Japanese Universities

To be honest, recently I'm not so motivated to study subjects except English in this university. Most of my friends say like "I can at least graduate from university as long as I'm in class and I can get grades even if the scores are terrible." I used to have the same opinion, but I came to consider the reason why I came to university and how hard I studied to enter this university, and I felt I had to study harder. In addition, we have parents who pay tuition. We have to study hard not only for myself but also for them.

Scary Story

Hi. In this post, I'll write about an incident which happened to me last year. I went on a drive to Kagawa prefecture with my friend. On the way home, it was about 2:00 a.m., one of them suggested to go to Mt. Kabuto (I guess you know the mountain near KGU), which is known as a spiritual place. There is a extraordinarily huge rock in the middle of the road near the top of the mountain.
There is a story about this rock that some people tried to remove it out of the way, and most of them got injured or fell from the mountain during their attempt. After all, they couldn't even move the rock. After that, people started thinking like it was dangerous to touch or approach the rock. Nevertheless, some naughty children went there and got injured.
We were going there. On the way to the top of the moutain, all of us saw a bjg truck and some men in work clothes, they looked like they were smiling, even though it was about 2:00 a.m.. We passed them, but soon we found that we couldn't go anymore because the road was one-way traffic. So we turned back to the place where we saw men. However, there was no longer anyone. None of us heard any sound of truck pulling out although it was so quiet, and it took at most 40 seconds to turn back there. We felt something strange. We should have go back to our home, but we wanted to see the rock. We kept going. There was almost no lights on the road except headlights of our car. As we were going on, suddenly the engine of our car sounded strange, and then, we saw a huge rock from the windshield. We turned and hurried away from it. None of us got injued, but it was one of the scariest things I had experienced.

Cultural Differences

I think we Japanese people are more likely to face cultural differences when we go abroad than people in other countries do because of some unique custom or culture Japan has.


When I went to New Zealand, altough this might be trivial thing, I found a custom strange for me. I was in homestay while I was in NZ. On my first day there, after I went to the bathroom, I closed its door as most Japanese did. After a while, my host mother came to my room and said "Is there someone in the bathroom? I'm waiting for quite a long time because I thought someone was inside." "No.", I answered. Then my host mother a little angrily told me like "When no one is in the bathroom, make sure that you leave the door open. Otherwise people think there is someone inside." I was surprised when I heard that because we Japanese usually close the door after using bathroom maybe so that it doesn't look messy. Since then, I realized that people in most European and American countries did like the case in NZ.

Dou you have any experiences like this ??