Today we had a lecture about Local Government in Japan: Structures, Features and Management from a professor from the school of business administration. He talked to us about how many different local governments are in Japan and the people’s views of changing policy and the role the central government has on local government. He showed us two videos during his lecture to try to get his point across. One of the videos was about a protest against combining two towns into one. There were a bunch of old men, in their 70’s that rode their motorcycles around and staged protests so that their hometown would not be combined with another town. The video was in Japanese but we could understand what was going on. The other video he showed us was about a bureaucrat from the central government who goes to a small town to learn from a supermarket. It is showing how he thinks he is better than everyone else because he is a bureaucrat. The agencies from Tokyo do send bureaucrats to work at certain towns or other cities for a few years and then reassign them to a different location. They might not be totally familiar with the locals or local process.
Our cultural site for that day was to see the Sensoji Temple in the Asakura area. The temple had two gates and a huge lantern was hung from the first gate. The area had many tourist shops that sold similar items. The shrine was housed in a huge temple that was undergoing repairs so we could not see the outside.
Later that day we went to a Japanese bar or Izakaya to meet with the professor who had given us a lecture earlier and about 8 of his students from the college of business. We had not met these students before but they were really cool and I had fun talking to them. We talked about school, our favorite types of music and other things that we had in common. We knew a lot of the same music and had a good time getting to know each other.
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