Somewhere in between

There is enough place to park to park my bike on the campus, I can study in the library with all my books spread out, and there are no cues for the cafeteria. My dormitory seems to be deserted. All the signs are obvious, it’s vacation! The first semester (for the Japanese the second and thus last semester of the school year) has finished. Although stating the obvious, it remains remarkable how time has a habit of passing, very very quickly. And leaving me behind in a kind of contemplating mood, thinking about everything that has happened, the things I have done and seen, and the things I’ve learned the last 5 months. In Leiden by now, all the Japanese language training should have come to an end. Until now my program has consisted mostly of Japanese lessons, or lessons in Japanese about subjects related to Japanese culture. And I find it surprising how many kanji (Chinese characters) I still come across that I can’t read. Seeing friends reading books in Japanese without apparently any difficulty, it feels like I still have a long way to go. But there’s no other possibility than try to walk the way so I also bought my share of Japanese books through which I am now plunging my way, with a little help of my friend, the electronic dictionary. On the other hand, I can now understand fairly all the lectures the Japanese teachers give, while being in a Japanese High school I was never really able to figure out what they were talking about. And I am even able to talk with Japanese people about subjects related to more tentative area’s such as politics, so somewhere I must have made some progress. Next semester we will have the opportunity to also take lectures and classes together with the Japanese students in Japanese. And we will also have to write a 25-page essay in Japanese about a freely chosen subject. And almost every single week the subject of this paper changes, depending on which subject has caught my attention. There are so many really interesting things concerning Japan of which I would like to know more that I have more than enough idea’s to produce 5 papers.
Because the real intellectual content of my lectures was not always that high, I have the feeling that I learned most outside school on a whole range of subjects. Not only the process of really living on your own, using daily life Japanese, but also meeting people with interest in subjects I hardly knew anything about such as Kyoto school philosophy, post modernism, theology, the homeless in Japan, have broadened my view on the world but also made it more difficult to find out what the subjects I am really interested in. But I guess that I still have more than enough time to find out what I really want with my life. Or perhaps I am never going to find out and just live from the one day to the other day, enjoying what it brings and just let time do what it has got to do. But for now I am all going to put those thoughts aside and kicking of the vacation with a schooltrip for 3 days to Nagasaki, Shimabara, Unzen and Kumamoto.