Tokyo Tech Visionary Project is a compulsory course for the first-year students at Tokyo Tech. It encourages self-discovery and aims to motivate students to set individual goals so that they can envision their own path throughout the four years of engineering studies at the undergraduate level.
For the 4th lecture of the course, we invited Mr. Takayuki Masuda, a lecturer at the Jissen Female University, to give a talk on “Japanese Mental Culture” on April 27th, 2017. Mr. Masuda gave a similar talk in the 2016 Visionary Project class, and he was kind enough to come again to Tokyo Tech and meet the new GSEP students this year. You may find details of his talk here.
For the group work session, students were divided into three groups of 4~5 members, and they had a good discussion about the important points brought up in Mr. Masuda’s talk. The students mainly summarized the talk into several main points, beginning with the history of Edo and how the gathering of many people from all over Japan and living in small spaces shaped the Japanese mentality. The students were particularly interested in Mr. Masuda’s statement about the need to change the Japanese culture, and many of them considered it to be a difficult task which will take a long time to solve.
Students were also asked to come up with several questions to be discussed among themselves. One interesting discussion was about why Japanese people seldom speak English. Many students actively voiced out their opinions, and through the discussion we found that it may have roots within the Japanese culture. Probably the Japanese simply did not want to cause any confusion to the listener, thus avoiding any conflicts. Students also found it fascinating how the Japanese shared similar values with cultures from their own countries, but the only ones who constantly apply those values in their everyday lives were the Japanese.
Through the lecture and group work, students had the opportunity to learn in more depth not only about the Japanese culture, but also about the cultures of their classmates. We believe the talk and advice from Mr. Masuda will help the GSEP students understand more about the mentality of the Japanese society that they will be immersed in for the upcoming few years.
Written by Azril Haniz