Sunday, December 18, 2005
Old Tokyo
I met up with some friends of a friend today and we walked around a beautiful old area of Tokyo that still has a lot of wooden houses, going in and out of little shops selling handmade shoes, leather wallets and so on. We also went to some extremely tucked-away little galleries above cafes - it was such a chilled out day (literally: very cold, but beautiful blue skies and sunshine). We also went to this house/studio of a sculptor who died in the 1960s. It was so huge, two-storeys tall with a pond in the middle of the kind you'd find in a temple. It's so great that there are still places like this in Tokyo.
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I'm starting officially at Sophia University in April. I'll be a so-called research student for a year, which means I will have the freedom to research my own project as I please. I'm researching 1960s/70s Japanese outdoor sculpture. After that I'll probably join a Master's course in something broader like art criticism or visual theory - I'll see what they offer.
The international school you're at kind of sounds like Sophia University, which is a bit of an unusual exception: all the lectures are in English. It was set up for Japanese people born abroad coming to study in Japan who don't necessarily speak Japanese. There are lots of foreigners and some Japan-born students as well, so it's a very international atmosphere, even for Tokyo. But everyone speaks with American accents, so it kind of feels a bit weird for me. I feel like I'm in an American university.
As long as you enjoy it, you're probably making a good decision to do Chinese. It's a lot easier than Japanese, the grammar is very similar to English, so all you have to do is concentrate on learning the characters and getting the pronunciation right and you'll be able to speak well quite quickly. I went to Beijing and Shanghai for a couple of weeks this summer, and it's an awesome country, but quite intimidating. It's more similar to America than you'd imagine. Beijing felt to me like a Chinese Los Angeles, and Shanghai like New York (with some Paris and Osaka mixed in).
So how come you're studying in Sweden?
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