ユニクロ本社訪問
(handwriting in English for the first time in a long time)
With the advancement of AI writing, which enables us to write no less than 10000 in a few second, giving it my brief ideas in my mother tongue suffices to produce a descent passage to submit. In that English has become almost like the Latin or some ancient language that needs just decoding, not for writing (oh actually had some courseworks in Minerva University's joint program with UTokyo which required me to write for reflection but that was not so long passage), but now that I have read Handwriting and typing, writing something with my hand seems somewhat pleasurable, or even quirk, and thus prescisous opportunity for me, and began typewriting. I am not a fast writer, so it takes about half an hour to write aboout 400 words in English, which is equivalent with 800 letters in Japanese. I can write the same amount in less than ten minutes in Japanese) In perspective, there is a huge progress since although I identified myself as skilled in English writing, I only recorded 2000 words a week, and spent almost 7 hours or so in a week. Of course, it includes the time for research into the theme on which I tried to discuss, but it's really a slow work. Still, I think there must be some reasons to think and learn to write a foreign language. I now just remembered 村上春樹, as a impressive example, who wrote in one of his essays that when he had finished his first novel but still not been satisfied with the style and atmosphere it keeps, his discision to translate it into English and translate that again into Japanese solved that problem. The similar situation might or might not happen in my writing. Whether it is or not, I am sure that billingualism helps us look at things from different perspective, which doesn't seem so bad anyhow.
As the inspiration of writing in English partly comes from the program on interaction with AUW students, I would like to discuss it. The whole process of the communal learning was new to me, but especially, our visiting to the UNIQLO, one of the largest apparell companiea the world, was striking, possibly due to the session with Mr. Yanai, the president of the huge corporation, exceptionally affluent, the capital reaching an astronomical amount. The main building of the UNIQLO was so large, fancy, and overwhelming that it can accomodate countless of my small room in the dorm, to the extent that it reminded me of the street children in slum area, who could have been accomodated and given a safe place without this building. But it's no use complaining about that, this is the structure of our society.
Our mobile phone was forced to turn off. How many gates, how long we walked thorugh the corridor to the conference room I don't remember. Anyway, that was a long distance, but somehow I was in a conference room that rivals or surpasses the size of a gym in an average elementary school. The screen showd us the videoes for the outcomes of the joint program of UTokyo with AUW, funded by UNIQLO.