Contain your excitement. This blog and Web site will chronicle the honors thesis I am currently writing. I am backdating the work I have done so the entire year can be accurately depicted. That’s a lot of work. Give me a minute, alright? I’ll get this thing a cooking real soon.
Image courtesy of Image Engineering.
It is my hope that I begin research for this honors thesis over the coming semester, so that I might be able to accomplish as much as I can efficiently next year, sure to be a hectic one, considering its my last at Temple University. So, I’ve formulated a handful of short proposals of what I might want to research. I want to develop a focus before the end of May.
I also have to choose an academic adviser for the project, though that largely depends on what I choose to research. Still, I have been blessed with a handful of bright, challenging and caring academic mentors, like Political Science Professor Dr. Robin Kolodny, Associate Dean of College Liberal Arts Dr. Joseph Mclaughlin, Filmmaker and Broadcasting and Telecommunications Professor Eugene Martin, and Honors Director Dr. Ruth Ost.
First, I have to choose an academic pursuit, though. Here they are, as follows:
Here begins a year-long investment in an undergraduate thesis. The details are a bit hairy, but let’s see if I can’t flush this out.
I came to Temple University in August 2004 as a political science major after an average high school academic career. I wasn’t honors department material. In the past that meant that I was unable to graduate with honors.
Things have changed.
The final overall JYA episode, which serves as a review of all the cast trips:
I went to New Orleans with Common Ground to offer some post-Hurricane Katrina support. Mostly, I stayed with a hundred other volunteers on cots in a high school gymnasium and worked in small teams to salvage homes in the Ninth Ward.
I was driven to provide some service, having worked in a shelter in Philadelphia of victims.
Continue reading Hurricane Katrina volunteering in New OrleansThings are easier on this side. I realized that when I woke up and, in my persistently active manner, decided I had to go the bank and settle some business. I spent at least a full minute worrying about how I would say what I needed to say in Japanese. Once I realized that wasn’t much necessary, it occurred to me that I have begun a nice grace period where everything I do is going to be awfully simple in comparison to my maneuvering and studying and eating and buying and banking in Tokyo.
The question I am almost always asked is if it is “strange” to be back in the United States. Of course, mostly it isn’t. I am a man of limited means so, while I most certainly have done a lot for what I have been offered, I have spent a great deal of my life wherever my family considered home. It is not strange to return to what I have known for two decades. I may have to readjust and rediscover, but strange is unknown and different. To be sure, in a grand sense, there is nothing different about the America I have found.
I have an embarrassing admission. It took far too long for several sources to explain to me what is up with Japanese names. Names are one of a handful of cultural issues I readily acknowledged as being different than my Western tradition before I began preparing for my trip here, but, it took me some time asking questions here in Japan before I developed an understanding, so I thought it might be worthwhile to try explain what I’ve learned, if only to hasten my comprehension.
Alright, well, we all have this vague understanding that given names come after family names in Japan, making our contemporary American conception of “first” name fairly meaningless and confusing. Moreover, the family name taking its place in the front of a person’s name is a firmly Asian tradition, from China to Indonesia to most Middle Eastern countries of which I can speak.
Before I could even begin to compress and react to returning to the United States of America, please indulge me. May I mention what already appear to be my lasting memories of Japan and its baby, Tokyo?
Japanese kids love their school uniforms, and you see packs of them walking through the streets. This, I suppose, is a fine image for a people that still reject individualism in preference of obedience and communal living. There are more pet grooming shops and pachinko parlors than Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in Tokyo. In the United States, I expect to get beeped at if I cross a red light into traffic on my bicycle. In Tokyo, they will simply drive at me. I felt four earthquakes, lived through one typhoon season, and had one tsunami warning on my four months on that weather-pestered island.
Tomorrow is December 16, 2006. There is a ticket that asserts I will be traveling to a place unknown to the Christopher who has lived in Tokyo for the last half year. As thin as paper is, some of it carries a great deal of weight. Some of the most important and powerful things of this world of this civilization are just paper. My ticket will not change much, nor will it be remembered by anyone in just a few short months. Importance is relative.
Forgive me. I am listening to a crackly version of a Nat King Cole Christmas song. Romantic nostalgia is a noted side effect of Mr. Cole’s wide-voiced holiday music.
This week was the premiere of my final episode from here in Japan. It is amazing how fast the time has gone, but, then I suppose that is said a bit too often, and acted upon too rarely. Still, today a plane will take me away from here, but let’s not think about that now.
Instead, I thought it might be nice to let you guys see a bit more about the final scavenger hunt I went on here in Tokyo: my final tour of the city before I leave it.
