Keeping the "Study" in Study Abroad.

Although it may seem like I’m off just seeing all the city of Tokyo has to offer, the whole reason I am here in Japan in the first place is for an intercultural communication class through the Communication Studies department at Kansas State. Not only are we lucky to have Han Sensei (Dr. Han) guiding us through Japan, we are also joining up with Steffensmeier Sensei (Dr. Steffensmeier) and his students in a summer course on civic leadership communication at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. Before we left I was a little bit skeptical of how this class would tie into our objectives for the Japan trip, but after a few classes, I am learning that there is actually quite a bit of overlap between the two concepts of civic leadership communication and intercultural communication. The students in this class are quite sharp, I don’t see them taking a lot of notes, as I expected like in K-State classes, but they have great memories about in class discussions and their contributions to the class discussions have been very insightful.

Rikkyo University! A beautiful campus with fantastic study nooks and very intelligent and friendly students!

The past few days, we have also been welcomed into two other classes, meeting more students with bright minds and fantastic English, even though they felt otherwise. In one class, we discussed food insecurity in the United States, and how obesity is affecting the lives of millions and how prevalent this particular disease is becoming. We watched a TED talk by Jamie Oliver (https://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver) who focused specifically on how obesity and improper nutrition is affecting children. Although his video was alarming in some ways, he also wasn’t wrong, and it was interesting to discuss an issue like this with the Japanese students. We also discussed a BBC documentary, “No sex, we’re Japanese”, regarding the phenomenon of virtual relationships. Throughout the video, we were snickering to each other because we found it absurd that a married man with kids had a virtual relationship, himself being portrayed as a teenager with a teen girlfriend. Giggles aside, it did shed some light on issues not only in Japan, but we found commonalities in U.S. culture as well. After talking with the Rikkyo students, they made it very clear that this issue was not as prevalent as childhood obesity in the U.S. and that this documentary took a small percentage of the population that participate in virtual relationships and then almost blew it out of proportion making it seem that this was a common occurrence in Japan. During this class, at least in my group, we talked a lot about the idea of virtual and fantasy identity. Although the conversation was geared more towards the Japanese culture, and the creation of basically a completely different, yet virtual, person, the idea of a fantasy identity is not lost in the United States. We have our own issues with online predators and internet dating has had its fair share of horror stories as well. Yes, we come from different cultures, but we have more in common than we think. In our groups we talked about the root of some of these social issues, and it turns out they are quite similar, a big one being socioeconomic status. I enjoyed our conversation, and it almost made me feel comfortable being able to talk about issues we are facing, but still being able to find ways to understand the new culture I was in.

The second class we sat in on was maybe my favorite (but shhh, don’t tell the others!). We got into groups and based on information we were given separately, we each had to use our piece of the puzzle to figure out which farmer grew apples and which farmer drove a truck. We couldn’t write anything down, and we couldn’t look at the information others were given. At the end of the activity, a representative of each group shared the process their group went through to figure it out, and I noticed that all the reps were us, the K-State students. As I observed the rest of the class and reflected back on it, one thing that stood out was the difference between social skills and nonverbal communication of the two student groups. Through conversation, we learned the basics about our group members (major, home, age) and in my group, I turned out to be the oldest. I didn’t pick up on this until after class, but I noticed that I was never really interrupted when we were trying to figure out the puzzle. I would stop and ask people to re-read their clues and their thoughts, but when I was talking, I do not recall being stopped mid-sentence or having other ideas being shared at the same time. I am not sure if that was them being polite, or if there was some type of heiarchy at play. Either way, comparing that to my group work back at K-State, I can confidently say that members were interrupting each other all the time, trying to convince everyone that their idea is better, or their way of thinking is more effective. Being in a different learning environment has really helped me be more present and take in what is happening in the classroom, as well as activities outside class.