Fellowship Talk

Yesterday was a pretty relaxed day. I got my hour of kanji study and shamisen/utai practice in and worked on planning the upcoming wedding for quite a while. Other than that, the main thing that happened was that the ryosei and I met with Prof. Morita about the future of the Friend Peace House. Prof. Morita agrees with us that the best thing is to have this new dorm become a kind of replacement for the old Amherst House where the Fellow used to live with around 15 students, and that we should be allowed to start accepting new students next semester, but we need to get permission from the gakusei shienka (the equivalent of the Residential Life office), and apparently for whatever reason they seem to hate the ryosei. However, we’ve talked a lot about this issue with people back at Amherst and President Marx put in a word for us and made a big concession on Amherst’s end to give free room and board to Doshisha’s Nijima Scholars in the future, so I feel pretty confident that we can convince Doshisha to let the ryosei make the Friend Peace House their new home and for the Amherst-Doshisha Fellow to continue to live with them here, since living with Japanese students is the best and most unique part of my experience here. From what I hear, most other exchange students in Japan end up living with mostly other exchange students and don’t have a lot of chance to interact with Japanese students, so I’m really lucky to have that chance. If we can’t get this plan to work out, though, then I don’t know what Chris will do next year when the last students here graduate and he’s left on his own. That would be really sad.

Later on in the night we discussed the issue with just the ryosei in the dorm. I couldn’t help but notice the difference between the first few discussions we had about the issue when I first came and had a lot of trouble understanding much of the complexities of the language and felt unable to really participate much – now my Japanese has improved a lot and I ended up kind of convincing them not to rebel and to push for an official recognition by the fall semester if not the spring semester. A few decades ago there was a similar problem at the old dorm and the students then just decided not to leave when the school told them too and continued to live there as fuhouryosei (illegal residents – basically squatters I guess) but collecting the fees they would have paid and putting them aside, and after a decade or so the school relented and agreed to let them become official again if they paid all the dues from the past few years. Junpei seems to really kind of be inspired by that example and seems to want to do that kind of thing again. I kind of support the idea if it really comes down to it and the Doshisha administration just refuses to recognize the importance of the Doshisha-Amherst connection after all our efforts, but I do think we have to try to make it happen through normal negotiation first if at all possible and only resort to that if everything else is exhausted, so I convinced the ryosei to go with me to talk to the gakusei shienka office and then with Doshisha’s President Hatta if that fails, and only if we’re refused after all of that to think about the fuhouryousei option.

I think this must be on a small scale a lot like what it would be like to be part of a fledgling country trying to gain independence from a repressive, corrupt government. It’s important to get strong backing from the international community and go about things in a manner that shows you’re in the right if you want to have a hope of independence, because if you don’t you’ll just seem like a terrorist organization and then no one will help you.

Oh, one other thing I did was to look at my cellphone bills for the past few months that arrived the other day after I called and asked for them. It turned out that there was one particularly bad month earlier on (¥7,000 when my base plan is only ¥2,150) where I seemed to make a lot of phone calls and I think I sent some photos from my phone, which ends up costing a lot, but if I make a couple of adjustments on my plan (eliminate some unnecessary feature and nominate Sawa’s phone as one I can make cheaper calls to for a minimal price) and just be prudent in my calling and texting (texting is much more economical in Japan) I should be able to lower the bill pretty easily to around ¥3,000 a month or so.

Oh, I also had McDonald’s for the first time in six months (the last time was at 4am after being out in Roppongi clubs all night with the Zumbyes, a couple of hours before we performed at Tokyo DisneySea and, despite all odds, sounded awesome.) I was kind of thinking it would be a wonderfully nostalgic taste experience, but really the best part of it was bunching up the straw wrapper and squirting a little Coke on it with the straw and watching it unfurl itself like I used to do when I was a kid. The food was fine, but I really didn’t feel any desire to eat more of it any time soon. The Coke must have been the first soft drink I’ve had since I’ve been in Japan, and I was very glad of it. It feels so much better drinking tea and water and coffee all the time!