SCHOOL LIFE: Seminar Presentation

 I wrote this in simple, easy to understand English and most people were able to get the full idea along with explaining it in Japanese.

Blake Foster

EC10E015

Seminar Presentation: Research on America's Impact on Japan

In the summer of 2008 at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, I wanted to study about Japanese history. The subject of history was about the influence and impact of the United States of America on Japan, especially during and after World War II. I did not have a clear idea at first about what to study, but I started by reading books about modern Japanese history to get a general understanding. Since my goal was to explain how the United States had an impact on Japan, reading about Japanese history helped me form these ideas. I read five books: Andrew Gordon's A Modern History of Japan, Ienaga Saburo's The Pacific War, 1931-1945, Kyoko and Mark Selden's Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, John Dower's Embracing Defeat and Andrew Gordon's Postwar Japan as History. For each one of these books, I wrote an essay to summarize the books' main ideas. These essays were around 10-20 pages long, and I included my responses to each book and what it meant for my main idea of research. Because I wrote these essays, I was able to organize my thoughts about my research. This made writing my final essay a lot easier. I then traveled to Japan for six weeks, going to Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9 for the anniversaries of the atomic bombings, and to Okinawa to visit historical places there. I included all of these travel experiences and my thoughts in my final essay.

I returned to the United States thinking about what I had learned, and started writing my final essay. I wrote for about a week and the essay ended up being 97 pages long. I did not plan to write such a long essay, but I had many thoughts about the research I had done. The lesson I learned from doing the research on Japan and writing the final essay is that you need to care about what you research and write about. This is important for 卒業論文, because the point of writing an essay or a research paper is not to simply explain the research, but to explain what the research means. Research should only function to support your main ideas about what you are studying, not fill up the entire essay. Your opinions and ideas about the research you do makes a stronger essay and also makes it easier to write. Think about your idea about the subject you research, and use the research to support that idea.

I think that anybody can write a good essay if they think strongly about what they are writing about. I am not normally a good student, but because I cared about my research in Japan I wrote around 150 pages about the research I did throughout the summer. I hope everyone does their best to write a good college thesis essay ( 卒業論文).