Author: Bryles Tucker| Major: Biology | Semester: Summer 2024

Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine, or the location of the thousand Torii gates in Kyoto. This location is amazing with the view of the Torii gates as well as the view of Kyoto you get from the mountain side.

I studied abroad in Japan because I’ve always wanted to visit Japan for its popular culture, food, history, and architecture and this specific Honors Passport program hit every single one of those boxes. I was just in University Perspectives when I heard about this opportunity, and I knew I had to take this chance to see one of the countries I have always wanted to see. I was there for a summer intersession in this last May, for about 2-ish weeks. We left the day after finals ended, so it was an extremely quick turnaround.

Despite this trip only being 2-ish weeks, it was jam-packed with different activities and locations all throughout Japan. It was so difficult to tell people where specifically I was going in Japan when we would be tackling so much of the country. Our main assignment was to do a research project that was specific to Japan. Our medium for this project was a presentation that was around 15-20 minutes long talking about the significant parts of what we researched. The goal was to sound like the expert on our topic when giving our presentation. The way our presentations were structured was going from site to site and several different days to all, and our entire trip was  structured around these sites as we started with the old and moved into modern Japan. This trip also had lots of students from a variety of majors, and the research aspect helped students gain new information and relevance to outside cultures and history that they probably wouldn’t have gotten without this trip.

My specific project was on the history of Japan’s automotive industry and car culture, where I touched on the history of Japan’s major export manufacturers and their relevance within Japan and worldwide. However, one of my favorite experiences was staying at a traditional Japanese inn in Koyasan, we were only there for one night, but we had tatami mat rooms and futon beds that ended up being more comfortable than I had predicted.

Not everyone at the U of A speaks English, but the majority do, and that makes talking, learning, and organizing things easier, but in Japan that is not the case. Since English is the global lingua franca many people know some English, but sometimes they only know a few phrases or words. On top of that, every person I interacted with, that wasn’t a part of our group, defaulted to speaking Japanese immediately, this made for a very awkward interaction at the very first store I went to where the cashier was speaking Japanese and I stood there on the other side of the counter trying to put pieces together of what I knew of Japanese to attempt to understand. I failed miserably. Japanese is a very difficult language coming from knowing a Germanic language. Since it requires learning new characters and what those mean, on top of having to then know what the combination of characters mean as well. However, as the trip went on, I was able to learn more pieces of Japanese and was assisted by our guides, photographer, and a little bit of google translate when needed. I wish I was a little more well versed in the language, but that’s just an excuse to go back to Japan when I know Japanese, to be able to truly test my knowledge in the language.

While in Japan I was able to visit some locations that included a lot of my hobbies. I visited the national museum of nature and science, the Nintendo store in Kyoto, and a Pokemon center in Kyoto as well. All of these locations were super fun things that I did in my free-time, but we also visited several shrines, temples, historical sites, and parks. We visited the imperial villa, Katsura Villa, which is probably my favorite garden on the entire trip. We also got to go to the Hiroshima bombing dome and peace museum, which hit super hard emotionally, but was an important place to go. We also rode the shinkansen, or bullet train as we know it in the states, which went around 200mph.

Study abroad if you can, if you have any interest at all do it. The relatedness of this trip to my major was slight, but not crazy, but I still would recommend this trip or any study abroad. However, if you do travel to a country that does not require a language to visit and they don’t speak a language you know, be prepared to rely a lot on others that do know the language or google translate, but that should not scare you from taking a study
abroad to a country you want to go to. You also should be in good standing with your college and the Honors college as well. Don’t let a study abroad hurt you when it comes to your education, but I don’t want to discourage anyone from doing a trip like this. It will genuinely change your life to the point where words nor pictures do it justice. If you can study abroad!