My busy week began on a surprisingly mellow note with the revelation that Tuesday’s “small test” had been cancelled. Having anticipated a long Monday afternoon and evening cooped up studying, the news was very welcome indeed! I took advantage of my relatively free afternoon to catch up on my favorite T.V. show (which I’m not ashamed to admit is Nickelodeon’s The Legend of Korra) and begin reading a Japanese manga (comic book) that Ai-san thoughtfully purchased for me as a kind of end-of-the-semester, you’ve-worked-so-hard gift. The manga is called Massugu ni ikou (“Let’s Go Straight”), and even though the manga is written in Japanese, I find it fairly easy to understand. It follows a plot typical of shojo manga (girls’ comics), based around romantic relationships, but the story is narrated from the perspective of the main character’s dog. When Ai-san found out how much I like dogs, she immediately thought of this manga and how much I would like it. Reading this manga has really familiarized me with colloquial Japanese, and I’m really thrilled by how much of the writing I can understand. I’m hoping to buy the next couple books in the series soon (although you can buy manga in plenty of American bookstores, in Japan it’s dirt cheap, about $1.00 a book. In America, on the other hand, each book costs about $8.00 to $10.00. Reading manga can easily become a very expensive habit in the States).

I devoted Tuesday afternoon to revising and memorizing my section of the 10-minute presentation my partner and I were to perform on Wednesday morning. The subject of our speech was Japanese “soft power,” which describes a country’s influence abroad that is not military or economic, but cultural. The concept of “soft power” was introduced by Harvard researcher Joseph Nye, who wrote a book about it, appropriately named Soft Power. Although Nye’s idea wasn’t originally centered on Japan, Japan and its cultural exports are great examples of “soft power.” After WWII, when Japan’s economy was in shambles and its military power had been stripped away by the United States, Japan began to amass soft power through the exportation of cultural products like manga, anime, Zen Buddhism, cuisine, and (more recently) video games and electronics. Through this process of exportation, Japan earned a reputation for creativity, reliability, and “coolness” worldwide.

One of the key examples my partner and I used in our presentation was the worldwide popularity of sushi, which was formally introduced abroad in 1953 when Emperor Akihito joined Queen Elizabeth at her coronation ceremony for a meal that included raw fish and rice. Nowadays, sushi has become synonymous with bourgeois lifestyle, as a taste for sushi implies the possession of cultural and economic capital (providing you’re eating the good stuff, not the boxed sushi from Safeway). Soft power turned out to be kind of a tricky topic to write about and present in Japanese, but with the aid of a Power Point, we were able to successfully get our message across to our audience on Wednesday morning. I felt so relieved after it was over, as I had spent so much time committing the sentences to memory. One sentence in particular, roughly translated as “Some foreign readers of manga will even develop an interest in Japan to the extent that they want to learn the Japanese language, or travel to Japan” gave me so much trouble that I anticipated choking on it outright during my speech, but thankfully that didn’t happen! Some other interesting topics covered by groups in our class were Japanese superstitions, Japanese onomatopoeias (as some of you may know, Japanese cats don’t say “meow,” they say “nyan”), and the circular path of influence that exists among China, Japan, and Taiwan.

Wednesday morning also brought news that I would not be able to visit my friend Mao Matsushita in Kagoshima City this summer as planned. Mao-san and I met when my family hosted her as an exchange student through the Santa Rosa Kagoshima Student Exchange Program. In 2007, I traveled to Japan with SRKSEP for four weeks, two of which were spent with a host family in Kagoshima, which is at the very, very bottom of Kyuushu, Japan’s southernmost main island.  The following year, Mao-san came to stay with my family in Santa Rosa, California. She’s a very sweet and bright person, and I had been really looking forward to seeing her again, but our reunion was destined to fall through due to the interference of the Japanese education system.

As I explained in an earlier post, life is pretty rough for a Japanese student at any level of education, but especially at the high school level. During that time, students must rigorously prepare for university entrance exams, often attending cram school in the evenings and on weekends in addition to their usual classes. Think SAT Prep, but every day for years instead of just a few months before you sit the test. Unlike in the States, where a poor score on the SAT or ACT doesn’t necessarily deny you the opportunity to go to college, in Japan if you fail the test you have to either wait a year and retake the test or reevaluate your life plan. Also unlike American standardized tests, Japanese students don’t take one test and send your scores to multiple universities. Each Japanese university typically has its own entrance exams and pricy entrance examination fees, so students usually only apply to one college and take one exam. Therefore, an enormous amount of pressure rests on a single test alone. Mao-san wants to go to medical school and become a doctor. She unfortunately did not receive an acceptable score on her entrance exam the first time she took it, so she is now what the Japanese call a rounin, or a student waiting for another chance to enter a university (however, this word has literally refers to wandering samurai who have no master. Seriously). Now it seems that Mao-san does nothing but study, poor thing. It’s especially hard on her because her father doesn’t approve of her desire to become a doctor, so her dreams are essentially riding on this one last chance to get into medical school.

So, what does this have to do with me? Earlier in the week I sent an email to Mao-san to check in with her and see whether it was still alright for me to come down and visit her when my program in Kanazawa ends. Her reply, chock full of allusions to how hard she was studying and how much stress she was feeling due to this impending test, conveyed her regret that if I came to Kagoshima, that she wouldn’t be able to spend as much time with me as she would like. “But,” she wrote, “My mom could show you around if you’d like.” Granted, part of Mao-san’s reluctance to invite me was probably in part due to a typo in the email I sent her that made it seem like I was going to be staying in Kagoshima from July 28 to September 3, about a month and a half longer than the duration I intended to visit. Nevertheless, I got the feeling that if I went to Kagoshima, I would simply be creating an inconvenience for Mao and her family in this time of great stress. I sent a reply to Mao on Wednesday afternoon expressing as much, and I’m hoping/expecting that she’ll be more relieved than disappointed to learn that I won’t be coming down after all.

This leaves me in a bit of a pickle as to what to do after PII ends. I intend to check in with my various experts on Japan (Chiyo-san and Ai-san) as well as my PII friends to see whether there isn’t another option available for some extracurricular travel. As of now, my tentative backup plan is to spend a few days in Tokyo before my return home in early August.

In other news, we received our new textbooks for the second semester on Wednesday afternoon, and it appears that the entire curriculum of the second semester will be based around Hayao Miyazaki’s wonderful anime Spirited Away (if you haven’t seen it, please stop reading this blog and go rent it now). Spirited Away (or Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi in Japanese) tells the story of a young girl named Chihiro whose parents are put under a spell that she must find a way to break while simultaneously working at a bath house in the world of Japanese spirits. It’s a beautiful movie, and one of my favorites, but I’m a little apprehensive that studying it for an entire month might turn me off to it. Hopefully an extensive study of the film will do just the opposite, and increase my love for the film and all of its charm.

I depart on Thursday afternoon for Isehara City in Kanagawa Prefecture, the hometown of my friend Chiyo-san! More updates to come after the sure-to-be fun weekend!