Project Discussion & Introduction

ようこそ！Welcome! ^-^ Our blog focuses and explores the life of university students in Japan. As simple as it sounds, there are many aspects of university students including their social life, academic life, and their relationship with one another.

Our main focuses

1. Clubs (サークル—“circle”):

There are many cultural and sports clubs in Senshu University in which we don’t have in Canada, such as 茶道 (Tea Ceremony), 書道 (Calligraphy), and 落語 (comedy club). Sounds very exotic, doesn’t it?! We would like to experience and find out more about these cool-sounding clubs.

2. Life outside of class:

What do Japanese students do when they are not in class? Where do they hang out? Nomikai, gaming arcades, karaoke, group outings and so on seems to be the typical ways of socializing in Japan—from what we've heard or what we've seen from anime and dramas anyway. We will try to take part in some of these activities and explore them in a engaging way.

3. Education System:

The way how Japanese student get into university. They would have to pass an entrance examination to get into university. We are interested in finding out things such as how they select their universities, and if they'd have to take a separate exam for each of the universities they chose. Also from what we've heard, Japanese university students have to start looking for jobs by the time they reach their third year of university. While university is our major focus, we are also very curious about their elementary, junior high, and high school, as they are very different from ours.

4. Senpai (Senior) and Kouhai (Junior):

If you have studied Japanese language or culture, I am sure you have figured out by now that Japan is a hierarchy society—a society that divides themselves from top to bottom based on either one's age or experience. The language usage of how you would speak with your senpai is entirely different from how you would talk to your kouhai. We will attempt to explore this phenomenon more closely within Senshu University.

Approaches

1. Interviews:

To ensure the accuracy of our information, throughout the course of our four weeks in Japan, we will conduct a series of interviews with Senshu University Japanese students we encounter. In order to respect each interviewee’s privacy, we will not post any personal information or ask any questions that people are uncomfortable in answering.

2. Interactive:

Our project requires us to do a lot of interactions with local students and participate in their activities. Through this process, we hope to gain lots of valuable experiences that will help us understand better not only about our own research topic, but as well as Japanese culture.

3. Compare & Contrast:

We will compare and contrast Japanese university student life to our student life back home. Are they any different from us? What are the similarities? These will be some of the question we will consider throughout our research.

We really hope that our findings will be insightful, and become a useful resource for those who are planning to study abroad in Japan!