Responce to 3 articles

To the article,"Four marines investigated for rape" two people reply.

The first people, Manuel Sandval, complains about this article by emphasizing the importance of American military and blames the girl who was raped based on his experiences (You can see it from the word, " I know what type of people work in these places". Though he didn't say why He knew it,so this could be really vague key to believe what he said.

The second people, Kevin Egan, disagrees with Sandoval,especially his prejudice against women .Also He distinguishes the matter from "military", and said "if wrongdoing is suspected it needs to be investigated no matter how respected the person who comitted the crime are.


First four marines who are suspected of gangraping a woman should be ,of course, investigated. Manuel Sandoval disagrees to investigate them,but they should be.

It doesn't matter whether American military is necessary for Japan or not at this point, and also it doesn't matter whether the woman is just a pedistrian or a girl working at a bar as Kevin Egan said in his article. The problem is that woman was raped, and she reported about it to the police, it means rape happened without agreement between the girl and four marines. Maybe she should be blamed too, she might have acted behavior to let them think they can have a sex with her. But if she has filed a complaint, it means she didn't agree to have a sex with them, and it means "rape", which is absolutely a crime, and the one who made the crime should be investigated and punished no matter how respected the one is. It is the problem about humanity.

Why I am in IES

I appreciate that I have to write “Why I am in IES”, because it reminds me of why I came to this college.

These days I always hang out with someone and go somewhere and because of this, I have little time to study, as a result I have to cut off my sleeping time to study. I know after all it was all my faults, but I sometimes thought “why should I study so much?? I don’t care if I will be kicked off from IES anymore.” forgetting why I came to this college all the way from Hokkaido. Recently it was more important for me to have a fun “now” than studying for the future.

Actually having fun now is important, since we can’t go back to old times. We should have fun now. But I found I should think about the future as well. Because future is a result of what I’m doing now. I have some bad experiences because I thought about “now” too much without thinking about what’s going to be in the future. Even though I have such experiences, I almost made the same mistake and broke my future dream! But this assignment gave me chance to think about what I should do from now again.

Okay, so why am I in IES? It’s because I want to study abroad successfully. I want to learn about education system of other countries. For the plan I want to study abroad to see and experience actual education of other countries and I thought it was good chance to be in IES to succeed studying abroad. That’s why I am in IES.

This week

This weekend was fun.I went to karaoke with Yuri and Hitomi last friday.It has been long time since we went to karaoke last time.

Since we were so tired because of exam,homework and lacking of sleeping(lol) when we met at around 1 am,we all looked so tired and sleepy.But we sang songs(most of time we talked though....) After finishing karaoke, we went back home and had a good sleep!It has been long time since I slept for more than 5 hours last time.(Recently I slept only for 3 or 4 hours everyday.)

By the way recently I seldom cook by myself...lol I know it is not good for my health,but I dont have any time for cooking.(Actually I have,but I wanna use these time for sleeping...lol) So if you guys know some recipes which I can cook easily,please tell me!I will do my best to cook this week!

Thank you for reading!

Nara

Last Monday(08/10/2007) I went to Nara with my friends. Since I have never been to Nara before,it was really good experience!

We went to see "Toudai ji" and lots of temples in Nara.In "Toudai ji" there were lots of forigners much more that Japanese.We wanted to hang out with deer,but since we didnt buy cookie for feeding them,they ignored us.

We enjoyed sightseeing in Nara at first,but at the end we were so exhausted that on the way to home all of us fell in asleep, and we forgot to get off the station we were supposed to get off.

** This picture is from "Toudai ji" **

Responce to the article by Tomoko Otake

After reading this article, I realized there were so many “gairaigo” in Japan, some of whose meaning I don’t understand. Somehow we, Japanese are attracted by things from other countries, especially western, say fashion, singers, models and languages, and want to use them and want to know about them more. Of course it isn’t particular only for Japan. It’s typical for lots of people to be attracted by other countries’ things. For example there are lots of people who are attracted by Japanese things and sometimes they wear shirts with kanji on. It’s kind of same situation as what the author is talking about in this article. However these tendency seems to be much more powerful in Japan. For example lots of young girls in Japan want to look like celebrities in other countries, lots of Japanese like western music or western movies and as this article said, lots of “gairaigo” are used in daily life or even official places. It’s because of, as the author said, Japanese people's long-standing sense of inferiority regarding all things Western.
The problem about this is that we use these words without knowing the meaning of the words and we use these words just to show off or not to miss the trend. It means we use these words without translating it into Japanese. If we will continue to use these kind of ways to use words, we won’t use “Japanese” itself and finally we may lose “Japanese”, our own language in the future.