TUJ is a relatively small yet highly diverse campus, featuring students from different countries, backgrounds, and ways of thinking. In a day and age where college campuses across the country are pushing for even greater diversity, TUJ manages to pull it off, including diversity of thought. Throughout my experience at TUJ, I ended up with…
Thursday, March 1, 2018, was what TUJ calls an “undergraduate holiday,” or basically a day off for no particular reason. On this fairly warm day, TUJ took a group of students on a trip to see Sakura (Japanese Cherry Blossom) trees in Kawazu, Shizuoka Prefecture. Along the way, we also stopped to pick strawberries in…
Back in November of 2017, I sent out an email to all 91 study abroad students in an attempt to get to know some people before landing in Tokyo. All I can say is it was a success. During my short email exchanges with students from across the United States (mostly from Pennsylvania), two of…
The weekend of February 9-12, 2018 was an undergraduate holiday at TUJ, meaning we had no school on Friday or Monday. While I am not sure why they decided to take Friday off, the reason we have no school on February 12 is because that’s Japan’s National Founding Day, or basically their Fourth of July.…
NOTE: This guide is intended for Chapman University students who plan on studying abroad at Temple University, Japan Campus. I also provide specific information applicable to the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles. Check with your nearest Consulate for proper procedures. The pre-departure process gets overwhelming at times. I know because I was once in your…
This post is a modified version of an assignment I wrote for my Practical Japanese class. This post is also written from the perspective of a dumb American who barely knows what Setsubun is, so please forgive me. I will update the post with corrections as I see fit. Saturday, February 3, 2018 was not…
When landing in Japan, one of the first things you will probably notice is that Japan is… Japanese. According to data from the CIA world factbook (see citation), Japan is 98.5% Japanese, about 0.5% Chinese, 0.4% Korean, and the remainder “other”, although other consists of a considerable amount of Americans, Europeans, etc. Due to Japan’s…
Monday, January 22 marks a rare event in Tokyo. That’s right, it snowed today. I was super excited throughout the day as I had never seen snowfall in my life. And out of all the places in the world where I could see snowfall, I never expected the first place to be Tokyo. This is…
After a long 12.5-hour flight from LAX to HND, I finally touched down in Tokyo, Japan. I was so eager to enter Japan that I actually forgot my suit on the plane, but thankfully one of the flight attendants chased me down to hand it to me. As I was walking to the immigration line,…