Fernando's research blog #2

Hey guys, it’s Fernando and while I’ve only been in japan for only a week, but it was a busy week for me. There were tours around Tokyo and the Senshu university Ikuta campus, exploring various parts of the city like Shinjuku, and Harajuku. In the limited time of the tour of the campus, I was able to see a couple of the clubs that were currently having club activities around the time. For example, we were able to catch the kendo club finishing up their club activities, which was disappointing because I wanted to see how their daily routine was like. As the tour went on, we went to the gym to look around but we were not able to look for long since the gym was closed for non-club members but in the time there, I was able to recognize the level of seriousness they take sports club in there. To close it down from the rest of the community, it means that they want the members to focus only to their activities and not be distracted by other people like spectators. We also saw the club room building on the way back but couldn’t go inside it.

Back in high school, my experience of clubs were that only some of them had mandatory meetings such as sports clubs, and some were not in the form of clubs at all but in the forms of a class like the culinary, band, or art class. Then in university, the diversity of clubs expanded to cultural, activist, or hobby clubs. So back in Calgary, clubs were lenient in terms of meetings as longs as the all the members do their work on time, and sometimes, the only ones with any work are the executives like the Japanese conversation club, where you only go there to converse with people in both English and Japanese and have a good time. In comparison to here, the clubs in Tokyo are more strict where meetings are mandatory, which means less time for holidays or free time for the students and more commitment out of it. In a way, it works to further improve their skills but I feel like being this committed to something that doesn’t return profit is a little bit going overboard. There might be a chance of being scouted like in the western countries but even so club work looks exhausting.

While all of this looks like im making clubs out to be a negative in school life, it is not. Since this is usually the time that students are able to socialize with others, form bonds with people and enjoy their hobbies. But students usually drop out of clubs in their senior year to focus on their studies in order to be able to pass the entrance exam to be able to further develop their education and skills to use in the real world once they graduate. And since clubs were not mandatory, at least in my knowledge, students can choose to not enter a club which is nice for people who don’t want to join the existing clubs in their schools. So there are upsides and downsides to school clubs but it’s all in the students decision to suffer through them if they decide to join one. This is what I’ve gathered so far and I will update more as I go on. Thanks and bye.