Kanazawa and School

Tomorrow marks the end of my first month here, and the daily highs are still in the 80s. Seriously, what gives?

Several people have asked what it's like to be tall in Japan. It's actually not that weird. I have to duck when entering rooms and packed trains (I told my host mother I like bowing a lot), but I'm not the only one - there are a decent number of young Japanese men who are approaching six feet thanks to Western food. On the flip side, this also means there is increasing number of overweight youth in Japan, which surprised me at first.

Last Saturday, the IES students loaded onto a bus and spent the weekend in Kanazawa, a city on the Sea of Japan. My favorite sight was Kenroku-en, a beautiful garden that was teeming with Chinese tourist groups - Japan is 99% homogeneous, which makes moments like this memorable. I have a feeling the garden would have been a bit more tranquil without the hundreds of tourists, but then I suppose I wouldn't have been there, either ...


School is going pretty well. The hard part of college in Japan is getting in, so you aren't expected to bust your butt for grades like in America. It's a nice break from Northwestern. The classes I'm taking are:

• Intensive Japanese
  
• Japanese Religions
• Japanese Literature
  
• Seminar on War and Peace: A Transnational Perspective

The latter two are my favorites. Lit is taught entirely in Japanese and we read short stories and excerpts of novels in the original Japanese, so I spent a lot of time reading with my electronic dictionary. For this week, we were assigned a 19th century story called "The Spider's Thread" that turned out to be nearly identical to "The Onion" from the Brothers Karamazov. No one in my class has read any Dostoevsky (thank you, Morson!), so I get to present about that next week.

The seminar is taught in English and covers the atomic bombings of 1945 and the pacifist clause of the Japanese Constitution. What makes the class interesting is that it is divided almost equally between Japanese and Americans and the format is open-forum discussions with short presentations. We may even go on a field trip to Hiroshima - if we do, I'm sure I'll write about it here.


Edit: Something I keep forgetting to mention: the guy with all the hair and the beard is Benjamin, a Grinnell student in my program and Japanese class. It turns out we met last summer while he was interning at Reba Place in Evanston. Small world, huh?