My first encounter with Japanese culture came when I saw Miyazaki Hayao's Spirited Away.
The movie's vivid imagery and incorporation of Shinto elements, such as the respect of natureand the power of kamis, made me interested in the culture of Japan. To feed my curiosity, I
watched more of Hayao's movies, including Princess Mononoke and The Wind Rises. The
latter's portrayal of the relations between Japan and Germany before and during WWII
immediately caught my interest, and from that moment on, I turned my academic focus towards
learning as much as I could about Japan´s international relations.
I first turned to Glenn D. Hook's Japan´s International Relations from which I discovered how
Japan and the US shifted towards each other after WWII, because of China´s growing economicinfluence.
This had an enormous impact on the post-war Japanese society and culture, which manifested
itself in linguistic innovations, the absorption of American pop-culture elements, and thecountry's democratisation. These concepts were further explained in Modern Japan: Social andPolitical History by Elise K. Tipton, which also introduced me to how the government tried todefineJapanese nationalism with Shintoism. To have a clearer image about the social order of Japan,
I read Japanese Society by Yoshio Sugimoto, and I was fascinated by how the generationalvariations affect the working morale of Japanese people. This book made me realise how thesociety of Japan isn't as homogenous as it seems as it is divided by social factors that are notcommon in the West. I also started to attend the Milestone Institute, a centre of advanced
education, to learn more about international relations and East Asia. There, as part of anIntroduction to Political Thought module, I first encountered the topic of multiculturism. I readparts of Samuel P. Huntington´s book The Clash of Civilizations, which argued that in thefuture international conflicts are not going to be about ideology or economic, but about culturaldifferences. I also took a China and Capitalist Diversity module, where I learned about China´seconomy from a historical perspective, starting from the Opium Wars until current times. I
wrote an essay about how China became a capitalist country, and what it means for the futureof democratisation. In Milestone, I and fellow students with similar interests put together anacademic journal about the emergence of East Asia. I contributed to by writing an academic
article about the importance of the Meiji restoration, especially the educational, military, andeconomic reforms, for the modernisation of Japan and a book review on Modern Japan: A
Social and Political History.

To understand Japanese culture even more, I started to learn the Japanese language bymemorising hiragana and katakana characters. A few years later, I had the opportunity to starttaking Japanese classes at a private language school. I attend a Hungarian-German bilingualschool, where parts of the curriculum are taught in German. I was also admitted to a talentdevelopment program at Corvinus University, where I completed all the international relations
courses with excellent marks. This program gave me the opportunity to understand modern
international relation issues, for example, European energy politics with Russia, and to analysesuch cases. I also participated in several competitions in connection to social studies, including
the International Geography Olympiad, where I finished in 8th place in the national finals, aGerman-language debate competition, Jugend Debattiert International, where I made it into thesemi-finals, and a competition with Amnesty International, where my team and I made it into
the national finals. In addition, I participated in the UN Sustainability Project by volunteeringin Iceland.
Studying in the UK would enable me to continue to learn about Japan and international
relations in one of the most prestigious university systems in the world.