Finally, we come to my last hours attending the East Asia Practicum – and I didn’t even have to interpret in afternoon. Once we finished the morning’s interview and had lunch, we rushed to Roppongi to meet up with the rest of the group to visit the Graduate Research Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA).

Unfortunately, the morning’s interview ran a little late and we arrived late to the first official meeting of the day. Given the two students’ research topic, interviewing the professor on immigration was probably more useful than listening to another lecture on security, but I still felt bad entering the room in the middle of his talk.

Glassy Roppongi, on the way to GRIPS.

Nonetheless, it was interesting. Just as I sat down, the speaker, Mr. Narushige Michishita, was talking about the North Korean missiles that had been launched over northern Japan in 2017. Nothing happened, so it’s easy to dismiss the event now that it’s in the past, but it must have been terrifying to get the J-Alert saying that there was a missile headed towards Japan but giving few details about the actual danger level.

In any case, the rest of the talk was interesting just as interesting as those of the other speakers. Even after discussing similar topics for several weeks in class, I learned a lot about Japan’s security risks from the Japanese perspective. Throughout the trip, it was fascinating to see how the perspective of those we spoke to was different from the American academic perspective we had in class. I found myself wishing I was going to China, too, so that I could compare these perspectives to yet another.

Our final lecture was at MOFA. The speaker works in the North American bureau, specifically working on trade agreements like the TPP. I felt a little bad for him, as (surprisingly) few students were studying his personal area of expertise of US/Japan relations. He often had to respond to the students’ questions with a disclaimer that he wasn’t an expert in their fields, whether it be Russia or the Korean peninsula or AIIB. As a diplomat, he seemed very careful to clearly delineate what was and what was not in his specific purview. It was fascinating to watch. Here at MIIS, I’ve been fortunate to get to know diplomats from a few different countries, and it’s interesting to see them at work.

“Ministry of Foreign Affairs”

He had a very different perspective compared to some of the other speakers. Before his current station in Tokyo, he had worked in Bangladesh and in Addis Ababa – again, neither places that are specifically being researched by my fellow students, so places that came up for the first time in this class. That made his perspective and his experiences very refreshing and exciting to listen to.

And that was that. After three whirlwind days, the Tokyo portion of the East Asia Practicum, and my role in it, was over.