The Adventure Begins...

In June of last year, I began what was to be the biggest undertaking in my life to date. From June 2012 to May 2013, I lived in Japan as a foreign exchange student in various cities across the Chubu and Kanto regions. For the summer, I participated in a cultural studies program for my home University of Missouri while I spent the academic year studying the Japanese language at the Japan Center for Michigan Universities in Hikone, Japan.

The summer I spent traveling across Japan, being primarily based in the city of Iida in the Nagano Prefecture, as a member of Bunraku Bay Puppet Theater. Our cultural studies program took the form of spending eight weeks living in Iida and learning the art of ningyou joururi, puppet theater, from the oldest active puppet troupe in Japan, the good people of the Imada Puppet Theater. This all culminated in our participation in the annual International Puppet Fest hosted in Iida, performing both as students of Imada and as members of Bunraku Bay.

I began my travels as most foreigners do on their first time in Japan, in the capital city of Tokyo. I was traveling with some classmates of mine, Joe Shadduck and David Parker, who were also on the summer program with me. From the get-go, our time in Japan was one of exploration and discovery as we struggled to find our hotel on the first night and carried our luggage into the wee hours of the morning on the streets of downtown Tokyo.

After a couple days in Asakusa, a district of metropolitan Tokyo, we made our way to Nara, a city I came to call my favorite in Japan, for the beginning of our summer program. There again we met challenges as people began to gather at our youth hostel in Nara for the start of the summer. But that's a story for another post.

After all 12 members of our group, 10 students, one student leader and our professor, Martin Holman, the head of the Japanese Department at Mizzou as well as the founder and head of Bunraku Bay, found their way to Nara, we spent a week taking in the sites, rapidly learning japanese just from sheer exposure and learning about the rich history in the former capital in ancient Japan.

We spent nearly a week and a half in Nara, after which we moved to Kyoto where we stayed for a week in the best youth hostel in Kyoto according to many travel guides, the Utano Youth Hostel. Although so much of the country is steeped in history, many consider Kyoto to be the cultural capital of the country, including my sensei, who said, "You could spend ten years living in Kyoto, which I have done, and still not see all there is to see or do all there is to do in this city."

Our time in Kyoto was all too brief, but I would be making many trips back to the city in the coming year. After leaving Kyoto, we got into the meat of our summer program, living with Japanese host families for eight weeks in the rural mountain city of Iida. During this time we practiced learning puppetry for 15 hours a week in addition to language classes with Holman-sensei and cultural opportunities such as learning kyuudo, Japanese archery, and volunteering at a local daycare.

As busy as we were, the summer flew by and before I knew it, it was time for my friends and classmates to return home, while I readied myself for spending my academic year in Hikone at JCMU. There was a month gap between the end of my summer program and the beginning of my academic year, but I was lucky enough that one of the host families allowed me to stay with them for that time, which allowed me to get comfortable with everyday japanese without the added pressures of practice and classes. It was during this time and the beginnings of my studies at JCMU that really saw the greatest change as I became more adapted to life in Japan.

In this blog, I will be sharing my experiences in the Land of the Rising Sun, the good, the bad and the ugly, now that I've had a full summer living back in the good ol' US of A to process what happened in my year abroad. Because it's become such an integral part of my current vocabulary I will also be sharing some useful Japanese phrases I've come to love as well as provide a little advice and tips to people looking to have their own daibouken in the isles of Japan.

Useful phrase in this week's post:

daibouken - だいぼうけん　大冒険

meaning: great adventure