Japan Is Doomed

This entire post is based on things I’ve heard from current 2nd years, been told by various lecturers or read on my university email. I wanted to talk about it as it will give you guys an idea of what we can specialise in, and what I’m going to be waffling on about for the next year!

There are three mandatory modules I take next year. Two of them are core language modules, Japanese Language III (Autumn) and Japanese Language IV (Spring). The other one is similar to last semester’s Understanding Japan module. It’s called Contempary Japanese Society (Spring) and apparently prepares us for our year abroad. Exciting stuff.

What I’m more excited about are the optional modules I’ve chosen. The first, Postwar Japanese Politics, I chose partially because I enjoy writing about politics on this blog, and mainly because although I’ve never had an interest in politics, I think it might be beneficial to have one for the future. Plus, this way I can write even more stupid updates about building underwater trains or whatever.

The second is Japan’s Minorities, an interesting course considering until not long ago the Japanese government issued statements that there are no minorities in Japan. We do in-depth study on Koreans, Ainu and Burakumin amongst others. I really can’t express how excited I am about this module! Who knows, I may even be able to find a little humour somewhere and do an update someday.

I’ve saved the most interesting module for last - Understanding Japan Through Contemporary Texts. The idea is by translating novels, newspapers, journals and blogs, we can learn more about contemporary opinions and so forth. Rumour has it I may even have to swallow my pride and get my nerd hat on, as we will be translating a manga, too.

So there you go. A short and pretty boring update about my course. Why did I post this? Well, if anyone has any interest in how UK university works, or Japanese courses, or if anyone is thinking of coming to Sheffield, they can read this and all their deepest, darkest desires will be fulfilled

If on the other hand you found this boring, normal service resumes soon. See you then.

Sorry for the wait! It’s my fault as I’ve been pretty busy recently with choosing modules for my second year (more on that later) and also starting to think about which university I want to attend in my third year (more on that much later), and taking a mid semester exam. Anyway, last week we performed Soran Bushi for East Asian day just outside the union in broad daylight, making for some great photos. Photos were taken by Joseph (thank you!) and are available on Flickr here.

Pre-Soran

As we are a very drunken important and lazy professional dance team, we never do silly things like pose for group photographs or take silly photographs. Honestly. Did you really come to this site expecting to see that sort of thing?!

Only kidding! I guess this is our promotional photo, although a few members sadly couldn’t make it to this performance, so it’s not a perfect lineup. But it’s close! Here’s the lineup as we are standing in that shot;

Goto, Mo, Naomi, Simon
Taka, Amelia, Mike, Maria, Me

Following this very important photo, nonsense prevailed;

As you can see, Simon was not impressed by our antics, choosing instead to the professional “no-nonsense glance at camera” pose.

Alright kids, enough stalling, start dancing!

Soran Action Photos!

We did the dance twice and both times I think we did a great job. Unlike our earlier performance at the Culture show, we could hear the music from the start and everyone was a lot more confident. Sadly when we stamped on the ground this time there was no sound, but on the flipside people could stand all around us and it was quite exciting for everyone to be visible at all times. No more hiding on the back row getting the moves wrong for me!

As I said before there are many more photos available on Flickr here. Oh well, guess there’s nothing else to say…

HOLD IT!

Super Bonus Video Time!

Thanks to AJ for filming this one!

That really is it for this update! Stay tuned - I’ve got over the lull of posts and have a few more planned for the nearby future, and if that doesn’t work I’ve warmed up the excuse generator! See you then!

Wow! Last night at around 11pm myself and 11 other members of Sheffield Japan Society ran on stage at Sheffiend International Culture Evening 2008 and danced like maniacs. I don’t really know what to say, so I’ll post this video for you guys to enjoy.

Let the video load before playing it. Hosted courtesy of Facebook. Bonus points for spotting me.

Dancer Lineup;

Naomi, Kuni, Mo, Kishin, Simon, Masa, Mike, James, Maria, Amelia, Taka & Me

Best dance team ever.

Photographs will be here in a few days (courtesy of Joseph Tame)

Remember way back, when I posted those pictures of me looking like a bit of a total fool in my Shorinji kit? Or in a Yukata? Or a Kimono? Well, fan favourite “Mike doing weird stuff” is back with a whole new theme; traditional dancing!

This year’s annual International Culture Evening, held by the University Of Sheffield, will be on April 19th, and will be followed on the 20th by Japan Day. At both of these events I, along with a group of other scared individuals, will be performing a traditional fisherman’s dance from Hokkaido called Soran Bushi. (ソーラン節)

As we only just started to learn it, I can’t really provide any photographs or video evidence of how terrible amazing our dance troupe is yet, so instead I thought I’d provide you with two fun alternatives. The first is the song we will be dancing to:

Sorry, not available anymore :(

But wait, there’s more! The Japan Society did this dance two years ago and uploaded a video of it to Youtube! Enjoy!

I’ll try to take my camera to the next practice. If the other dancers will allow me to take photos (they won’t).

So Thursday saw me and sixty odd other brave students face the Japanese Language Exam. I’ll run through each part of it here then go onto other stuff. If you’re interested in learning Japanese at university one day this might be very useful for you, as I would imagine most universities’ exams are somewhat similar.

1. Japanese Writing, Reading, Translation & Comprehension
Not the official name of the exam but the one that makes the most sense in my opinion. The first section had eight Japanese sentences that we were to translate into English. It had a few hard ones (”I don’t like doing the things people like to do” was particularly fiendish) but hopefully it was OK. Right from the off these questions were very difficult which probably caused quite a few people, myself included, to start to mourn over the lack of throwaway easy marks. Following that there was translation from English into Japanese, then a large Japanese story from which we had comprehension questions, then finally an original composition question which was “How have your eating habits changed since you started university?”

2. Kanji
My favourite of the whole lot because I obsessed over learning all the combinations for weeks. We were presented with either 16 or 20 (I can’t remember) combinations and were asked to give their English meaning and their Japanese reading. I remmeber 病院 (Hospital びょういん）, 部屋 (A Room へや*) and 不便な (Inconvinient ふべんな). After that we had to copy out sentences that were written in Japanese, inserting as many Kanji as we could. * Irregular Reading

3. Listening
Then the horror that was the listening exam. I have absoloutly no idea how well I did on this because it’s just impossible to know before the results come on.

After all of this I had 24 hours before the worst exam of all;

4. Understanding Japan
Do I have to talk about this one? We had three hours to just regurgitate all of the knowledge we had memorized from various books onto the page. The only problem being I was so worried about getting enough content in that I didn’t really bother with essay structure. Oops.

Nevermind, though. I should have a rough idea of my results in a week or two’s time, and they are officially released in March. But rather than just worry about them, I thought I’d talk about Semester 2! I believe we have around 10 weeks of lectures, and during this I am aware that we will cover another 250 Kanji, the ば form and a variety of other brain burning grammar structures. Our original compositions will start again, however rather than post them like I did last year, this time I may just post clippings from them.

No photos this week, I’ve been too busy studying / taking exams / drinking.