Oarai Field Trip (Wednesday, July 6)

On Wednesday, July 20, students enrolled in the class of “Human and Communication: Japanese Pop Culture B,” which is offered by the Center for Global Education, participated in a field trip to Oarai town. Oarai Town is the setting of the anime "Girls and Panzer" (commonly known as Garpan). In this course, students visited Oarai town every year and it was one of the fun things to explore the town, but due to the spread of COVID19, it was canceled two years ago, and it was a virtual filed trip a year ago.

This year, 11 students taking this class in a face-to-face mode visited Oarai for the first time in 3 years! In addition, 5 students participating in the online exchange program from partner universities also participated virtually, and 12 students from our partner universities in Indonesia, Brunei, and Malaysia also participated virtually.

On the field trip, Mr. Osato of Sakanaya Honten, where the tank crashed in the anime "Garupan," spoke about the cooperation between Garupan and the shopping district. After that, students were divided into groups and took a walk around the town, and broadcasted to the virtual participants using Pocket wifi and smartphones. Finally, we visited Oarai Isosaki Shrine.

“The teacher was very kind in explaining the process, and in addition to what I learned in the pre-presentation class, I will learn it quickly. At first, I thought it took a lot of skill to decorate with ikebana, but with the help of the teacher and the students, I was able to successfully create ikebana works, even though I had no previous experience."

We received many positive comments from online participants saying "It was very interesting because it made me feel like I was in Japan." and "It was an amazing tour!".