| ヨーコソ！ |
| Welcome to KYUDAI |
It has now been over six months since I went back home to Sweden from Fukuoka, where I had spent the previous six months as a guest student at the department of materials science. As always when there has been some time since you experienced something special, I remember almost only the good things of my stay. Of course, there was a back side of the coin as well, but you will have to bearwith me for not going into that here.
By the way, the fact that there are two sides of most things leads to one of the absolutely best things about travelling and seeing cultures different from your own. You will always find many nice things to bring back and try to introduce into your own life at home, while you can leave the less good things where you find them. In this way you can improve your way of life by travelling. There are quite a few good things in Japan, which are well worth taking after. Most of them are, in my view, of the kind that has to do with the personality of the Japanese, a personality which seems to me to be amazingly homogeneous throughout the different categories of the Japanese people.
What struck me first is something that I'm sure all newcomers feel when they come to a group in Japan. You are treated like a King! At least I was. I was shown around, in vited to dinners and so on. I know that there are different opinions about this and that some people think that it sometimes becomes too much, but I just recieved and enjoyed. (Of course, in some situations I had difficulties relaxing, naturally enough in new situations, but most of the time it was great.) In the beginning I almost felt guilty for recieving so much without giving anything in return, but as I see it, it was just natural to my Japanese friends. As it should be! It is a very sound attitude to accept and welcome new people like that, isn't it?
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| 研究室コンパのスナップ。中央左が本岡教授、右が筆者。 |
This kind of welcome is not very common in Sweden. Of course, we are a friendly people (I think), but not in this way. In Sweden, newcomers are not always the center of attention (unless they have a personality that leads to it). On the contrary, you have to work yourself into a new group of people and for some that can take quite some time. It's probably difficult to say which of these two "welcomes" are better. Maybe a mix would be nice, since you would like to be warmly welcomed as part of a new group, but not based on your different nationality or culture but based on your person.
What about housing, then? The university offers many foreign students a great way of accomodation at the Kyushu University International House. I had a rather small (by Swedish standards) room with fridge and bathroom. There is about twelve such rooms to one kitchen and the rent is very nice (low). I think there are a couple of hundred rooms and apartments in the House, most inhabited by foreigners from Asia, USA and Europe and in the center there's a common building with office, computer room, pool table(!!) and so on.
The low rent made it possible to go for a few short trips, which was great. I went to Kagoshima and Ibusuki once, where I among other things let myself be buried in 60°C hot and damp sand. I lay there sweating with my heart pounding (sand gets very heavy) for twenty minutes (much more and you'll be cooked). An other time I went away for a week to visit a friend who stayed in Nagoya. We went to the Hakone area by bus and there we enjoyed "onsen", karaoke, black eggs and watched Fuji-san from a distance. Impressive! We also went to see Kyoto, which is a beautiful city where I very well can imagine myself living.
Also Fukuoka is a very nice city. It appears to be very young (altough it definitely is not!), since there are basically no old buildings left in the city centre. They would have given the city more "soul and feeling", but the new replacements are not bad. Personally, I was impressed by the large number of immense buildings with cool and modern architecture that are everywhere in and around the city centre. They certainly give character to Fukuoka as a dynamic centre of Kyushu.
Finally, I will never regret staying in Fukuoka and at Kyushu University. I'm grateful to my friends there, for their care and I hope to keep the contacts I've made in the future and would like to go back soon again, at least for a shorter visit. Also, I haven't climbed Fuji-san yet.