Japan

                So I was very excited to discover my passport arrived in the mail! My trip to Japan is just that much closer to fruition. I’ve been saving up for years to go on this trip.

 I fell in love with Japan’s culture after getting into their anime and manga in seventh grade. Their manga and anime generally proved to have awesome art and a zany storyline. And reading the manga and watching anime gave me an insight into everyday Japanese culture which got me interested. I took Japanese class because I wanted to learn more about their culture and their language.

Their culture is very different than ours but there are big similarities too. I can’t wait to actually visit Japan and stay with a host family and experience the culture up front. I want to try the different foods like sashimi, tonkatsu, udon, and other such dishes. I love their refined art and their cute styles too. They have almost two kinds of distinctly Japanese styles, the woodblock style and the anime style.

They created one of my favorite characters of all time: Hello Kitty. My friends will tell you that I am pretty well obsessed with Hello Kitty and that is actually a main reason for me to go to Japan. Hello Kitty is adorable and I like collecting Hello Kitty things although bathtubs and toasters are a bit overboard.

I have made a few friends from Japan over the years by hosting a student and hanging out with Japanese students while they were visiting my school. I love them all and I miss them dearly because they were so much fun to be around. I can’t wait to see some of them again.

I have so much I could say about Japan, and it’s hard to pick just what to say. I want to teach Japanese because my Japanese class has been so much fun I want to try and continue the experience for other people of the high school and college ages. Truly, it’s been my favorite class for years (with some really close seconds). There’s so much for my language obsessed brain to absorb. Everything from the way they say things to how they write them shows a big cultural connection. The more I learn the happier I’ll be.