At my core as a person, I am an artist and I have spent the past years at my university developing an understanding of the connections between people, technology, and design. Design is such a major piece of everyone’s life and culture, and I had come to be interested in just how much it differs and affects people in various parts of the world. I originally fell in love with Japanese design culture through the use of mascots, whether it was for a business, location, or purpose. Their designs would take into account what it is they advertise or support and how an audience is able to associate and reflect. I had spent quite a bit of time looking over so many different kinds of mascots, even to the point I had used them for a school project to reflect social media presence and connections followers create with a figure, or mascot. It made me realize something, mascots exhibit a particular narrative and cultural device through design, they emphasize togetherness, tourism, and enjoyment through both physical and virtual media within Japanese society. I wanted to learn more about Japanese design culture beyond just this, it was intriguing to see how another culture uses design to communicate with its audience.
Design is all around. It’s in advertisements telling someone to buy a product or encouraging community welfare. It’s in how a train station is built to be efficient or buildings place their signs. Design factors into economy, entertainment, socialization, and history, where it creates a subtextual communication between the creator and its intended audience. I have been influenced by Japanese designers and their ability to create such powerful designs, and I wish to apply that same ability to my work and connect with my main future goals of working with design in the fields of advertising and audience interactivity. Intensive language study, in-depth culture immersion, and peer socialization is what aids in the ability to fully understand the design in front of me. I want to ask the question of why the design feels so influential and what cultural context brings to design. At the same time, I want to create long lasting connections while I’m here with others who have the same passion for design and art as I do. Creativity is something that is so much stronger when it is done together with someone.
I’m incredibly excited to begin cataloging the design I see around me. I have a sketchbook set aside to draw out what is before me and record what it feels influential to me when I look at or interact with it. But, I’m even more excited to be putting myself out into a new place, have new experiences and understandings of another culture, and maybe even share a bit of mine with others. I know there will be times where I feel embarrassed, timid, or scared, but I’m ready to take those on and see them as an opportunity to grow as a person. Language learning is going to be incredibly intriguing during my experience as I’ve come to understand how important the connection between language and culture is, and experiencing the language first-hand is going to provide a wonderful impact to my educational understanding of it.
Living in a new place can be an exciting experience, but living in another country as well is going to open my mind to new ways of life. In the United States, I grew up on the west coast in the state of California and my home university was on the east coast in the state of Pennsylvania. It was almost two completely different cultures, but both have become solid parts of me and developed me as a person. I wonder how I will change during my time in Japan.
I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to be part of an educational exchange, and cannot wait for all that is to come.
[Attached is a photograph of my home university.]

I’ve been in Japan for four months now, and within that time, I feel as if I have been able to start seeing the world from a different perspective through a different experience in life. For most of my days, my routine would always take the Hankyu railway to my host university. I was on it nearly everyday, which led me to start being fascinated by the people and world around me. I’d get to stare at the home and parks of Kobe. Families crossing the street, trees changing their leaves for the season, and most of all, watching how people rode the train. It’s mundane, yet, I never thought of how people operate in the world around them until I broke away from my routine back in America, daily life became beautiful to me. I’d look at what people wore,
Other times, I’d get off from school and just walk around. Either in the neighborhood of Okamoto, my dormitory’s neighborhood, or ride the Hankyu and get off at a random stop and see what awaited me. I loved to look upon businesses that were stacked on top of each other, streets that held plenty to offer. There is a design I found of an efficient, but also a city that can hold so many people and opportunities for them.

As I learned more of the language, from both my class and my peers, I found myself nervous about my language skills. Anyone would be, I was worried if I had improved. But being outside, as the months have gone by, I begin to understand more of the words spoken around me. It felt like connecting puzzle pieces in, and I began to feel confidence in my improvement the more I kept going outside. It felt even more advantageous to my experience as a secondary language learner to make friends from here. I made friends through my school’s Global Zone, which was the main area to connect with exchange and university students, and through joining the cosplay circle at my host university. My Global Zone friends were learning English and between the two of us, we would exchange phrases in our native languages. In the cosplay circle, I could only speak in Japanese, and they were so excited to teach me about slang pertaining to the internet and their culture.
To me, these were more than just words that I was adding to my vocabulary, but it was also part of being a young adult in Kansai. Textbooks act as the standard for a language, yet language strays away from this standard depending on age, region, interests, or job. This was learning to live in a language, rather than learning a language. Of course, it is still hard to pick it up, and when I say it, it may not come out the same way as a native speaker. I remember the cosplay circle members had tried to get me to add more Kansai dialect into my speech. The hardest for me was adding “や” into my speech, and they thought it was cute how I spoke it, and encouraged me to keep trying out the particles and vocabulary as I spoke to them. My language began to be tied to my identity as well.
Alongside this, I spent 90 minutes twice a week participating as an English tutor in LOFT, Konan University’s language learning space, and I began to discover how much I love helping to learn alongside my own learning. I would meet so many students each shift from Konan. Everyone had a different personality, different major, and a different approach to how they chose to take on language.

As of writing this, the New Year has just passed. I live in a dormitory, however, I was invited to spend New Years with my friend and her host mother. We ate traditional New Year’s dishes, watched the Kōhaku Uta Gassen, and visited a shrine for Hatsumode. Again, I was amazed by people simply living. To see all the people gathered for Hatsumode, it felt good to be part of something. I never thought much of the New Year before this, usually there would be nothing special for me back in America. It was a day like any other, yet being here, I saw how everyone was connected into doing the same things in celebration for the new year. Whether that was cleaning, putting up decorations, or praying for good fortune in the upcoming year, everyone was participating in it.
I think people are incredibly unique, in every way they walk, choose to dress themselves, speak, share their interests. Yet, I only began to discover how beautiful we are and wonder how we operate as a culture since coming here. Experiencing something much different than I am used to allowed for me to take notes on anthropological aspects of a culture and city. I continue to look at the “why” of a situation. Why does someone choose to stand like that? Why would the businesses be arranged like that? Why do we follow certain trends within a culture? It’s intriguing but also important to discovering who we are, as individuals and as a culture.