Group Photo!!
Twice during our final week, we visited Waseda University, the Princeton of Japan. Our first contact was an American professor who attended UofM. He made getting around and getting set up with his students less complicated. That doesn’t mean, however, that communicating with the Japanese students was easy. It was actually pretty hard. While all of the students knew some English (they were English classes afterall), it was hard for us all to understand each other. Sometimes they didn’t know what I was saying and sometimes I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
Inter-group mingling!!!
Another challenge was shyness. I don’t usually start conversations with strangers right off the bat so this was different for me. I also noticed that out of all the students I talked to, I was the one to initiate the conversation, except when I was with classmates, then my classmates were the ones to initiate the conversation, but none of the students I talked to initiated the conversation. This was very different from the Keio University students (who are their rivals might I add). However, I did have a few good conversations with some of the students. A sidenote would be to mention that these students helped us in our research projects by taking the surveys used to gather research for said projects. We met with at least 4 groups of students over a 2 day period and I’m sure the data collected from them will be very beneficial to our project.
Rob Cole's Study Abroad in Japan Blog 
Talk about being shy. You were the exact same way in our Japan meetings back at Michigan State. I know what you are talking about though. It was rather strange that we could talk to the students but never really have conversations. I do remember one girl though, from Korea, if I remember, that really wanted to talk to you…
As awesome as it was to talk to students from a different country, it was pretty weird trying to figure out how to go about these conversations. It seemed as though we would just ask a series of questions and they would reply. The main differences in their responses were that some of them knew English better than others.
I was a bit surprised of the difficulty of having a conversation with them since Wesada is indeed Princeton of Japan. Just like you say we would just ask a series of questions and they “sometimes” or “trying” to reply. I think one of the main reasons was becasue they were not prepared. One of the students told me they are not informed about this activity at all. They just came to class normally and BooYa! A group of forigen student started to talk to you……