Day of activity: August 9^th 2014

Yesterday concluded a beautiful chapter of my life. Though I have experienced enough in the last two months to fill in a few years’ worth, I can’t help but feel that this amazing experience came to an end prematurely. As it is for most days in Japan, yesterday’s schedule was quite filled. The Tama community organized an event in which all WCI members got to present their countries to the Japanese youth. After this warm interaction, we moved on to our Thank You event, which consists of dances, musical performances, and other playful activities. It aims to show our gratefulness to all of those involved with the WCI program. This was for me the last of 8 events of this kind, and undoubtedly, it was the most emotional of all; as a mix of joy and nostalgia were present throughout the night. In the last few weeks WCI has become a family to me. We have played together, laughed together, cooked together, and discovered tasty foods together. We have sung together, danced together, and signed a ridiculous amount of thank you cards together. We have been happy together, and we have been sad to say goodbye to each other. Now I hope we take all of this home and make the world a better place together. Love to all my WCI family and everyone who was involved with the program. Thank you Hiro Nishimura for allowing us to live this experience. From the bottom of my silly canadian heart!

Jeremy (Canada)

Date of activity: August 7^th 2014

Today, we were allowed by the JUKI group to tour their facilities. Mainly, they demonstrated how their signature industrial and home model sewing machines worked. It was quite amazing to see all of the ingenuity behind machinery that mostly sits in the back of people’s houses. However, we were given the opportunity to see them in action. Some of us used the machines to sew buttons and others fixed some holes or sewed sturdy stitches. This all paled in comparison to the machine that sewed an entire suit pocket or a suit front all in about a second! This is work, that when done by a human instead of the machine, would require at least half an hour. But this machine did it with care and very fast. It was a surprise to see that the same technology that is used in the big automatic sewing machines was also used to mount chips and other parts onto circuit boards. All in all I learned a lot today and it was a lot of fun!

Michael (USA)

Day of activity: August 6th 2014

This day half of the participants went to Keisen University. It is a women’s only university, and it’s also a Christian (protestant) university. First we went to see a field next to the university where the students were growing different types of crop. We then went to the school church, where we got an explanation about the university. Among other things, the university focused on Christianity, peace and agriculture. It was explained that every student got a small part of the field we had seen as a freshman of the university, and they were responsible for the crop in that area. This was a very new to me, and I found it to be very interesting. Afterwards, we went to make dango with the students. Dango is a strange, squishy, Japanese sweet made from rice flour. As there were also Korean and Chinese exchange students at the university, we also ate a lot of Korean and Chinese sweets that were brought to us. There were all kinds of varieties that I had never seen before, but most of it was really good. We had a fun time with the students, speaking in a mix of Japanese and English. In the end it was a great day and I think most of us made some new friends!

Joakim Gåsøy (Norway)