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Sophia University in Tokyo is a perfect place to spend an exchange period for everyone who is interested about Asian cultures. Besides living in the biggest city in the world is fascinating and there are always places one has never gone, Japan can offer much more than sparkling night clubs. However, when considering Sophia University, or Japan in overall as an exchange place, it is extremely essential to remember one thing. Japanese people do not speak English. Neither Swedish, Russian, Germany, French, nor Italian. Every label in convenient store and menu in restaurant is in Japanese, and only in less than one percent of products and menus something might appear also in Romanised characters. Therefore, an applicant has either to know at least some Japanese, or hold good nerves for an adventure. I personally chose the latter option without regretting.

Academics

Sophia University is the most famous private university in Japan. In the society which is highly dependent on the old habits and respects the extreme hierarchy, one can easily gain lots of respect by informing total strangers about the name of university (which by the way appears something like [cjo:chi daigaku] in Japanese).

As far as the author knows, the Sophia’s Faculty of Comparative Culture (the name is about to change as Faculty of Liberal Arts) is only university in Japan that offers courses in English. There are lots of exchange and other foreign students in Kanda University (in the city of Chiba, also in Tokyo metropolitan area) studying Japanese in Japanese. There exists also one university in the city of Nagoya where is – or at least was – one Finnish student studying arts.

The university system in Japan differs quite much from one we have been used to. First of all, it doesn’t matter what is your major – getting a stamp from best university matters. For example, one of my Japanese friends was studying ‘Catholic theory’ as a major, but is nowadays working for a marketing department in a company that produces ATM’s. The second small difference is a fact that good universities will find a workplace for every single degree student before they will graduate as bachelors.

Besides the small facts above, maybe one of the biggest differences that will affect to exchange students, is the cultural habit of not questioning things that elder people says. In some cases, Japanese professors have been freaking out since Western exchange students have been brave enough to argue when honourable professor has been speaking loads of bullshit. Anyway around, it is better for one’s grades to keep the mouth shut and concentrate to discuss with the Western professors. Japanese professors, especially those ones who are teaching Japanese, assumes that once a thing is quickly mentioned in the class, everybody masters it, at least in the next lesson.

Courses

The credit system in Sophia University is same that it used to be in HSE earlier (opintoviikot). As the HSE Mikkeli requires you to take 3 business courses on this basis, the Sophia University requires exchange students to have at least 12 hours of lectures for a week. Besides Japanese, I had four other courses that are 70% too much for Japanese standards. I had lectures, which everyone has to attend, eight hours on Tuesday and eleven hours on Thursday, supplemented with one and half hours on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

The faculty offers also ‘intensive Japanese’ courses, but unless you master Japanese and are willing to be buried alive with it, do not even think about it. There is no prerequisites for Japanese studies, but one can easily make a life little bit easier by studying hiragana and katakana characters before arriving in Japan.

Marco Economics
It seems that every year there exist lots of students in HSE Mikkeli who are lacking the macro (or micro) economics course from their curriculum. As one might guess, it is better to do all compulsory stuff before planning to graduate. However, it was fascinating to see that there really exists a “Vilho Mäkelä clone” in Japan too.

Comparative Marketing
Instructed by a really nice French-Canadian professor Sheron, the course is really similar with the compulsory Cross Cultural Communications course offered in HSE Mikkeli. It is nice and easy way to spend time, but if you fancy real challenges, drop this one.

Japanese Government and Politics
Professor Nakano loves his voice. The course was a mass lecture of over 100 students due to the interesting topic and appreciated professor. The drawback of the course is the first half of it. Students are required to learn all Japanese prime ministers and parties in order to understand the interesting latter part of the course. However, it is a nice course for those who are interested in politics.

Institution and Development Management
If the one should be picked up, this is maybe the best course I have ever taken. Besides Professor Okada is very good instructor, he is very experienced as an institutional researcher. The course was relatively challenging and besides only one other exchange student, the student body consisted only graduated students. The lecture times were not the best possible ones, however I would recommend this course for everyone who’s even a little bit interested in developing countries and institutional issues.