Changing impressions

おもしろい日本（funny Japan）

When I first come to here, what we were introduced are rules, rules and rules. What we cannot do in Seminar House, what we have to do at school, what procedures we have to follow in the orientation period. And also, you can see sign and warning everywhere. In the kitchen, in the toilet, or on the road. Everything is telling you about rules you should follow. Japan is serious. Japanese are serious. It is the first impressions of Japan.

The first time when you meet Japanese, you will feel that they are very polite. They keep smiling and listening. Sometime, you will feel boring and hard to continue a conversation with Japanese. They are good listener but they won’t talk about themselves. They will always build a wall between themselves and others. You can hardly break the wall and see the real personality of Japanese. 建前(tatemae) is a word to describe behaviors and opinions one displays in public. And it might not be the real feelings of that person. Japanese are always covering themselves.

But there is a change of my impressions of Japan. Japanese also have many funny faces.

When they are get use to one, they will start talking more and acting more funny! They will only show their 本音（honne）in front of the people they believe and really want to make friends with. They don’t talk about rules anymore but about their daily life. They don’t only listen to your story but also tell you about their boyfriends. These, is the face of Japanese which was hide behind a mask for a long time.

The scalp

Coming to Kaisai Gaidai, one of the things that impressed me so much is that we can take courses about traditional Japanese arts culture. Not only learning it from the book but experience it by our hands. There are ceramic and sumie(Japanese style painting) courses offered to exchange student. By really participate in it, we can also learn about the cultures and attitude of Japan which was integrated with the arts activities. Now I choose ceramic to introduce the Japanese culture hide inside it.

One of the characteristic of ceramic was concentration. Walking in the ceramic lab, it is very funny that you probably can only see the scalps of students and our teacher in a very quite environment.

No one speaking and everyone are only focusing on their work. Ceramic is a difficult work. There are many steps for making a bowl. And every step can be messed up easily. For example, in this picture, I made a hole on the bottom of the bowl.

From the beginning of this class until now, I think I have been broken more than 20 pieces. And the number will increase, I believed. You can frequently hear the screaming from students, or from me that we have spent 5 hours for one bowl but in the last step, we break it. “Ah~~~~~~~~~~!!!!!!!” “I know that sound. Don’t mind. ” We know the feeling of destroying our own pieces which we have put great effort on it. In order not to make any mistake, we are focusing. Everyone looks like having mental sickness. Every little thing can make them nervous.

Japanese arts need great concentration. All the exchange students are experiencing this environment by participating in it. It is a awesome experience for us.