School trips in Japan are something else. We’ve all been on a day trip to the zoo or a museum. Perhaps you don’t learn much on the trip. But school trips in Japan, especially those for high school students, are done by almost every school and last a whole week.
Known as 修学旅行 (しゅうがくりょこう), these tend to focus on learning about Japanese culture and history through site visits, lectures and other activities.
A blog post on 修学旅行 might be useful to get an introduction to it, you can find it here.
So first, we have the mention that not only high schools do such trips but also primary and middle schools. There is also the mention of 林間学校 (りんかんがっこう) which are outdoor schools, a type of camping trip that is common in Australian schools (we call it Outward Bound, awesome fun!).
There is also the point that being a high school student, you get a lot more free time for the high school trip. The use of the word 修学 is interesting, as it already means learning or dedication to a topic. So as the blog post points out, such a trip includes group activities, keeping to a schedule, following school rules and touching on history and culture.
There is also the final point that rather than being a trip for playtime or fun, it is more about rules, discipline, knowledge and learning.
I was fortunate enough to be put into 二年生 upon my arrival to Japan for exchange, even though I was perhaps at the age for 一年生. My guess is that they want me to go on the school trip so put me in that year.
Unfortunately, the school trip season goes from April to June or so, which meant that as I arrived near the end of March, my Japanese was absolutely terrible when we went on the trip. It’s not that I didn’t have fun, but it did make it hard to get a lot of information from the trip as I couldn’t read much or understand the lectures.
My school did a very standard school trip. As I hadn’t been able to read much about it or get told much about it that I understood, the destination and schedule were a mystery to me. This never used to bother me although perhaps I should’ve taken more ownership over my life.
We took the 新幹線 to Hiroshima where our first destination was the 広島平和記念公園 (ひろしまへいわきねんこうえん) or Peace Park, which contains the infamous 原爆ドーム (げんばくドーム) or Atomic Bomb Dome, formally a Hiroshima business development building.
It was amazing to see the building with my own eyes, having seen it in so many textbooks. As an aside, I often get asked what the Japanese attitude to WW2 is, and while I don’t want to speak for a whole nation, I can say that personally every Japanese person has expressed regret over how WW2 happened and explicitly stated it was wrong.
Part of this school trip is indeed to get the Japanese to confront this history, and I never saw the textbook revisionism or watering down of history that Japan is constantly accused of.
After that, we were walked around the park and laid the chain of 1000 origami cranes that we had folded in class in the preceding weeks, known as 千羽鶴 (せんばづる) at Sadoko’s statute.
Then we had a trip to a lecture hall where we heard a speech from a survivor of the bombing, followed by a trip to 宮島 (みやじま), one of Japan’s most popular tourist destinations and features the famous floating Torii gate and 厳島神社.
We stayed overnight on the island and then made our way to the next destination, 神戸. Kobe had large parts of it destroyed in the 阪神・淡路大震災 of 1995, and so we visited a museum dedicated to the event as well as researching earthquakes.
We had the afternoon off so I hung around with my classmates and we walked around Kobe, at which point we met up with the rest of the group to take the bus to 大阪. We stayed in a hotel near Universal Studios Japan, which was our destination for the next day.
In the end, it was a very enjoyable trip that I could clearly see was related to the topics we were studying in several classes such as history, Japanese history, home economics and others.
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