August Sycamore Tree

Dear Sycamore Family,

Recently, I was asked to give a lecture at Miyagi Gakuin for a class of first and second year college students on topics in contemporary issues. Miyagi Gakuin is the women's university in Sendai that was founded in 1886 by missionaries from the United Church of Christ. At the time it was one of the few schools for women in Japan. Today the campus includes a pre-school/kindergarten, junior high school, high school, and university and has a variety of departments including English, Japanese Literature, Food and Nutritional Science, and psychology. Their music department is world famous and many students in this department are regular members of the student center.

Professor Tominaga is a friend of Jeffrey and a long time supporter of the student center. Her research interests include women's issues in Muslim communities as well as issues in ethnic minority communities around the world. Professor Tominaga also leads a study tour of university students to Tanzania every year. I met her in February and have had the opportunity to sit in on a few of her classes while I've been in Sendai. She was very interested to have me come give a presentation in her class because she thought it would benefit young women to hear the perspective of another young person.

As I've spent more time with Japanese college students and gotten a little better at speaking Japanese, I've come to appreciate the major differences in the lives of Japanese college students from American college students. For example, each semester a student in Japan might take anywhere from 15 to 20 different classes while a student in the U.S. might only take 4 to 8 classes. This kind of schedule makes it very difficult to focus very deeply on specific topics but does give students very broad overviews of many different subjects. However, the Ministry of Education and Science in Japan requires each class to give written final exams, term papers, or projects for grading purposes so the end of July and March are very busy months for students as they study for each of their prospective classes.

In my PowerPoint presentation I discussed ethnic diversity in San Francisco. I knew it was important to use a lot of graphics to enrich the information I was presenting and to keep it very simple. I began my presentation by talking about scale and distance in the U.S. and used a lot of maps (i.e. California is about the same size as Honshu, the main island of Japan). I also talked about the history of various neighborhoods in San Francisco like Chinatown or the Mission District. We had an interesting discussion about Japanese interment camps during WWII and they had many questions about that as well because it's not a topic that's typically discussed in school. But, as I suspected most of the students questions were about me personally and my life in California.

In any case, it was a fun and enlightening experience for me. There were about 100 students in the class and Professor Tominaga translated for me through a bulk of the presentation. I don't know if my talk made any impact on these students but I guess that is the reality of being a teacher. I'll have to practice a little more for next time.

For now, I'm off for summer vacation. I will a little time to travel around Japan for fun and with the student center summer work camps. I will also join Pastor Sharon and Morita Sensei at the PAAM conference in Honolulu, HI in August so I'm sure I will have plenty more experiences to share with you next month.

Until next time! Matta ne~

SKLT
Global Missions Intern (GMI) and
Assistant to the Director of the Sendai Student/Youth Center in Sendai, Japan