Being in a class with people from different countries is a lot different than I thought, and I'm discovering new ways to look at things every day. It's weird to sit in class and realize that people haven't learned things that are really obvious to you because you have to consciously remember, "Oh, right, so-and-so is from Denmark," or something.
In my contemporary Japanese history class, we're learning about World War II. The catch here is that we're only focusing on East Asia's role in it. It started at a completely different time over here, supposedly beginning in Manchuria in 1931. We're not discussing European involvement at all. Do you know how weird it is to think of WWII without Europe, the way we've been taught in the US for ages? We barely even touched on what was happening in East Asia unless it was about Japan. It really was a worldwide war.
Another thing to consider is that while I'm learning about Japan as an outsider, I'm sitting in class with Japanese people who might already know everything we're talking about already, but they were taught in a different way. My teacher is American, so his perspective is a little different. For instance, he presented the theory (that has been supported by multiple sources, according to him) that the first Japanese emperor did not, in fact, descend from heaven, but rather came from the Korean Peninsula. If you know anything about Japan, you should know about the tensions between East Asian countries (especially Japan, Korea, and China), so this information came as a shock to me. I've heard about how homogenous Japan is for ages (90% of the population is "pure Japanese"), so the fact that it all could have began in Korea really throws my perspective off-balance considering the tensions still between the two countries. I even asked a Japanese girl in class what she thought of it or if she had ever heard of it, and she answered that she thought it was just a rumor and she needs evidence to back it up.
This is probably just one example of many that will come later on in the year.
I guess the point of this post is to make you think about perspective.
This is a world map in Japan.
If you're like me, you'll look at this and think, "It's reversed." It's not. It's just different.
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