「Institution」カテゴリーアーカイブ

Michael Mauer: Fencing

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Ever since middle school, the sport of fencing has been an important part of my life, so naturally I picked fencing as my CIP. The Doshisha fencing team practices every day but Monday for about 2 hours. I’ve only been going to Tuesday and Thursday practices because I have to take a 70 minute bus ride to get to Doshisha’s Kyotanabe campus for practice. Much like in America, practice is composed of some warm-up, followed by free bouting.

Practicing with the fencing club was a great opportunity to learn about Japanese society. For example, like most sports club in Japan, younger members are expected to use formal language when talking to older members. Moreover, members usually only socialize with other people in the same age group. I’ll never forget my first night of practice when I asked a freshman if he wanted to sit together on the bus ride home. He was bewildered that I even considered asking him instead of another Junior (even though I hadn’t talked to the other Juniors yet!).

That said, the most important thing I’ve learned from the fencing club is that no matter how different two cultures are, some things are the same around the world. Sore legs after practice, triumphant screams after a successful touch – these sorts of experiences and emotions are shared between fencers in Japan, America, and around the world. In short the love and dedication we share does not just belong to one culture. It is universal.

Thus, my advice to the students that follow in my footsteps at KCJS is to remember that no matter how strange and alien Japan might seem at times, remember that you certainly have some common ground with the people and culture around you. Explore those similarities and differences by getting involved. Immerse yourself. Even if you don’t know what to say, even if you aren’t confident in your Japanese – dive in head first. I know it might be scary, but I promise that no matter how scary it is, it will be even more rewarding.

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George Chen: Kyoto University Animation Club

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This semester, I joined the Kyoto University animation club, which primarily is an interest group for students interested in various types of animated TV series and films. Meetings primarily consisted of casual, informal get-togethers in small groups, discussing various shows and films. Many of the members, incidentally all guys, seemed to be interested in TV series like K-On and Gurren Lagann more than films like those by Hayao Miyazaki and Shinkai Makoto. So, while our exact interests were more distant than I thought they might be, I learned several things, not directly related to the club’s content, about how Japanese club life and relations go about.

The club was very informal, with a flat organization, and various people used distal and direct-style speech, which seemed to be mostly personal preference rather than senpai-kouhai relationship. Coming and going into the club room, which was in a science building, was fairly informal, and people just gathered with various interests, playing games, introducing shows, or debating the merits of various programs. The most important take away I had was that not all Japanese clubs used a hierarchical senpai-kouhai relationship, and this was rather dependent on the type of club’s activity and intensity. In my case, the anime club was not intense, but very welcoming and a nice place to discuss shows that I enjoyed with other like-minded, Japanese students.

Clearly, if you are looking for an intense, structured, hierarchal club, other circles would probably be a better fit. But if talking about animation in an easy-going clubroom sounds interesting, the circle could be worth a look.

Xiaoyu Liu: Sumie

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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!!!!

Erin Gallagher: Hiking Circle

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This semester, I decided to join the Hiking Circle for my community involvement project. It was challenging at first, because I had to write very formal emails in Japanese in order to see if I could join, which I wasn’t used to doing. But once I was able to join the club, I had a lot of fun! The Hiking Circle meets once a week for a few hours every Saturday, so it fits easily into my schedule, especially since we meet on campus, so I don’t have to spend a lot of time traveling. Club activities include hiking one week out of the month, and ‘training’ the other three; usually it’s running by the Horikawa.

What I like about the Hiking Circle, though, is that it’s not just about the training. After activities are over, people usually spend some time hanging out in the club room, talking, playing video games, and making food. It’s sometimes been hard for me to keep up with conversation because everyone talks pretty fast, but they’ve been really good about slowing down and clarifying things for me when I don’t understand.

I’ve had a lot of fun with my CIP so far. The other members are really cool, and I get to go hiking in the mountains around Kyoto, which are gorgeous. I’m so glad I decided to join!

http://d-live.info/club/sports/index.php?c=club_view&pk=1364458233

Isaac Jemielita: Shogi

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I did not know what to expect when I started my CIP. When I was in high school, I played some chess so I thought it would be fun to learn how to play Japanese chess- shogi. The first time I went to the shogi room, this tiny little room called a box, I opened the door to find a single person sleeping on the floor. Not wanting to disturb him, I slowly closed the door and took down the contact information for the club. That was a weird introduction to the shogi club but was pretty representative of the club as a whole. The atmosphere of the club is very relaxed- people come and go as they please, they play shogi as the want, and generally just want a place to kick back with friends.

When I started learning shogi, I had two problems. The first problem was that I had no idea how to play shogi. This was further compounded by my inability to read the kanji on the pieces. The second problem was that chess strategy is hard enough to understand without trying to figure out what is being said in Japanese. Somehow, I figured out how to play the game after a couple of thoroughly embarrassing interactions. I’m still getting trashed by all the other shogi players but it’s okay because if I ever want to relax and play a quiet game of shogi, I know where to go.

Jaime Craven: Ohara Gakuin

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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!

 

Alex Hall : Kyoto University Basketball Circle

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I joined Kyoto University’s Free Club, a basketball circle, thinking that because I had been playing basketball since I was young, it would allow me to make connections with people based off of common ground. This was a correct choice in my eyes, as it felt natural to play and I could focus my energies on making friends in between scrimmages. While many KCJS students probably want to delve into something “new” and “Japanese”, I would suggest choosing something natural as their CIP, so they too can make valuable connections instead of focusing on learning something new.

Another thing that I feel I did correctly in the past few months with Free Club is saying “yes” to as many invitations as possible. Because of this, I got put into various Line group chats, grabbed meals with various members of the circle, and even got to go to the Autumn Camp, a group trip to Adogawa. The whole point of the CIP is to become a member of some community, and I believe the only way to truly become a member of any group is to interact with them as much as possible.

One of my fears in joining Free Club was navigating the complex Japanese hierarchy revolving around age. And while this exists (first-years always mop the court and most of my closest friends in the circle are my fellow second-years), it was not as strict as I believed. Those older than me would forgive me the occasionally omission of さん, and those younger than me didn’t really seem to be afraid of asking me to rotate faster on defense, etc. That being said, I would caution those joining university circles about the delicate balance you have to strike when it comes to these sorts of things. On one hand, I wanted to get to know everyone, and would try to talk to everyone from first-years to Ph.D. students. On the other hand, I had to be cautious of appearing rude. As a foreign student, I’m sure I got some more leeway on this issue than most, but at the same time I feel like I still made some missteps that I hope future students can avoid. My advice would be to use the です/ます form most of the time, until you feel certain that the other party is comfortable enough with you for you to stop using it. That is probably the most important thing – to not judge things from your own static point of view, but to try and see them through the eyes of the other circle members.

Free Club’s website: http://freeclub.oops.jp/

Lahna "Fury" Sheron: L’s Cat Rescue

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After a few attempts to join more KCJS-typical CIPs, like an aikido circle and a choir, I sat down and considered how I actually wanted to participate in Kyoto’s community. The answer to this question, like many others in my life, was cats. I had volunteered for a few years with cats back in America, so I knew the gist of what I was signing up for. My language class sensei located a shelter about a minute’s walk from the Kamikatsura train station. （「＝L’s=猫の家族探し」。）
It clicked early on to me that the patient people who worked at L’s were willing to guess at my dubious vocabulary until they understood what I was saying, to my relief.
The first day I got there, there were three kittens who had been born only the previous week and abandoned in the street by their mother, pictured here: http://catls.blog5.fc2.com/blog-entry-477.html
I got to see them saved by the people working there, and sometimes even care for them myself, which was tremendously satisfying since I’d only ever volunteered with cats over the age of 15 back in the states. I remember one week I became very startled to see a very large bump on one of their bellies. I was extremely worried because I’d only ever seen that size of bump on cats who had cancer. I quickly looked up the word for tumor and told the owner of the shelter. She kind of laughed and told me to my relief that it was just a hernia. I don’t know how that little guy got a hernia at three weeks old, but he’s still fine scampering around and I know the word for tumor now.
This is just one of the many stories I have of the good people at L’s saving lives and legitimately caring about their animals. The interesting thing people don’t tell you about many shelters in Japan is that they, like L’s, take place in private homes and living spaces, and are filled with animals to which volunteers donate their time, money, and love. I was shocked to learn this, and am elated there are such good people in Japan fighting under the radar to save animals’ lives, both inside and outside NPO’s.

Anna Kelly: Volunteering at a Museum

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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/

Lauren Levine: Kyoto Walking Circle

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For my CIP I knew that I wanted to be in a relaxed environment with Japanese students my own age so that I would be able to engage the other club members as peers. For this reason I chose to join the Kyoto Walking Circle, a club open to students of various colleges around Kyoto, and which meets once a week to walk around and explore different temples and shrines around the city. The club met every Saturday at 1:30 PM (at different locations around Kyoto depending on which temple or shrine we were visiting that day) with occasional night time events during the week.

One thing that surprised was how many members the club had and how much the people that came varied from week to week. At a given activity there could be more than twenty people, but very often more than half of those people would not have come the following week. Since the walking club is a very relaxed environment, attendance is always optional and most people come to events sporadically. This meant that I got to meet a lot of different people, but I often would not see the same person multiple weeks in a row, which made it difficult to stay in contact and become close friends. Still, everyone was really welcoming and friendly, and I enjoyed hanging out with everyone during the club activities.

Another thing that I noticed was that there was not a strong distinction between senpai and kouhai in this club environment. Even though there were students ranging in age from first years all the way to graduate students, most people in the club spoke in short form to each other and treated each other like friends (though some younger members did frequently speak in teinei). When speaking to mw, people usually started by speaking formally during the introductions, but soon switched to casual speak afterward.

Rather than the main distinction in the group being specifically by age, the more prominent distinction was in the smaller circles of friends that formed within the group. Since the group had so many members, only some of whom would come any given week, it was normal for the group walking that day to split into smaller groups of 4-6 while we were all walking. Some groups were all girls, other were all boys, and others were mixed (though there tended to be more guys than girls at the club activities). These were not official groups, but just groups that naturally formed based on friendships because our group was too large to all walk around together.

As a result, each week I would usually only end up talking to about five or six people depending on whichever smaller group I ended up walking with. I usually walked with whoever I started talking with before the activity started. The people in my CIP were very friendly, so I was almost always approached by someone who wanted to make conversation. If not, I would just introduce myself to the person who was staring at me the most. We would sometimes talk about the place we were visiting, but usually our conversations revolved around more general discussions of school, hobbies, and interests.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time as a member of the Kyoto Walking Circle. I got to see a lot of different temples and shrines around Kyoto, and because our club activities were mostly walking, there was a lot of time to make conversation and get to know the members of the circle.