Category Archives: Suita City

Shopping street work experience and juggling with new friends at Kansai University

Group photo with English conversational school turned into Karate lesson
Group photo with English conversational school turned into Karate lesson

We went to the shopping street in Suita, where we were each assigned to a specific shop. A group of five World Campus – Japan participants (including myself) were supposed to be teaching English, but ended up getting a private karate class from our student instead! At the end of the class, we decided to thank our student/sensei by performing some Rakugo for her, which we learned about for the very first time yesterday. I did not want to perform then, because I’m not good at improvising, but today I felt confident enough to try. And I actually sorta liked it, too!

Later in the day, we went to Kansai University to interact with the students. First, we got to play with the juggling club’s materials. My favorite was the diabolo: spinning it was easy and fun. I also tried really hard to catch it after throwing it up in the air, but I just couldn’t do it! Later, we talked about the differences between our countries, for example, what type of food we eat or how we celebrate Valentine’s Day. Our group’s question was: “what do you study at your university?” It turned out we all did something with languages, either English, Japanese, Korean or computer programming (we think it counts).

When the day’s program was over, we made plans with some Japanese students to hang out at the arcade the day after. We might also see them again at the Arigato Event. Somehow, World Campus makes it easy to make foreign friends, even when we have little time together!

Francine Geurts, The Netherlands

Personal day shenanigans in Suita

Osaka tower at night
Osaka tower at night

Hello, my name is Magnus and I’m from Norway.

Today we had our personal day in Suita. We were all excited for this day. A lot of people did different things such as going to the Osaka-castle. In this text I will describe what I did:

In the morning me and some other participants went to Yodobashi, a store that sells all kinds of electronic stuff. No one really bought anything but it was fun to look around. After meeting up there we went to Spa-world. Spa-world is the largest Onsen (Hot spring) in Suita. We planned on staying there for 2 hours but ended up staying for 4. This basically happened because we discovered a floor with slides and pools. We completely forgot to watch the time after that. After that we were all pretty hungry so we decided to eat dinner at a special restaurant that serves VERY large portions. We got a gigantic Yakisoba (noodles) plate for 10 people so you better believe we all were very full after that meal. Then we walked around in Osaka downtown for a while until we finally spontaneously decided to go to Karaoke where we had a lot of fun. Sadly my throat started hurting a lot after singing the rock version of jingle bells. But it was worth it.

This basically sums up my personal day.

Magnus Krumbacher, Norway

Senri Daini Elementary school and Rakugo

Kim trying Rakugo in Suita
Kim trying Rakugo in Suita

The first event of the day took place when we walked from the local community center to an old library. The library used to be a school, however as time passed, it slowly fell into disrepair until it was eventually abondoned, after which it was reconstructed into a library. Inside said library, there was an old classroom in which Hiro taught us some valuable life lessons.

Next, we went to visit a school (Senri Daini Elementary School) and interacted with the kids. The school was very nice and had an open atmosphere, and the kids were great. Later, we ate lunch with them, which was a chaotic yet unique experience.

After that, we thanked the school and its students, and went back to the community center to experience “Rakugo”. Rakugo is a performance in which the performer sits on a pillow on a small stage in seiza (Duke Kanada, who introduced us to the concept called it “punishment”, haha). During which, the performer is to depict a story in which two or more characters perform different things, followed up by a punch line at the end. The catch is, the performer may only use a fan, a small cloth, and various motions to depict said story. After listening to a few rakugo stories, we got to use templates to make our own which was a fantastic experience. Once every group had tried things out a bit, lots of us had a go on stage which was great because it put everybody into the spotlight and gave us a chance to express ourselves in new and creative ways. I myself took part in this, during which I did get a bit nervous as a result of being on stage but managed to pull through in the end.

I had a great day and would love to do something similar again, and will make sure to teach my family the way of rakugo when I return home!

Axel Hooper, UK/Sweden

Roasting Coffee, Making Origami and Playing Games with World Campus!

It is not often you get to make coffee from the raw bean and make awesome kabuto origami in the same day! But World Campus – Japan was lucky enough to do does things. Hinata talks about her experience roasting coffee with “Iga-yaki Horoku”, a Japanese roaster. She also talks about making different origami and playing games with the local students.