The Best Time to Come to Japan
One of the cardinal rules for gaijin coming to Japan is, try your best to make it over here as a university student. College life in Japan is a kind of magical time between childhood and adulthood, mercifully free of the stress that normally comes with studying at university, where you can make lifelong friends and see Japan from a viewpoint you won't ever get to enjoy again. I was too poor to come to Japan when I was in college, so I had to come here as a shakai-jin, a "society person" or full-time worker, which colored my experiences in a different way, but I'd have given anything to be able to visit Japan during school. Many universities offer study abroad programs that allow students to spend a semester or a year living in Japan, so if you or a Japan-focused young person you know would like to come to Japan for a year, start looking into what's available. Remember my theory that every young American should be made to live for a year outside their home country, which would do wonders for the way we view our own country and the rest of the world.
If you are lucky enough to come here during your college years, this is what you get to look forward to:
posted by Peter in Japan at 8:10 PM
4 Comments:
Let me add my vote, and expand just a bit.
Not only does the stressless atmosphere at universities make it ideal to enjoy Japan and Japanese people. They also have an incredibly amount of lively "organized" non-academical life, boasting all sorts of special interest clubs. That might be special or not depending which country you come from (coming from Spain, it is). Still, as a foreigner whose "job" is to suck as much of the culture and customs as possible, they are the treat you do not want to miss. You'll be able to dive into a unique environment many foreigners will never have the oportunity to penetrate.
I was lucky enough to attend to Waseda University for a few months last year (not as an undergraduate, but students are thrilling with curiosity to mingle with foreigners, anyway). Waseda is particularly known for the amount of student circles it boasts. Not as a demerit to the classes I took, joining one of those circles and being "adopted" by a couple of lovely sempai, was the thing that contributed by far the most to my learning of the language, of the people and their way of relating, to be delighted with loads of charming cultural tidbits, hidden to the casual foreigner, and ultimately to fall (deeper) in love with Japan.
If you can do it, do it.
9:29 PM
That's cool. A friend of mine went to the same program, probably (国際部, right?) and he had a lot of fun. He joined the Outdoor Drunkers Club, which specialized in drinking outdoors. I really studied too much in college myself, looking back.
11:52 PM
There is a Art and Design Workshop in Tokyo that I'm considering (through Temple University), but I am wondering if people will look at me kind of weird because I am an older student (I'm 35). There is no age limit, but returning to college later in life does not seem to be as common in Japan as here is the states. It makes me wonder how well I'll fit in. Am I just over thinking this?
10:45 AM
Heh, I've got a post going on that very subject. Yes, they don't really go back to school at a later time in Japan, since it's hard to take the same college entrance tests at the age of 35 that you could barely pass at age 18. That said, I'm sure any institution like Temple is going to be a lot more understanding.
11:56 AM
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