My good friend Taylor slumbers (as he often tends to do after about 10pm these days, guess a harvard kennedy school lifestyle will do that) beside me, dreaming no doubt of the haikyo adventures he'll go on tomorrow. Haikyo is the growing underground cult of exploration in Japan, where interested youth of a new generation and the occasional curious foreigner will explore the abandoned ruins of Japanese WWII bases and the byproducts of overconfident entrepreneurs (amusement parks, fancy restaurants, any business catering to a population holding more money than they know what to do with) floating on the surface of the country's economic bubble prior to it bursting in 1991. Finding things that survived the country's Lost Decade (1991-2000) because they were too costly to bulldoze and cart away. Many of them appear to have been evacuated in an emergency- TV sets sit in crumbling hotel rooms, fine china sits pristinely alongside rusted silverware in kitchens. These things would be teeming with gaggles of friendly hobos sharpening their blades and spinning yarns about the railroad life in America (if I understand the plight of modern homeless people correctly), but in Japan they're miraculously vacant. And mostly intact, other than the occasional sign of vandalism. I'd post pictures if it wasn't part of the unofficial haikyo code not to. In fact, just telling you about it is taboo. So don't tell anyone. This is just between you and me.
Anyway, I'm up now partially because I'm still internally celebrating some news I got earlier today, which is that I was accepted to Johns Hopkins' SAIS masters program in international relations (IR). This came as a complete surprise, since the program ranks as one of the top 3 IR programs nationally, and I have never considered myself necessarily on that level. But it took some hard work, and I've got to say it feels good for it to have paid off. I'm still waiting to hear from Georgetown and Harvard Kennedy, but I'm not going to hold my breath there. If I do go to Johns Hopkins I'd spend the first year studying at their campus in Bologna, Italy, which would be real sweet (the food is supposed to be amazing).
I've been thinking about my future a lot today, and while I haven't come to any definite conclusions, I do think I'd like to get involved in international development. One of the questions students will ask when using the english under their control (along with What's your favorite color? and Do you have a girlfriend?) is What is your dream? They ask it in all sincerity, and it doesn't carry quite the sarcastic overtones we tend to receive it with back home. And by god, I think it's important to have a dream.
This is an interesting age for my generation of young suburban-raised Americans (and possibly others who I can't speak for), we have our high school diplomas, many of us have graduated from college, we are presented with an almost overwhelming sea of opportunities and faced with the reality that we have to provide entirely for ourselves.
Personally, I traveled through most of my education as if I was sleepwalking. School was something I felt burdened with, but never questioned the validity or necessity of. About halfway through college I suddenly discovered something I was interested in and became engaged in learning it, and since coming to Japan I have devoted progressively more of my free time to studying Japanese, and more recently, to studying history. I began life as a very curious child, as most children do, and I can't help but wonder why there was a gap of curiosity and joy in learning between the ages of (maybe) 8 and 20. In a national organizational sense, we certainly benefit from a mandatory educational system with a certain amount of standardization to teach shared cultural values and establish a base level of literacy/math know-how. But there's got to be a better way if the system frustrates and alienates as many capable minds as it does.
The solution? Damned if I know. I think the addictiveness of video games has potential for children if well-marketed games are creatively and effectively infused with facts and problem-solving. The internet offers a promising platform for sharing materials and information; about half the information friends direct me to on any given subject are on wikipedia. What's more, my peers, professed loathers of schoolwork and exams, are spending hours and hours browsing wikipedia articles out of sheer intellectual curiosity.
Yeah, so I don't really have a point to summarize with, but I guess what I want to say in conclusion, now that it's 5:16am (another 8-hour day begins when I wake up at 7:30am) is that I'm excited about grad school, miss my friends who I haven't been able to spend time with, and want to help design new, popular forms of education. Maybe these creative new ideas could be instituted first in developing countries, and if successful applied more broadly. Ever play Dr. Brain? Those games were fun.
