Author: Nathan Fuhrman | Major: Computer Science | Semester: May 2024

This was inside of the garden at the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto.

I’ve grown up around airplanes my entire life, but the 17 combined flight hours from XNA to DFW to LAX to KIX was something else. It honestly felt pretty similar to the long bus rides I have taken for marching band. Instead of ending up at another football game though, I ended up in a new country and a new adventure. The Honors Passport: Japan program took place during the 2024 May intersession and lasted 17 days. We stayed in Nara, Koyasan, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Okayama, and Tokyo all the while visiting cultural sites, shrines, temples, museums, and historical buildings to learn about Japan’s history, architecture, religion, and culture. Now admittedly, this doesn’t seem like the kind of program for a Computer Science major, but what interested me about studying abroad in Japan is because of my field of study. One of the biggest influences on my life, and one of the few reasons I am studying CS, has been video games. I grew up playing video games and it sparked my interest in computers and technology at large. Now, some of my favorite games are from Nintendo, a company that originated in Japan, so naturally I was intrigued by the country and the culture that inspired such an impactful company. I have admired Japanese culture from afar for a while, so when I heard about the Honors Passport: Japan program, I knew I had to apply.

This was just after giving my presentation on Studio Ghibli in front of the Really Big Clock, or Ghibli Clock, in Tokyo.

This program was both new and familiar to me in terms of academics. I’ve written papers and done research before, but it was amazing to listen to presentations while at the actual sites that we were talking about. Getting to walk through these buildings, feel the bamboo mats underneath my feet, and feel the wind blowing through these picturesque gardens was incredibly unique. Part of our course work involved reading a book, Stranger in the Shogun’s City by Amy Stanley, with which we got to compare parallels between the sites we were visiting with some of the situations or historical places that the main character in the book experienced. The main project I got to work on during the program was a presentation on Studio Ghibli, a well-known Japanese animation studio, which I got to present to the group in front of the Ghibli Clock in Tokyo. For this presentation, I learned a lot about Studio Ghibli’s history and got to dive into Japanese animation as a whole. One of the most interesting things to me from my research was the way that Japanese animation developed by incorporating things from Western animation. This ended up being a theme we saw a lot in the more modern history of Japan. After WWII, Japan put a lot into self-improvement and used some of the West’s advancements and culture by combining them with more traditional Japanese elements to create a new identity for themselves.

The topic that stood out the most to me however was Japan’s history of religion. The way religion has developed in Japan over the past 1500 years or so has coincided a lot with the people in power at the time. Most of the religion in Japan was traditionally Shinto, but as Confucian Ethics and Buddhism were introduced to Japan, the country’s religious identity morphed into this unique combination of all 3. We got to see this a lot at some of the sites we visited, where Buddhist temples had Shinto elements in them, and some Shinto shrines had Buddhist elements as well. Exploring both Buddhism and Shintoism in Japan gave me a new appreciation for my own religious beliefs as a Catholic.

Studying abroad was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This was my first time traveling internationally, and I was blown away at how familiar Japan felt even though I was so far from home. The big cities like Kyoto and Tokyo felt similar to big cities in the US like Chicago or New York City. Even though I know almost no Japanese, it was surprisingly easy to navigate around and interact with people. I was honestly surprised at how much smaller the world felt after studying abroad. I always thought that being here in the US was just a fraction of this planet we call home, but living briefly in Japan felt comparable to how it does here in Fayetteville, even with how wildly different some parts of Japan were. Studying abroad really puts the global community into perspective, and I will be forever grateful for this experience.