During one of my language sessions with Masako I was interviewed by the local television about my thoughts on a change of the start of the academic year in Japan from Spring to Autumn. Weirdly enough, they indeed broadcasted it and Masako recorded it later (that’s the girl’s voice in the background ).

And just for the content, I basically said that it would be easier for foreign students to study in Japan if they changed it to autumn. I actually said more in the interview, but that stuff has seemingly been cut out ^^

This time, I have to disappoint you as I have no pictures or videos for you, but I still have something to tell. Last Friday I had to write my placement test to determine, which language classes I can and have to take. Funnily enough, on that day the room was filled mostly with chinese and korean people (like 80-90% altogether) and I was thinking, that this does reflect the percentages of foreigners in Japan quite well. Still, it felt odd somehow, beeing like encircled as a foreigner between foreigners. As if beeing an oddity in Japan itself wouldn’t already be enough. Strange feeling, I can tell you ^^

The test itself started rather easy, after everything was explained to us in Japanese, Chinese and English, and I was able to make good progress until halfway, when things really started to become difficult. There was a steadily rising amount of Kanji and words that were unknown to me and the number of questions were I was just guessing grew in proportion to that, until I was just guessing in the end, when we were told that there were only 2 minutes left (great announcement – so timely…). Anyway, I made it into level 3 of 5 as expected (I was told nearly everyone coming from Hamburg gets into that level) and  was able to choose from courses of level 3 and 4. After the level 3 class this morning, which was easily understandable, I decided to take the opportunity to also take one level higher and now have 2 courses of level 3 and 2 of level 4 in my schedule. Above that, I’ll visit two lectures on each Friday in Japanese about ‘Family, Environment and Industry’ and ‘Science and Society’ to try and understand more university Japanese and get more input towards the topic of my Bachelor degree, which I’d like to write about environment/environmental movements/society in Japan. we’ll see how that works out – I still haven’t written to my professor about that, but there still is time and I have to figure it out a little bit better myself before I do that.

That’s the deal so far. I’m meeting a lot of cool people here, Japanese as well as foreigners, and it’s a cool time despite the moments of homesickness in the evening in my cold room (and it’s really fucking cold here in the evening and at night!). Still, everything’s fine and I’m starting to make plans for the Golden Week, which is a national holiday at the beginning of May. Maybe visit Kobe and osaka… we’ll see…