As with the week before, students presented on excerpts from an English text about cultural nonverbal communication. Me and my partner presented on the aspect of touch and how it varies between Japanese and American culture. Him, being Japanese, explained how Japanese people don't tend to touch between family members, friends in public, and in romantic relationships in public. I explained Americans touch between family members and lovers in public situations, but there is a strong homophobia that affects how members of the same gender touch in public. Japanese people will tend to drop the touch barrier, at least between the same gender, in settings where they drink. Drinking is an important part of communication in Japan, and it has its own coin-phrase "nomunication" (I explained this before in the blog), where people only truly communicate their feelings when they are intoxicated. While this is considerably a stereotype, it usually holds true for most Japanese social occasions. In the Folk Song Club it's not at all uncommon to see guys with their arms around each other after drinking a good amount, and girls lying down on each others' laps. Japanese people do not think this at all strange; culturally, it is a normality. Americans tend to touch when they get drunk too, however, there is still some level of taboo (although I f-ing hate the term, the recent phrase 'bromance' comes to mind when men show physical but non-sexual affection to each other, usually when drunk, and the phrase is said somewhat mockingly) in touching between the same gender. With the Chinese students in the class, their cultural perspective on touch was explained that people tend to touch in public regardless of gender or sexual connotation. It is normal to see girls holding hands in public in China, but it doesn't necessarily hold a sexual meaning. The class turned out to be a good discussion in cultural differences, and solidified aspects of Japanese culture for me in terms of touch and communication.
The next class was "Interchanging Societies". All of the class time was devoted to showing more graphs on population densities and population movements. Giving facts over giving a definitive conclusion for those facts seems to be a common practice in Japanese college lectures. The overwhelming use of data makes it hard to care about what it actually all means, at least for me. I nonetheless thanked the professor for coming to the show at Gakuensai. I'm also supposed to give my own lecture in the class soon about differences between living in America and living in Japan. I agreed only on the fact that it would make me look good in front of the class.
That concluded Tuesday. Thursday first period was Japanese Language and Culture. This day held the first presentations from students. The first student to present did so on Japanese holidays. There wasn't really any meat of information in her presentation, just a run-through of annual holidays. The second presenter was much more well-put-together; she presented on the Takarazuka theater troupe, an all-female troupe that has a long history in Japan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takarazuka_Revue). Though her presentation was exceptionally done in terms of its information and presentation, I wrote down as a criticism (students are given score cards to rate their peers' presentations) that she left out the aspect of lesbianism that famously exists in the Takarazuka culture, because women play both male and female roles in the performances. Third to present was another girl in the class, doing a rather frivolous presentation on Hello Kitty, to which I responded that I wanted there to be more substance in the presentation rather than simply explaining the dynamics of Hello Kitty's fictional family and friends. The language instructor was thrilled with the presentation, however, as she has a similar obsession with some other Japanese marketing mascot (she showed her pictures on her computer of the mascot at the end of class, along with her wedding photos... I found out she was Christian, too, which wasn't a big surprise considering her overly-sweet demeanor).
During second period, "Private/Civic Law", we were shown a video of Japan's major court-houses, the highest courts in the country, which resemble the supreme court of the United States with its ceremony and decor. Students were given response sheets to both the video and the class itself. I wrote down my intentions in the class in that I didn't really understand what any of the lectures were really about (especially since I don't have an actual text book, not willing to drop 5000 yen on a class I won't get real credit for) but was using the situation to learn Japanese. Other than that, the class was nothing out of the ordinary.
Third period was more of the same for "Interchanging Societies". The concept of "New Towns" was thoroughly explained, and as I had lived in one of these "New Towns" during my first exchange in Kyushu, I was interested in seeing the actual explanation of what they are. "New Town" developments are areas that are suburbanized, often in more rural places, and usually requite that people commute by car as public transportation in these areas run thin. The "New Town" I stayed at was on top of a mountain, and required about twenty to thirty minutes of walking time to reach any type of business area. The problem with these areas is that as Japan's population ages and the elderly become more of a majority in demographics, their inability to operate motor vehicles will make "New Town" developments more inconvenient for living. Areas closer to train stations offer more public services, and thusly the trend toward development has been for condominiums and apartments, a trend that can be seen all over the Kobe area around the main subway lines. As far as I can tell, this has been the ongoing connecting theme of the professor's lectures on population movements. There was even a section of the lecture talking about how animal populations have been increasing as rural areas become less populated.
Seminar was the last class of the day. I did not have to give a presentation although I was scheduled to, because several other students were presenting and time ran out quickly. Next week, however, I am expected to present on some studies I did about Japan back 2008 through a contract at Evergreen. Nothing I really did then inspires to fully go into the subject, which was about America's influence on Japan, so I will mainly give advice on writing reports in the hopes that other students can use the advice for their graduation thesis papers. I wrote a hundred page report for that contract in 2008, along with about 5-6 reports that each covered a books for research material, and each of those papers ranged from 15-20 pages in standard format; all and all, through one summer quarter at Evergreen, I wrote nearly two hundred pages in essays. While I don't intend to brag, I do intend to explain how I wrote these papers, and that I never intended to write so much, but merely had that much to say about the subjects. It was probably the highest level of academic professionalism I have ever achieved and believe me, will never achieve again, but because my mind was working I was able to do it. Japanese college students are often tied up in the research materials rather than writing the paper about what sense they made out of those materials; if I can communicate this idea to the students in my seminar class, hopefully it will make it a bit easier for them to write a thesis paper.
And that concluded the week following Gakuensai. There's still plenty more commitments to the Folk Song Club that I will have to juggle with studies at the University of Hyogo and what I post on this blog; let's see how it all plays out.
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