ーLocal Community Relations Commー

On the 21st of October (Fri), the Japanese speaking corner and JCC (Singapore management university Japanese cultural club) organized a collaboration event at the campus in SMU. It was the first physical event in 3 years since the Corona virus though collaborations between the two groups has been ongoing from 2016 with online only events during the lockdown period.
The number of attendees exceeded expectations as there were approximately 44 SMU students and 15 Japanese volunteers. This makes the grand total of 60 participants in the event. At first, it was a little worrying as most of the young people today may not be interested in Japanese language and culture due to the overwhelming popularity of Korean cultural influence on the current trend of drama, movies, fashion and cosmetics etc. However, the atmosphere during the event was full of enthusiasm as many students took part in it. Among the participants, there were also exchange students from Japan as well as from other countries.
After the formal introduction and explanation of the rules by representative of JCC, participants are allocated to their respective groups, each consist between 5~7 pax. (4 to 5 students and 1 to 2 Japanese volunteers) Topics are prepared by the students beforehand and they are originally meant to be conducted in Japanese. However, as each student’s Japanese level is widely diverse; the session was a fun mix of trial and error as some English were used. Though each group had a different experience, it was a fun and rewarding 2 hour session to the point that even after time was up, everyone was still staying behind continuing chatting.

In the coming future, the Japanese speaking corner will continue collaborating with SMU. Moreover, apart from SMU, there are also other universities and polytechnics that organize their own Japanese cultural club which the Japanese speaking corner would like to reach out to them for possible collaborations to broaden the Japanese speaking circle.