School, Inc.

I've been trying to hold off writing something about school until things are actually underway and I know what exactly I'm doing every week. However, my desires are in constant conflict with the reality of time, and I still have no idea how I'm going to fit everything that I want to do into my waking hours. The only thing that I know for sure is my course schedule (which is slowly eating me alive) and the ever growing list of things that I want to do.

We can safely start with Japanese, which is a required course (duh). In a moment of weakness, I gave into my fear that merely living in a foreign country wouldn't give my language skills the boost that I was looking for, and I decided to enroll in the intensive Japanese program instead of the regular course. This mistake has cost me two of my four courses for the semester, as well as three hours of my life, every day, from now until the end of time. And most unfortunately, the intensive program has fewer levels than the regular program, so I placed lower than I would have otherwise, giving me at least a month and a half of grammar and vocabulary review. Don't get me wrong--I am learning something from my three hours everyday. I've picked up some new kanji (the Chinese characters, remember?) and I've definitely found my place as the leader of the class, since most of the kids ask me questions instead of whatever teacher we have depending on the day of the week. Despite some serious moments of doubt, I have decided to continue the course and pray that things get better, and that I won't shrivel up and die from the immense boredom to which I am currently subjecting myself.

Then, on Mondays and Thursdays, I head on over to my anthropology class: Approaches to Japanese Society. Its a class designed to give us some of the basic theories behind the characteristics of the Japanese people. The professor happens to also be my academic adviser at Sophia, and he has some very interesting insights on Japanese society. Not much has happened so far, mostly because of several issues affecting the physical location of the classroom (we haven't had class in the same room yet). I'm enjoying everything so far.

On Tuesdays and Fridays, I get to enjoy a political science seminar on the media and politics, taught by the most awesome bald Irishman I've ever met. He's pretty opinionated on the subject of Japan and the media, but he's also very interested in what we think, which gives the gaijin in the room plenty of time to talk (since the Japanese students are really quiet for some reason). The first week of class we spent discussing the issue of media censorship in Japan, which is unique in that the media reporters and news anchors practice a strict form of self-censorship. The government doesn't have to limit what people say because they will do it on their own. As an example to this, we have been discussing the issue of Imperial succession and the fact that the media is completely ignoring the women's rights activists in other parts of the world. The Japanese equivalent of tabloids will sometimes make comments--"the crown prince is almost certainly a test tube baby", "can the Imperial Family risk putting its entire line on one boy?", etc--but these are smaller papers that don't always attract a lot of attention. Very interesting things happening there.

Between these three classes, I'm also trying to balance a club (probably indoor soccer, though at this point in time I'm not sure which of the three I will be joining) and hopefully a tutoring job somewhere along the line. I'm also toying with the idea of volunteering at the elementary school we went to a couple weeks ago. We'll just have to see how everything works out.