Congratulations and お疲れさまでした again to the whole group from IUHPFL Osaka 2018. We are forever in debt to the teachers, families at home and abroad, staff at home and abroad, and the countless others who made the trip even possible, let alone such a success. As the students are well aware, I’m a bit of…
Farewells
The last week of the program always brings a mix of emotions. In the Literature class, we actually studied the Japanese word kidoairaku (喜怒哀楽), which, in a single word, denotes the full range of human emotions, either felt all at once, or over the course of an experience, or both. Things start out in a sort…
Koyasan
I tried to get this post out the night before we flew back, but sadly we had a big time crunch to get all the albums finished and clean-up completed, so instead of being a last update on “what we’re doing,” this post is going to be the penultimate entry, focusing on “what we’ve done.”…
A Brief Return to “Normalcy” at School
Sorry to keep everyone in waiting. As you no doubt know, there have been quite a lot of events, both planned and unplanned, in the meantime on this program. Separately, the massive flooding in the nearby prefectures of Okayama, Hiroshima, and Wakayama made it where school was cancelled one day, which we made up on…
Week 2 (Part 1): Kyoto and Back to School
[One quick note: Ava wasn’t able to join us on the trip to Kyoto because of her injury, so she isn’t featured in this blog entry, but she’s been keeping up with classes and will be joining us at long last in person tomorrow] This past week has been just as eventful as the first…
The 2018 Team’s First Week in Osaka
Our team has had quite the first week in Osaka! As everyone’s surely aware of now, shortly after we arrived, we thought we’d settled in, only to have the whole city upended for a few days, but now we’ve finally settled back into a rhythm. It’s time to catch up! The team arrived mid-afternoon and…
First Day of School Cancelled due to Earthquake: Everyone’s Fine
Greetings, everyone. This was not the first post I had been drafting. I have another post with five videos and lots of happy pictures, but I hadn’t quite finished. That will have to be for later tonight. For the time being, there’s a bit more urgent matter to attend to. A magnitude 5.3 earthquake hit…
Almost Ready to Go!
Greetings from Japan! While Imai-sensei will travel to Japan with the ryuugakusei (exchange students), I arrived in Tokyo about a week and a half ago, and we’ve been busy setting up our first activities. In a countable number of hours now, the ryuugakusei will board the first of two flights that will take them halfway…
Getting Set for Departure
もうドキドキしていませんか。 If you are one of the lucky members of our IUHPFL’s program to Osaka, you’ve probably started to feel a mix of intense emotions as you prepare to embark on what will surely be a life-changing journey. There’s much you can do, there’s no need to panic. Your instructors will be giving out regular information. Please be…
Preparing for Questions in Japan
Imagine for a moment that a new student from Japan showed up in your classroom. How would you introduce yourself? What would you want to say to them? Presumably, you’d have a lot of questions you’d like to ask them, about where they’re from, what they like doing, why they’re here, and what it’s like…
IUHPFL Osaka 