The Best Way to Learn

Besides coming to Japan and trying to improve my Japanese, one of my main motivations for interning at Ashinaga this summer was to learn. My aspirations of being involved with academia strongly exemplifies my love of learning and teaching, but the kind of learning I wanted to take away from this summer is a bit different. I wanted to learn the in's and out's of organizing a group of people for a common cause. I wanted to learn how to teach. I wanted to learn how to communicate. But I realized this kind of learning doesn't need specific goals, because what I ended up learning the last couple of days was unexpected and valuable: I just learned about other peoples' lives.

Cultural interaction really accentuates how different the world really is. Not only have I been able to talk to Japanese students, but also international students from Afghanistan, Somalia, Brazil, Indonesia, etc. Often times, we take for granted the power of cultural interaction, which seems to be overshadowed by the daunting field of international relations dictated by the politics of the leaders. But yesterday evening, by just talking to a student from Afghanistan about democracy and its relation to Islam, I realized that before supporting the process of democratization in the Middle East, I simply needed to learn more. So I'm currently re-evaluating my views of democracy especially in conjunction with the class I took regarding International Relations between the US and East Asia with Thomas Christensen. It seems like this realization might be useless in resolving conflict between the Middle East and the US, but pursuing this method of learning should be an imperative aspect in international relations. It reminded me of the FACES program in Stanford and the idea of bringing in university students from China and the United States to discuss about US-China relations.

In the beginning of the internship, I was bit anxious to get started in learning the operations of a nonprofit organization and really work. But, I realized another valuable method of learning is by simply talking to the students here. I'll try to keep this in mind throughout the whole summer... I bet I'll learn loads of new stuff with this mindset :].


Here's a recap of what I did:

Day 4:

We visited the headquarters around Shinjuku station with the new interns. It was so small, but most of the workers were away on a business trip... I really wanted to meet Mr. Tamai but he was also away. They took us to an interesting shrine which had a methodical way of 1) cleaning hands and 2) praying.

Yummy Fast Food Curry

 The most eventful thing was our Welcome Party! It was amazing... delicious food and lots of booze ;). Sukiyaki was so yummy!

Day 5: It's the weekend so not much has happened. I took a run with a student and practiced a bit of my Japanese. We talked about a lot of differences between the United States and Japan. I'm getting ready to head out to explore Central Tokyo!