First Class: Contemporary Issues in Japanese Politics

In an epic rush to get to the Shiga University campus before class started and to find where the classroom was, a classmate named Kelly ( picture might come later) got our bike helmets and hopped on to our bikes and pedaled through the windy town. It was so cold! and it was the day that I happened to forget my gloves...I was not a happy camper. Also it was my first time being at the campus because I wasn't able to go for the bike tour and Kelly didn't know where she was going ( but knew how to get there) so it was a small adventure.

After finding our way and the main gate we parked our bikes and started exploring with a very terrible map that they gave us. On our map the buildings were numbers, on the signs outside of the buildings they had kanji...the numbers did not help us at all.



After walking around for a short time we came across a building that look like the place we had to go, and after standing in front of the building we were asked by a male student who had almost perfect English where we needed to go. Kelly and I were surprised that he actually talked to us because normally Japanese people don't go out of their way to speak to foreigners. Also another surprise was that he was really friendly and gave us a small tour of the school, he showed us where our classroom was, the small school store, the cafeteria, and was about to eat lunch with us too! He told us a little about himself, such as he lived in America for three years ( so that's why his English is better than most), he lived specifically in California. On our way to sit down in the cafeteria we we saw two other students that were apart of the program eating there, of course I mentioned it and he insisted that we go eat with them and gave us a chocolate bar.

Not wanting to be rude or too clingy we went to go sit with the other two students.

 With this encounter I started thinking about the Japanese mentality when speaking to foreigners, either they completely ignore us, glance us over a couple of times, or try to talk to us. But then I also started wondering how much courage do they need to have in order to speak to us. There are lots of students that are taking and studying for the TOFEL, which is a test that measures how much English you can understand and how well are you able to speak English. But none (maybe) of the students are willing to speak to the foreign students unless they have to, such as getting to know the Shiga University students day ( four students came over for an hour and with the JCMU students and then left).

Hmm it just makes me wonder because even though our Japanese isn't great and we want to learn more we take chances and try to talk to people, but then again back in America we ignore foreigners even if we do know the language. I wonder if it's individual or if it is society thing...

Anyways, back to politics.

Our professor is a Englishman from Manchester, and he was one of the first people that participated in JET program! I was really shocked and then it also gave me insight to how old he is and how old the JET program is. The class is about fours hours long....

four...
hours...
long...
That's how long the first class was, and I'm not too excited for it either...but hopefully it's fun

Here's our awesome packet of information about basic Japanese Politics! We also found out right away that the packet is a little out dated because of the most recent election of Shinzo Abe.

That's more research on our side...