Japan so far(Going down Mt. Fuji after seeing sunrise at the top)

It’s almost a year since the scholarship began, and so much has happened so far. It’s hardknowing where to start. After about an hour staring at a black screen, I decided to organise mytime here so far into four parts
1) Studying Japanese / Waseda, 2) Life in Tokyo / outside of Waseda, 3) Travels around Japan,
and 4) My area in Tokyo.
1) Studying Japanese is no joke. I had heard this several times before coming to Japan, butthought to myself ‘how hard could it be?’. That being said, it isn’t impossible. The more I practiceand speaking and reading Japanese - particularly outside of the classroom - the more I see
progress. Having studied Chinese before, I thought I would have an upper hand, and, yes, it
has helped in being able to understand the meaning of road signs and the odd advert on thesubway, but that will only take you so far. Whereas Chinese grammar was, for me, relatively
easy to grasp, Japanese grammar is like a never ending maze. For grammar, Waseda has anIntensive course for beginners, after which there are what are called Comprehensive courses
for each subsequent level. I preferred, and learnt much more from, the Intensive class. In
accordance with its name, it packed a lot into a relatively short period of time. As a result, it was
just grammar we were focusing on. The comprehensive course I took in the second semester
had grammar of course, but questionnaire tasks, posters and things like that, which took somegetting used to. In both classes, there was a different teacher each day. One sticks out inparticular - Kamiya-Sensei. She is not your typical Japanese teacher. Even as I write, I findmyself cracking up thinking about her. She was very lively, and had a very mocking sense ofhumour which, as a Brit, I naturally warmed to. At the end of our semester she treated us to avideo of her rapping in Japanese in white dungarees, along with the Japanese class she had inCalifornia some years ago. I don’t think any of us will ever forget those four minutes. Sadly, I
didn’t have her in the second semester, but whenever we bumped into each other on campus,
she would scream ‘ESAN-SAN’ and we would hug like we had not seen each other in twentyyears. It was nice too to be able to converse with her in Japanese whenever we saw eachother. I could tell she felt proud that I had taken something from her / Waseda’s classes. Myclass too - my first class in intensive that is - were incredible! I don’t think I have ever had thatmuch chemistry with a class before in my life. It was also pretty cool to have my Chineseclassmates explain Japanese grammar points that I could not understand from the teacher orbook in Chinese. We had get-togethers and dinners now and again, which was great. In fact,
two of my classmates are getting married one in Taipei this November, which they invited me to!

ACITIVITES OUTSIDE OF WASEDA
As much as I made some good friends with my class and Japanese students within Waseda,I’ve been very fortunate to meet a number of incredible people outside of Waseda too. There
isn’t time to go into the numerous transformative experiences I have had since coming here, butI will highlight a couple.
There are of course a number of extracurricular activities to get involved on known as circles;
there is everything from music to sports circles. Although a few of them did appeal to me, theone drawback is that most of them require you to commit quite a lot of time every week, which
would have been difficult with classes. This soon didn’t mattter however, as I ended up forminga band with some friends in the city. A guy named Shun (the drummer), who I met andbefriended pretty soon after coming to Japan, brought us all together. I’m still not sure how
exactly, but he somehow found out I could hold a note and asked me to join around January.
There are five of us altogether - a bassist, pianist, guitarist, drumme,r and me on vocals - andwe settled on the name Sunday. We meet once a week, occasionally a fortnight, and always onthe weekend. We make our own music, and it has a jazz / soul sound. I also try to speak
Japanese when we meet, although the guys break out in fits of laughter whenever I do. There
are no aspirations, at least on my part, to top the charts or anything, it’s just us having fun andenjoying the process. We have had one performance so far, at a bar in Setagaya at the end ofGolden week, and have another this October:We also had a lot of fun recording some of our tracks around two months ago, as you can fromthis video:

https://vimeo.com/350547684

I’ve also become very, very fond of Grandfather’s - a tiny, dimly lit bar in the heart of Shibuya
that plays vinyls until the early hours of the morning - and Jazz Spot Intro - a live music bar justnext to Takada Nobaba where insanely talented Jazz musicians come together and jam onweekends.
I’ve been to a number of great talks at United Nations University here, the last one dealing withlabour challenges in Japan due to its ageing population.
A close friend of mine here in Tokyo is the co-founder of a fantastic organisation called Social
Innovation Japan. They deliver events, workshops and programs centered around people
pushing for social and environmental change in Japan. The last event I went to of theirs was todo with ientity in Japan, specifically what it means to be ‘Hafu’ (mixed race) in Japan today.
TRAVELS AROUND JAPAN
Most of my travelling occurred after the programme in Waseda came to an end. However, I did
make use of the odd national holiday, of which there are many in Japan, to explore. Along withJoe (another DS18 scholar) I took a day trip to Hakone around November time. Also, during thetwo week Christmas break, I took an overnight bus to Kanazawa. The highlight there was theD.T. Suzuki Museum, commemorating the life and writings of Suzuki Daisetz Teitaro, a prolificBuddhist philosopher. They had a number of his books in both Japanese and English, which
you could sit and read there, and a very peaceful meditation space. The design of the museum
was also quite something:I was offered the opportunity to participate in an educational access scheme by an NPO called
Glocal Academy here in Japan. It aims to empower Japanese youth from regional areas throughexposure to, and interaction with, University students and graduates from the UK. Principallythose who went to Oxford, but that didn’t stop me approaching Dr. Naoya Okamoto - the young
founder, and a really nice guy - about getting involved. The programme lasted from July 30th
until August 4th and covered travel expenses. I was one of eight students/graduates whoparticipated in the summer programme, through which we would go to two different schools inKagoshima and nearby Amami island, helping students on special research projects there wereworking on. The kids were 16-18 years old and very bright. One in my group in Kagoshima wasinvestigating the poverty-terrorism nexus in the West. In the second school, the projects the kids
were working on concerned regional revitalisation of the island going into the future targeted
more on Amami island. Here is a story about our time there in the local Amami pres (inJapanese), along with an unflattering picture of me :http://amamishimbun.co.jp/2019/08/04/19715/

I built such a good rapport with all the kids I worked with, and I can’t fully express just how much
fun I had, and how insightful the whole experience was for me, especially Amami island. It rests
just above Okinawa, and is just a stunning island.

Our last night happened to coincide with the islands summer festival, which was far and away
better than any I had been to in Tokyo (and I’ve been to a few). I may have been the only
person there who doesn’t drink alcohol, but I’m pretty sure i enjoyed myself the most:After the programme, I used the time I used the free time I had before our homestay to travel. I
first went to the beautiful Aoshima island, part of Aoshima shrine, in Miyazaki. I surfed for the
first time there too. My hostel was just off the small island and it was the only part of Miyazaki I
ended up seeing - I didn’t want to leave!

(From Wikipedia)

Just before I left Tokyo I bought an old Canon film camera from Shinjuku Used Camera Market,which I have come to love like a child. The two photos just above were the first I took with it,
hence the shoddiness, but I managed to get to grips with with the camera just in time for somestunning mountain scenery.
After Miyazaki I went Matsumoto , Nagano. I used Matsumoto as a base for Kamikochi, whichwas a thrill to climb.

After this, I climbed up Mt. Fuji overnight to watch sunrise at the summit. It was unbelievable. Itwas freezing cold at the top, and I was surprised to see vending machines there too (charding500 yen for a bottle of water too). The spectacular view made it all worth it though. If you findyourself in Japan during the summer months, pack lots of warm clothes. I didn’t and got to thetop a couple of hours earlier than I planned. Before sunrise it was unimaginably cold.

HOME​.
I live just north of Shinjuku (it makes me about 20 minutes on foot to reach Shinjuku station) inShin Okubo, Tokyo’s Korea Town. Now I am a big a fan of Katsu Curry and Udon, but Korean
food in Shin Okubo is a must for anyone visiting Tokyo. It’s out of this world. It’s a very lively
area, and a great place to live.

As I write this I am in the homestay portion of the programme. I am with a family in Kochi,
Japan. The rivers here are stunning, specifically Shimanto and Niyodo. My homestay family arereally nice too, and are really pushing to speak more, and become more confident in, Japanese.
Each day I learn something that that blows me away. My homestay mum, for instance, is theJapanese Mo Farah. She has one around 10 marathons and ultramarathons across Japan. A
day later I learned that her father taught Archeology in a University in Nigeria (where my familyare from) around fourty years ago. I spoke with him on the phone last night and he was singing
old Igbo songs (Igbo being one of Nigeria’s biggest tribes). All in all, it has been good so far.

Time has gone by so quick since over the passed year. So quick that, understandably, I have
not really taken time to appreciate how fortunate I am to have this opportunity. I have had thebiggest smile, and the odd laugh, writing this, going through the photos, and just remembering.
There’s about three weeks left of my homestay, followed by our work placement, and the big
JLPT exam in December. There’ll be no mountains for a while, but I’m sure I’ll have moreexperiences, and meet more people, that make me fall even deeper in love with Tokyo, andJapan generally. Cheesy, but true.