Tag Archives: university of tokyo

Surviving Japanese Summer

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Everyone in Japan hates Summer.
“But why, Summer is great! The sun, the heat…”
No, that’s Japanese SPRING. Here, Spring is the season of temperatures in their early twenties, beautiful flowers and sunshine. Summer is a different matter.

During the Summer, the weather becomes what we call ‘mushi atsui’ – literally ‘insect hot’. In other words, it becomes so hot and humid that all of the bugs come out to play. When the sun shines, it’s scorchingly hot, and when it doesn’t it’s raining and the dense clouds trap you in an uncomfortable earth prison of cockroaches and sweat. But there are some methods of surviving these awful conditions, as Japanese people do every year. So I’m going to share these with you! Continue reading

Commuter life

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Commuting is something that we definitely do not have to do in Durham. Tokyo, however, is very different. The city is the size of the entirety of Yorkshire, and it’s very common for people to be travelling for about an hour to get to work or school.

For me, living in West Tokyo, it takes around forty minutes to get to Komaba campus and around an hour ten to get to Hongo campus. You might be like ‘WHAAAAAATTTT’, but it’s actually okay. For starters, it’s a taste of REAL LIFE away from Durham, the city in which we come to expect everything to be on our doorstep. It’s also the case that while in Durham we’d go to class and go home, at U Tokyo campus life thrives and lots of people stay on campus for a good chunk of the day. AND once you’re done with class, you can stop by some of the most awesome locations in the world for a shop or a drink before going home (Komaba campus is walking distance from Shibuya and Harajuku, and Hongo campus is right by the famous Ueno park as well as being close to Akihabara and loads of other cool places – it is seriously super awesome).  Continue reading