Intermission: Introduction to Iida I

I think it wise to take a break before getting into my days in Iida and introduce this great city as it was seen through the eyes of foreign students. Unlike most of my fellow students, I was afforded the opportunity to live in the heart of the city with the Shimodas. Their home was a short 10 minute walk from the train station, which would serve as our central landmark.

As you might guess, with our language skills being what they were, we primarily had to use landmarks like specialty shops and statues to navigate the city over a street map. So forgive me if my directions aren’t as precise as some would like, but I think it’s how everyone familiarizes themselves with a new city.

So I’ll start with our lifeline, the train station. This was an easy location we all knew and so we used it extensively as the meeting place for activities. The station also provided us with the most important resource of all

Introduction to Iida Part I: Meeting the Host Families

The day had finally come to meet our host families, with whom we would be living for the next eight weeks in the great city of Iida in Nagano Prefecture. We walked from our hotel to the Iida kouminkan for a welcome party with our host families and a few people from the city building. We were welcomed to the city by Kumagai Fumiyo, the employee from the kouminkan who would be overseeing our stay and coordinating our program with the city.

During the course of our program in Iida, Kumagai-san was a tremendous help in making this summer run as smoothly as possible, while providing us with more opportunities for cultural enrichment than any of us could have imagined. This included lessons in Japanese martial arts, such as kyudo and kendo, as well as the performing arts like taiko and koto. I’ll talk more about those activities, however, in later posts.

After the welcome speech, students made a brief introduction speech, all of us at varying level of Japanese proficiency and some even electing to introduce themselves in English. Kumagai-san and Holman-sensei had worked for several months

Nagoya and Iida: First Impressions

After our day in Hikone, we again boarded the JR Line to Nagoya where we would be catching a bus. Nagoya was a city I never got to spend much time in, but it is definitely on the checklist for cities to visit during my next trip to Japan. Nagoya is one of the larger cities of the Honshu island of Japan, boasting not only a large JR station rivaling that of Kyoto, but also the Chūbu Centrair International Airport and the Meitetsu Bus Center. It is also the capital  of the Aichi Prefecture, making it a central port of Japan.

 Our business in Nagoya that day was at the Meitetsu Bus Center.  This is the central hub for the Meitetsu bus line, one of the largest lines in the country allowing you to take overnight or daytime buses to most anywhere in Honshu. We only had about 40 minutes to kill until the bus left for Iida, so we set down our luggage, grabbed some snacks from the convenience store located in the center itself and relaxed.

Hikone: An Interlude Between Kyoto and Iida

While I had hoped we would get to Iida in this post, there's still just too much story to tell before we got to our final destination. Between our time in Kyoto and moving in with our host families in Iida, we spent a brief, vibrant day in Hikone. We checked out of our youth hostel early Saturday morning and caught a bus to Kyoto station. From there we hopped on the Japan Railway (JR) Line and started making out way towards Nagoya, where we would be catching a bus bound for the Nagano Prefecture and the city of Iida.

However, as we rode up the eastern shore of Lake Biwa, our professor made the decision to stop off in Hikone, partially at my request. The reason being that following my summer program, I would be spending the academic year studying at the Japan Center for Michigan Universities (JCMU) located in the city of Hikone in Shiga Prefecture. In addition, Hikone is arguably the most important historical city in the prefecture. My professor used to be the Resident Director at JCMU before beginning his tenure at the University of Missouri.