Profiscor on the Your-Japan Blog Network

So I mentioned before that I’m not your average Japanese Studies student.

My degree course is science as well and I have come here to carry our an experment over the course of the year and eventually write it up.

Upon getting here, the university placed me in one of the labs in my field to get me started. Though it would be possible to change if I wanted to, but I liked the subject of the lab so much that I decided that I would stick with it.

It’s probably not a good idea for me to say what I’m working on because if one of the people I know stumbles on this accidentally, they’ll just know who I am. And while that would be fun explaining why/denying that I’ve given them nicknames and am currently broadcasting stuff about them all over the world…I think not having to do that would make life a lot easier

My professor is quite young for his academic status and you can tell that he’s a very accomplished man, with books and many many papers with his name in the title published in both English and Japanese. I had seen a picture of him on the university website so I knew what he looked like and I started to picture what he would be like based on his reputation and long list of published articles.

Around the time that I had come to Japan, he had been away for a while attending a conference in Kyuushu with the other people in my lab. I had no idea when he was coming back so I knocked on his door ever day to see if he was in, since I was getting worried that I was the only one left out of my coursemates who hadn’t met their professor…And since my student-helper had jet off to Kyuushu with them too, I was pretty much on my own for lab matters.

I knocked on his door day after day to ask if he had gotten my e-mail but there was no answer. In fact I was so used to not getting an answer that it had become my ritual.

Get out of Lift.
Walk to door.
Knock on door.
Go to lunch.

Except one day I knocked on his door, while planning if I wanted Salmon or Tuna onigiri for lunch, and heard a “HAI!” from inside.

Oops…I hadnt planned for this… Crap. What do I do?
It’s okay Advena, compose yourself and just ask him if he got your e-mail

I opened the door to find an extremely cluttered room. There were papers and folders stacked in almost every available space.

“Hai” He said from behind a stack of files.

I peeked round to find him sitting at his desk. He looked at me and said “You…You must be Advena-san…”

Wow, he certainly is more quiet than I thought he’d be. I thought to myself. And for a man who’s written countless papers in English he struggled to hold a conversation with me, only because of his shyness, not his ability.

And boy was that an understatement.

My professor has a brilliant mind but also is one of the most shy people I’ve met. I would even call him almost painfully shy, if it wasn’t for the authority he holds over us. The only time he’s not shy is when I ask him a question relating to the theory of the field, to which he can talk for all of Japan- and in English. But other than that he prefers to keep to himself and doesn’t really make an effort to speak anything other than Japanese. Nevertheless I still respect him and his work very much.

Next up…The students.

When I came to Japan the only people that used the lab were myself and 3 Masters Students, Taro, Inami and Aki.

Aki is the only girl and I was told by Dixie’s student-helper that she was kind of forced to be mine because of this. I didn’t think she was very helpful to me at first and I got frustrated because I thought she didn’t bother. Dixie and Smith’s tutor helped them buy essentials to live, but mine would be absent all the time, and when I’d ask her to help me she would simply say she didn’t know.

Looking back on it now though, I can see that she’s just shy. She, herself only started studying here in March, and I came In August. So she’s fairly new herself when you think about it, and I sympathised with her since she doesn’t seem to have friends at the unversity and spends all day in the prep room reading papers.

She did, and still does help me when I have questions about my experiment. When I ask her about this, she does all she can to help.

When I first started lab, I thought that Taro would be the most interesting. He seemed the most normal out of the three, but instead he has a forcefield of awkwardness about him that is impenitrable to the average human.

He reeks of weirdness, and I’ve often noticed any conversation in the lab or prep room just completely stop when he’s around, and lately he just seems to be pissed off all the time, or sleeping in the prep room, so I just leave him to it.

Inami is like a less weird version of Taro. He’s quiet and keeps to himself and I still cant bleieve he’s 25, but if I have a question he’s very approachable and does all he can to help me. My only problem with him is that he speaks Japanese at the speed of light and it’s sometimes hard for me to process everything he throws at me.

One month after I’d come to Japan I was also joined by two other international students starting their PhD’s at the university. One from India, and the other from Central america. I was keen to meet them because my professor had told me he might need my help showing them round. Which seemed kind of laughable to me since I felt that I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I still don’t know the lab very well.

Soon, the prep room became full and I felt more at ease knowing that I could speak better Japanese than the other two. Though I still admired them for taking the plunge and coming here, not knowing anything about the language, or the work they were to do. But I guess everyone’s path to Japan is a different one.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS