Positive Vibes

Today has been a very, very good day. I finally got my first real e-mail from Bryan, which reassured me that everything at home is going well. I got an e-mail from Mom that let me know that my Grandma is still doing okay. I finally was able to send her my birthday wish list (which is all food, since a lot of it is expensive here). I had Japanese class and I think I’m getting better, and then I had an area studies in martial arts. One of the students was missing from the course, so I ran back to the dorm to find her. On my way back, I saw a truck selling huge bags of tangerine-type oranges for 500 yen, which is $5.00. I bought a bag and was walking away, and then I said arigato, which is thank you in Japanese and they told me to come back and gave me several HUGE oranges from the pricier box. I was pretty excited. Now I have a great breakfast and dessert food for a while. I finally got to meet with one of my instructors and start working out my learning plan for the semester. They are really flexible and it looks like I’m going to get to do a lot of things that I was worried I would have to pick from. I am taking Japanese, and then I am doing Area Studies, which is a fun series of lectures about the culture here. My other classes are Behind the Mask, a course about the minority groups in Japan and Interactive Web Publishing, a course about networking and certain technologies that I am taking for no credit. The rest of my courses will be independent studies, and you can check the bottom of this post for more information about them. After my advisor’s meeting I got some of my homework done, but it’s kind of time consuming, because I am not only doing my homework in romaji (which is written out using the English alphabet), I am also doing it in kana, the Japanese character system. There are two sets, one for Japanese words and one for English words such as names. A lot of stores and products here can be identified by sounding out the katakana to figure out the English equivalent. So, doing my homework that was is good practice, but it does take longer. After some homework, we hackey sacked for a while. I’m still bad, but I do think of you kids at home whenever I play. When everyone was ready we headed to a really wonderful natural foods restaurant that caters to vegetarians. The meal was fantastic. I am not sure exactly what I ate, but all of it was very different and wonderful. There was pasta, a million types of tofu, potatoes, seaweed, etc. It was very good and I certainly left feeling full. The trip home consisted of a conversation with one of the guys here about Communism and our ideas for how it could be applied in small communities to produce a positive result, though we both agree it wasn’t meant to be applied to running entire countries. I went home and hung out at the guys dorm, which has pretty much become the norm for me (is anyone surprised?) and one of the guys gave me shiatsu. It’s not really a massage, but it does make your body feel a lot better. Shiatsu, as he explained, is about applying pressure to certain pressure points and channeling chi, or energy, through their bodies into the pressure points. I could really tell a difference walking home, because my bad ankle actually felt connected to my leg for a change. It was a good feeling to have walking home. I went to bed early, on a Friday night (well, at least early for me). The schedule works a lot different here, just because everyone’s very academically focused, not because they have to be, but because they really like what they are doing.

I feel like I should explain here a little more about the Friend’s World Program and the way it works. Although as a new student I am required to take certain courses that allow me to get more out of my study abroad here in Japan, they really discourage us from taking only courses offered by the center. I have about 6 credits which I can work with for any studies I want to pursue on my own. Right now I am working with incorporating a study on women’s issues here in Japan into my Behind the Mask class and will probably be doing my big paper in the course on whether or not Japanese women deserve classification as a minority. I then am, of course, doing a study in eastern philosophy and religion, through which I will spend a lot of time fully immersing myself in the practices of eastern religions and reading a lot of great religious texts from the major eastern religions. Then it looks like on top of the other things that I am doing I will be able to do a study in Japanese literature in translation, which I think sounds fantastic. I love Japanese literature and I would love to be able to read a lot and visit some of the places that the authors wrote about. Although, I am still not sure if this is how my time will be best used. I got the list of courses W&M teaches that I could possibly get credit for, so we will try to build my learning plan off of that. A learning plan is like a personal goal sheet for the semester, which lists personal and academic goals you hope to accomplish. It is the way you keep yourself on task and guide yourself academically, emotionally, and spiritually through the semester. Because so much of the program is what people are actually interested in doing, nearly everyone is highly motivated to stay on task with their studies. It’s very refreshing to have people so excited about what they are doing that they cannot wait to talk about it, instead of school being what is dragging everyone down. Very refreshing.

Music equivalent of the day: Marxism
Major purchase: Meikan, or tangerines for 500 yen
Food: O-Banzai meal, all vegetarian friendly
Top priority: contemplate learning plan