is nice and friendly. The class size is small, so everyone gets equall attention. Maybe because I’m the foreigner and the only young people there (other people are around 50s 60s), I get more attention from sensei. Every class is very relaxing, we sit around a long table, talking while drawing. the lesson holds once a week, and two hours long. the lesson breaks into two sessions. During the first one-hour session, we learn some drawing tactics, and keep practicing. then we have a ten minute break. during the break, sensei makes green tea for us, and we drink together while having a short conversation about our past week’s life. then during the next one hour session, sensei let us draw whatever jumps into our head at that moment. sensei always mentions that for sumie, self-imagination is important. Because I’m a beginner, I usually draw something thats very easy to draw, like flowers. Sometimes, I find inspiration through online photos. Every week, there’s a different topic for us to draw things, for example, this week’s topic is christmas! Anyway, I really enjoy my sumie lesson, and I can do sumie now! Because the class, I also really like my sensei, 上村先生. she’s so nice and friendly. Kyoto rains often during the fall season. Sensei would drive me to the station if there was raining outside. If anyone’s interested in Japanese traditional arts, I highly recommend 上村先生’s sumie lesson!!!!
Jaime Craven: Ohara Gakuin
For my CIP, I volunteered as an assistant English teacher at a school in scenic Ohara. On Mondays I took the subway to Kokusaikaikan Station, the northernmost stop on the Karasuma Line, and then rode a bus into the mountains where the school was located. The full trip was about one hour there and one hour back, relative to Doshisha.
My teacher recommended Ohara Gakuin as my CIP because of my previous teaching experience in both America and Japan. However, this was my first time in a school so small. From first through eighth grade, the total head count was just seventy students!
Every week I joined a different group of students – usually two per visit – and helped out with whatever exercises the teacher had planned for the day. My role, which I initially thought would be mostly demonstrating pronunciation, was more participatory than expected. We played games to strengthen vocabulary, and conducted mini interviews to practice grammar. Because of the small class sizes, it was easy to make sure that everyone got a chance to participate. Occasionally, instead of a lesson, the students would rehearse plays, or prepare for the various school festivals sprinkled through the fall semester. Even when returning to a familiar class, no two visits to Ohara Gakuin were the same.
It was fascinating to watch as the students intuited their own language skills over time. Even their mistakes showed instinctive pattern recognition: swapping out “took a bath” for “have a bath,” for example. They worked hard to make themselves understood in class, even if the exact rules or vocabulary for the situation escaped them. In every lesson, the teachers encouraged them to think creatively about the topic at hand, going beyond what was laid out in the textbook.
As an English teacher, I tried to use as little Japanese as possible, as was expected of me. Of course, in doing so, there is always a danger that the students will be too daunted to even respond, let alone retain new information. I also worried about playing into the stereotype of a foreigner who doesn’t speak a word of Japanese. In the end, I compromised by speaking only in English, but also making sure that they knew I was listening when they spoke Japanese. Nodding along and laughing at their jokes went a long way in showing that I understood. This, in turn, made them feel more comfortable when constructing their own English sentences, knowing they could switch back to their mother tongue at any time if they needed a quick break.
In every class, the students proved themselves to be unflappably confident and attentive, and I was fortunate enough to meet as many as possible during my time there. This CIP activity comes highly recommended for any KCJS student interested in education!
Anna Kelly: Volunteering at a Museum
For my community involvement project I have been volunteering at the museum and archives at the Kyoto Institute of Technology. The museum specializes in different fields of design, and has a wide collection of antique posters, radios, art books, and more. The most recent exhibitions on display were about foreign advertisements related to food, and the Dadaist artist, May Ray, respectively.
The role that I play at the museum changes every week depending on what kind of tasks there are that need to be done. In my time there I have helped take photos to document antiques, set up and take down exhibitions, frame posters to go into new exhibitions, and enter data from old art books. Although it is probably the most tedious of my tasks, I find looking through the art books the most interesting. Some of the books were published as far back as the Meiji Period, so I have had the opportunity to learn something about old kanji that is generally not used anymore. For example, I never would have guessed that 学 used to be 學, 芸 used to be 藝, 十 can be 拾 in official documents, or that the number twenty (廿) has its own kanji!
Because I worked at a museum instead of joining a club or circle at Doshisha or Kyoto University, I didn’t have many opportunities to meet others my age through my CIP. However, I do feel that I am lucky to have had the opportunity to have a somewhat job-like experience in Japan, and although they may have not been college students, the people I met were great and taught me a lot.
Here is the museum’s website, if you are interested:
https://www.kit.ac.jp/en/research/museum-and-archives/
Ruiqi Wang: Manga Lesson
As my CIP for this semester, I chose Manga kyoshitsu. At first, I just want to experience something different from last semester and learn something about Japan. As we all know that manga and animation are really famous and professional in Japan and I am actually a manga fan and doing some little mangas by myself as well, I decide to do this for my CIP in Kyoto manga kyoshitsu with Okamoto sensei and Himura sensei. I go there every Saturday afternoon and spend 3 hours there drawing things. Basically you can draw anything you like at first and sensei will tell you which kind of exercise you need specifically. For me, I like to draw illustrations with characters but I can’t do very well in drawing human body, so sensei just gave me a photo book with human bodies and taught me how to draw human body from beginning systematically. Sensei will also gave me many advices when I am drawing. For example, the way to transform real pictures into manga characters and the composition of pictures, as well as some small tips which are really helpful.
Not only the way of drawing, but I also learnt how to interact with Japanese people. It’s totally fine to use casual speaking style with Japanese students in university, but since students in manga kyoshitsu are not all collage students and usually you cannot tell their ages, it’s better to use desu masu form to them. Because senseis are at our age as well, there was no wall between us. Of course we have to use Keigo to senseis but the atmosphere was really relaxing. Since I read manga as well, other Japanese students didn’t consider me as a foreigner, which makes me feel comfortable in this class. (The other reason that they didn’t consider me as foreigner may be that I am a Chinese which you can’t really tell whether I am a foreigner or not from my appearance. ) There was an elder sensei who is teaching traditional painting at the same place will always serve tea for us and students will bring snacks to share with everyone during break. I think this is a very special Japanese culture that happening everywhere in Japan, the tea time.
I really appreciate this opportunity to really join in a Japanese community like this kind of small class for manga. In this class, I had a chance to interact with young Japanese and here a lot of interesting things of Japanese young culture.
Bohan Li: Shamisen
Before I came to KCJS I hadn’t really decided what to participate in. Not all the programs would provide with such good chances for students to be involved in Japanese society. And I really hoped that I could take advantage of it. It took me a long time to think about what goal would I want to achieve at the end of semester. Is it a deep understanding of Japanese society? Or it could be getting to know about the working environment in Japanese since I have the idea to work in Japan after graduation? After careful consideration and getting advices from my teacher, I finally decided to practice Shamisen as my CIP program.
My initial consideration was that as a traditional and Japan-only instrument, Shamisen could be a good tool for me to learn about traditional Japanese music and arts. In China we actually have the similar instrument but nowadays most people don’t know more about it. However, after been imported to japan and assimilated to Japanese culture, Shamisen plays important part of Japanese「邦楽」. I would like to learn more about the spread and development of Shamisen through time.
At the beginning I thought it should be a group class that one teacher sits in the front and students follows teachers instruction and practicing. But then I found out that instead of a Shamisen class, it is more like an amateur’s club. Usually they have typical groups that practice same songs and meet regularly once a week. I was really nervous when I first meet with them. Partly because most of the members are elder people, I was worried that they would not be happy if a foreigner suddenly joined their private group. However, I was welcomed and even taken care of by them. They were curious about my past experience related to Japan, and would also like to tell me their personal relation to China, such as travel experience or business with Chinese partner. I was surprised because this is very different from things I learned from the Japanese minorities class that Japanese people would be offended if someone intend to enter their private group. Even I only joined them for few classes, I feel like I have already become a part of their party. Also, practicing Shamisen is a hart task for me since I had almost zero knowledge about string instrument. And because the Shamisen pick is actually really heavy, I had a hard time learning the basic rules like how to sit, rest my wrist and hold the ばち(picks) in the correct way. It was painful at the beginning, but when I firstly played a whole song, I felt that all the efforts were worthwhile.
I really want to thank my teacher Iwazaki Chieko sensei. She brought me into their club and also the area of traditional Japanese music. From her I learned not just about Shamisen as a instrument, but also how traditional Japanese aesthetics are changing and integrated with modern society. The insistence of Japanese artists and awareness of modern culture make Japan the special place that can retain its culture so well when other countries are somehow ignoring and losing their traditions.
Yun Zhang: Kyoto Manga Class
For this semester, I joined the 京都まんが教室 for my CIP. Although the course fee is a little bit expensive, I’d say it’s totally worth it, mainly because it is where you could have a real cultural communication with people who really understand you.
The most precious thing I experienced from this CIP is the feeling of getting into a real Japanese circle where I belong. Different from the general anime or manga club I’ve joined in the US, this class is more like a doujin-based fan circle. Since most of the students in the manga class are young ladies around the same age, we mostly watch same types of anime and have interests in same kinds of stuff(e.g. shipping). Thus, there are never too many topics to chat about, from which I get to pick up a lot of unique language that is only used within the Japanese anime-fan circle. However, since it is kind of an advanced course, the format of “teaching” almost doesn’t exist. Basically, you just draw whatever you like in every class, and the instructors will give some personal advice and instructions on your drawings. Since I don’t have any essential knowledge of drawing anime characters or manga before, the level is way too high for me. (Other students are all doujin artists.)
Therefore, here is my advice for those who might be interested: If you love anime/Japanese pop culture, and want to experience the feeling of really being one of the Japanese anime fans, don’t hesitate to participate in the manga class. However, if all you want is to learn how to draw manga and do not have any essential knowledge, I would suggest taking a more formal course that focuses on teaching basic skills of drawing manga.
Nicholas Niculescu: My Time at Klexon
My CIP was participating in an English speaking circle called Klexon. This circle takes place every Tuesday from 7 to 9 pm. This CIP is a unique one, unlike some other CIP’s, like a martial art or private lessons, it allowed me to interact with many different Japanese people from many different walks of life. I had the opportunity to talk to both college students and people working today. The sessions had a general structure. The first hour would consist of 10 minute talks with 6 people, and the second hour had us in a group of 4 to 6 doing group working together. It was during this hour I was able to speak Japanese with my partners.
While practicing my Japanese is was excellent, what I really had a chance to do is look at different Japanese people and learn about their experiences learning English. It is interesting from my perspective, I am normally in the opposite situation every day in Japan so to see from the opposite perspective was an interesting one. I learned a number of different things. First I learned very intricate things about learning new languages and trying to learn new words. When my Japanese conversation partners attempted lo learn a new expression, they would generally ask if the expression can be used by itself. I always said it had to be said in context.
There were a couple of interesting observations during my time at Klexon. Everyone thought I was a English teacher before I explained to them that I was a student, and oppositely I thought everyone was a university student if they were not wearing a suit. It was a funny thing every time the mistake occurred. A more serious observation is that many people are studying for the purposes of their job. I would rarely hear reasons like “oh I just want to use it for traveling”.
The final observation that I saw was that everyone was very courageous. I know how it feels to attempt to speak a foreign language to a native speaker and how nervous it can be. Yet every single partner I talked with did their best to practice their English. I know a little about English teaching in Japan, and I know it is primarily taught from a text book, however, in these sessions I see people who know that is not enough and they attempt to learn English the best way they can, by practicing.