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Twenty-one Cornell students gained lasting insights into Japan during a one-week cultural immersion tour in late January.

The group was exposed to various aspects of Japanese culture and society through carefully chosen site visits, said Patricia Wasyliw, College of Arts and Sciences assistant dean and study abroad adviser, who accompanied the students along with Stephen Capobianco, education abroad adviser with Cornell Abroad.

Traveling by bus and the Shinkansen high-speed railway, they toured Tokyo, Kyoto, smaller cities and rural areas; met Japanese students at Doshisha University, which hosts the Cornell in Kyoto program; visited a factory and Shinto shrines; attended a Buddhist prayer ceremony; and stayed with local host families in Shiga prefecture.

“While I have always been interested in Japanese culture, I was not wholly prepared for the vast varieties of landscapes and lifestyles – a beautiful harmony between large cities, regional cities and rural areas,” Asian studies major Alex Hutchins ’19 said. “In each location there were people who were happily going about their lives. Rural Japanese life presented a similar standard of living as urban life.”

The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs invited Cornell and funded the trip as part of the Kakehashi Project organized by the Japan International Cooperation Center. “We had over 600 applications for 21 spots,” Capobianco said.

Representing all seven undergraduate colleges at Cornell, students were selected for the trip last fall, and the deputy consul general from the Japanese Consulate in New York City came to campus and met with them for a presentation about Japan and the program.

Kakehashi means “bridge” in Japanese. The project’s goals include heightening interest in Japan, promoting deeper mutual understanding among the people of Japan and the United States, and helping young people and future leaders develop wider perspectives and build networks from Japan-U.S. exchanges.

“It was interesting to see how people interact with each other,” Shweta Modi ’19 said. “In America we don’t really acknowledge each other if you don’t know the person. In Japan, everyone is acknowledged; and they always say ‘thank you.’”



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Among the modern cultural attractions were arcades and toy stores in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, Modi said: “It wasn’t just the younger kids going to these arcades, it was everyone, exploring all these action figures and manga.”

Modi, a biomedical engineering major, learned during the trip about a research scholarship in Japan, and applied when she returned. One of only 14 students chosen nationwide for the all-expenses-paid program, she will conduct research in a nanoscience lab at Chiba University this summer.

At the end of the week, as part of the Kakehashi program, “the students had to create a presentation to talk about their experience, their preconceptions, what they learned on the trip that might have changed that, and what is their plan going forward related to their interest in Japan,” Capobianco said.

“There is no one Japan; it is a connected assortment of identities associated with place, whether that be a small fishing village along Lake Biwa, the ancient city of Kyoto or the metropolis of Tokyo,” Hutchins said.

Saying he wants “to explore the rural side of Japan in-depth,” Hutchins will return this summer for independent research in rural sustainability practices, after joining Professor Jane-Marie Law’s Zen Buddhism students at a temple in Kamakura for two weeks.

“The remarkable thing about this program is that in one week, we all learned so much about Japanese society, their culture, their values,” Wasyliw said. “It was really a remarkably informative and eye-opening experience, I think for all of us. It was incredibly enriching.”

Wasyliw was most struck by “the thought and care that people in Japan put into so much of what they do every day.”

The group’s tour coordinator checked everyone’s body temperature daily before breakfast, she said. “It was really to protect other people in society from being ill. There’s a real sense of the collective good being held above individual convenience.”