Days: 9-21 (January 15-27th)

Home life

While in the middle of my ski trip, I was able to finally secure my long-term housing accommodations in Tokyo! For the next 3.5 months, I will be living in a sharehouse in the Zoshigaya neighborhood of Tokyo. Zoshigaya is a relatively quiet, mostly residential area between two faster-paced, more hip neighborhoods called Shinjuku and Ikebukuro.

Shane, what the hell is a sharehouse? How do you pronounce the names of these neighborhoods? Are you eating enough? I can hear my grandparents now – yes, I am eating to my heart’s content.

A sharehouse is essentially an apartment in which multiple residents have their own bedroom, but share common spaces like bathrooms, showers, kitchens, laundry, and living rooms. A typical sharehouse usually contains 5-10 bedrooms, but I’ve managed to find one that has nearly 80 rooms. In practice, it’s much closer to living in a big hostel than it is living in an apartment. Fortunately, my room is located in a pretty quiet wing on the first floor and I’ve felt like I’ve had plenty of privacy thus far. The idea for choosing such a large sharehouse was that the rent is quite cheap at a little under $600/month, and it would hopefully provide me with the opportunity to meet some cool people. So far it’s been a success in that regard and I’ve had the chance to make friends with some of my roommates and glean a ton of information from them about living in Tokyo.

Basically everyone in the house is a student of some form or another. The majority are here exclusively to study the Japanese language, usually on a one or two year program. There are students like myself who are here on more of an “exchange” basis where they are studying the same thing they do at home, just in Japan instead. I’m the only one from my program that lives here – it’s about a 40 minute commute to my campus, so I can’t say I’m surprised – plus it means that I have “school friends” and “home friends,” which has been really nice.

Campus life

Temple’s Japan campus is about a 40-45 minute commute for me by train. While the train system here is world-class, it’s such a huge city that getting anywhere across town still takes some time. I’ve gotten quite used to the commute and use the time to read on my Kindle or catch up on podcasts.

The Temple campus itself is really just one big building that we share with the undergraduates who are studying abroad here. There are roughly 2,000 of them, and 45 of us, but I think we’re holding our own pretty well so far. We share the rest of the campus with a local women’s university called Showa. We have access to their sports facilities, which I’ll talk about more below. The area around campus is pretty sweet – we’ve got a ton of restaurants, bars, and coffee shops to kill some time at before, between, or especially after classes. I’ll have to snap some more photos of the campus for my next post.

This semester I’m taking 4 classes: International Contract Drafting, International Entertainment Law, East/West Negotiations, and “Guided Research,” which is essentially an independent study overseen by a professor. My research is focusing on the differences in data privacy laws between Japan and the U.S.

So far, I’m finding the classes to be engaging and interesting, and quite frankly I can’t really imagine getting anything lower than an A this semester. Maybe that’s because 2 professors have already guaranteed us all A’s. Seems to be pretty decent odds to make Dean’s List for the 3rd consecutive semester.

Tokyo life

So far I’ve been overwhelmed with possibility when it comes to exploring Tokyo. There so much to do here that there’s almost relief in a way knowing that you could never, in a million years, see every part of the city. So the strategy has been to just get out the door, hop on a train, and see what I can discover.

Our school program here has also treated us to a few outings. One of my favorites was a visit to an interactive art exhibit called TeamLabs – it’s a very popular tourist attraction. Every square inch of the exhibit itself is surface upon which artworks can be projected. Each of these artworks moves across the walls as well, and the exhibit is made up of a series of rooms, so you never really know which room you’re in. It was a bit maze-like, reminding me of a casino. No windows, no clocks. I was trapped for 11 days.