Our Study Topic

Hello! We are a group of students from the University of Calgary who are travelling to Japan this month to study the language and experience the culture. As a group we will be focusing on discovering and reflecting on life in Japan and different aspects of Japanese life. Life in Japan is known to be very different from life in Western cultures so it will be a unique experience to live in it for a month and share our experiences and findings on this blog. As a general theme as we study and live here we will reflect on and see how life in Japan is. We will try to take all our experiences and connect it to the history and culture of Japan. We will express our own feelings and discoveries about how we are affected by life in Japan and how it can connect us more to the culture, country, and our learning. There are many different things we will be able to talk about here. 

Japan is a place of a unique culture and a deep history. But as it grew there are now more cultures and more differences in the country. There are different lifestyles across the country as well we will hopefully be able to see. The city life people live can be very different from the life in the countryside. Even seeing the different between Tokyo and somewhere like Yokohama or Kamakura will be an interesting thing to look at. We can also experience and look at different lifestyles inside cities like nightlife or business life. There are many things we can observe while we also live alongside them.

There are also many different traditions in the history which we can try to connect to life now. We will be able to see how life in Japan is changed my foreigners travelling and being interested in the country. As well as how more immigrants are now coming to work in Japan. It shows how the country has changed and it will be interesting to see if it is easy to see the aspects of the international world on Japan as we are studying there. Being a country that was closed off in the past it is interesting to see if the country has been affected now that the world is so connected. More and more people are interested in Japan, even seen with our group of students, and vice versa. Japanese people are interested in foreign people and culture so it’s interesting to look at how the cultures have mixed and how it is growing in Japanese society and affects their lives. We can see how foreign tourists interact with locals as well as how the contribute to Japan’s lifestyle and economy. 

With these general ideas in mind we have chosen individual topics we will be exploring. These topics about Japanese life are what we ourselves will be focusing on individually so look forward to our introductions to find out more details about them!