Wednesday May 20

We had a lecture today about the education policy in Japan. It had gone through many changes over the century and used to have a centralized curriculum but now it has become a more choice based system. Students have the ability to choose some of their classes. There was a fear that students were getting burned out with studying and entrance exams. However, Japan has been falling in the rankings of math, science, reading and problem solving based upon international exams. They are trying to get students to study harder so that their standings will improve.
In the afternoon we went to visit a building that was kind of like a chamber of commerce. We had two speakers, one a writer for a news paper that is like the equivalent of the Wall Street Journal and the other was in one of the largest associations of business men in Japan. They spoke about the economy, government, and the relationship between business and government. We were able to ask them questions after their speech and they were impressed about the quality of the questions we asked. I believe that this was the first time they did this kind of program with college students. They usually have college professors attend this sort of meeting. One thing that I found very interesting from the talks was that there could be trouble in the Japanese government in August after the elections. Right now the opposition party controls the upper house. The lower house has elections this August and if the party called LDP which used to control the upper house wins the lower house but with a little less than 2/3 of the seats then the parliament will not have one controlling party which will make it hard to pass bills.
That night we went out to Shinjuku to a club. It was very quiet in there since it was a week night. That area at night is very busy and full of strange looking people. There are many people of the street that are trying to get you to go to their clubs or restaurants. We saw our first street fight that night with two people punching and slapping each other. No one tried to stop it but it lasted about 30 seconds. The train stops running around 12 am so it was not too late of a night.