By Raven Bluford

About two weeks ago, we read articles that discussed the relationship between the United States and Japan in relation to President Trump. The article that I really enjoyed reading the most was the article about the shooting in Texas and how the number shot was much bigger than the amount of shootings that occurred in Japan within the past five years. The article really went into detail about the difference between the United States and Japan’s gun laws. It even went as far as to criticize American gun laws by making the assertion that getting a gun in America is as easy as getting chopsticks in Japan. Although the author of the article heavily critiques the United States, it doesn’t take away the fact that it makes a great point about the U.S. needing to look at the way that Japan does its laws and why their way is successful. I hope in the future our government reconsiders our current gun laws to hopefully prevent another tragic mass murder.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/texas-church-shooter-killed-more-than-japans-total-gun-homicides-for-5-years

Cha Cha Slide

This picture shows our Japanese Plus group teaching a popular American line dance to a group of Japanese exchange students that were with the Kakehashi program. My favorite part of the Japanese Plus Program is that we are able to utilize the Japanese learned in class with native speakers that are closer to our age. But more than that, our work with the Kakehashi program has raised our cultural awareness and understanding of Japan.

Raven Bluford

By Raven Bluford

This was my first time ever seeing someone tap dance, so I didn’t really know what to expect and I was really anxious. Once we met Kazunori Kumagai, my anxiousness turned to anticipation because when he talked about how he got into tap dancing it really showed me that there was so much more to tap dancing than what I originally thought. I learned that tap dancing tells a story and the story can be told with more than one story-teller. The story can be told with tap dancers, trumpet players, bass players, and drum players.

The performance overall was really intense and I loved seeing how everything had a solid contribution towards each other. The background music and the lights really set the mood for the music being played and made the experience more intense, which caused me to be quite emotional. I loved seeing how attuned all of the musicians were with each other, because every time the musicians played something, Kazunori knew how to tap to it in a way that made you feel like it was rehearsed, but also made you feel like it was impossible for it to not be impromptu. If given the chance again, I would love to be able to watch another tap performance.

By Raven Bluford

My shift for our booth at the Cherry Blossom Festival was from 4-6 p.m. and I had arrived at about 10, so we had a lot of time to explore the festival until our shift. A few of us spent a lot of time at the JPOP stage, where there were various Japanese performers performing throughout the day. The performances ranged from bands to dancing groups to fashion shows. My favorite performances were by a J-Rock group called Kanadete sourou and a J-Pop group called Jr. Exile. I’d never heard of Kanadete sourou and I’m not a big fan of rock, but I really enjoyed the songs they were singing considering the female vocalist had a really amazing voice and she was really energized. Another thing I liked about them was that the speakers were really loud, so you could really feel the vibrations from the drums and guitar. I knew Jr. Exile because two days prior we had watched them perform at the Japan Bowl, so I was really excited to see them because I was amazed by their performance at the Japan Bowl. I think their performance at the Cherry Blossom Festival was better than the Japan Bowl because the audience was louder and more pumped, which made the performance more exciting. I really liked Jr. Exile because they’re really good dancers and very good singers. I especially liked the dancing because they were in-sync and they did a few stunts as well. This was a really great experience because it has influenced me to explore more about them and their music.

By Raven Bluford

We had another Kakehashi visit from another set of students – from Meiji University. This time we got a chance to practice our Japanese with them. The conversation was very hard due to the fact that we had to talk for 7 minutes in Japanese and I don’t really know that many questions in Japanese. But the person I was talking to was very willing to try and understand what I was asking, even if the way I was asking questions could be seen as confusing due to the questions lacking sentence structure.

Like the other Kakehashi visit, we were invited to go to Z-burger with them. This time I decided to sit with two of them and try to practice my Japanese. I asked them questions about what they think of America and their response was quite interesting, because the way they saw America was quite different from the way I look at America. The first thing they thought of when I asked that question was large serving sizes, which was quite funny. I also asked questions about what they do and about them learning English. Overall, I really enjoy getting to have experiences like this because it allows me to meet people and interact with actual Japanese people in ways I otherwise never would.

By Raven Bluford

This picture was taken during the second Kakehashi visit at Z Burger, where we got a chance to meet up with the Japanese students from Meiji University again. This allowed us the opportunity to practice some more of our Japanese. One of the things I remember the most about this experience is that as we were struggling when speaking in Japanese due to the limited amount of Japanese that we know, the Japanese students were struggling just as much when trying to speak in English. This made me feel much better and also motivated me to try to become as close to fluent in Japanese as I can, because being able to break the language barrier would be quite useful in trying to communicate with other Japanese people to learn more about their quite intriguing culture.

By Raven Bluford

The section in Geek in Japan about giri and presents is quite interesting to me because in some ways it is similar to what we do in the United States, but in some ways it is completely different. I found it quite intriguing that the gifts Japanese people give to people depends on the relationship of those two people, and that if you give a person a really good gift, but you just met them, they would be offended because they are obligated to get you a gift that is just as good. This is a little similar to the United States because almost everyone puts more effort and spends more on a gift for someone they are close to, as opposed to someone they just met.

Another thing that I found fascinating is that Japanese people give gifts to people for funerals, whereas in the United States it is seen as impolite to give gifts to someone who recently lost a loved one. Japanese people also give gifts on the first day of work to your boss or co-workers, while in the United States doing something like that is quite uncommon.

By Raven Bluford

The other language that I am currently studying is French, which I have been studying for about 3 years. Although I found French to be definitely easier to learn due to the letters being the same as the English letters, I found that I enjoyed studying Japanese more. Before joining Japanese Plus, I had no prior experience with anything Japanese, so the fact that I had no prior knowledge about Japan or Japanese culture and I have enjoyed it this much says a lot.

Studying French didn’t really help much when studying Japanese, because there are completely different components that makes up the language and culture. One similarity that I did find between the two was that Japanese and French start combining numbers using mathematical expressions to make new numbers. For example, in Japanese 11 would be the word for 1 and 10 and when you add them it’s 11. In French the word for 80 is 4 and 20, which means you would multiply 4 by 20 to get 80.

By Raven Bluford

After meeting the Kakehashi exchange visitors, a few of us went to go to this event where we were able to make Bingata.

Bingata is an old Japanese tradition, where you dye cloth and make different patterns nature-related, using various bright vibrant colors. We were given cloth that had a template to dye the cloth. When we dyed the bingata we were given palettes that had very light colors, which kind of served as the base before we added the darker colors. After adding the light colors to the cloth, we were given the darker colors, which would be added or even covered some parts of the light colors. It was quite different from painting, because instead of actually making long strokes, you just use one brush for dotting and the other brush for rubbing in that dot. This was quite fun because it didn’t matter if it was inside the lines or not, because once the bingata dried, the paint outside the lines would be gone.