Kansai School Politics

The politics of any school usually has interesting dynamics. For instance my home university (University of Utah) sees a need in pouring millions of dollars into the athletic department every season. This can be especially seen in the football at the school where the coach makes about a half a million a year alone. It seems that in America, much of a schools prestige comes from their football teams. The politics of Kansai Gaidai however leaves me with a totally different impression. Kansai Gaidai is all about image. “If it looks appealing to the eye, then it is probably good” is probably what their unofficial motto would be. It seems like they even have a full time photography constantly walking around classes and campus to make sure the portrayed image stays prestigious. Sometimes even entire film crews can be seen trying to make a scene for a commercial.



The appearance of KG




In fact, what I wanted to talk about is how the politics of the school portray something a little different than the truth.
The main asset that they try to publicize is the international students. All of the pictures are of international and Japanese students talking and having fun. Which leads people to believe that there is a lot of communication and interaction with native speakers. And while this is partially true, there is definitely a type of invisible wall between CIE and the rest of campus. It is sad to see that usually international students feel comfortable talking amongst international students and most Japanese students feel intimidated to inter the big scary English speaking building of CIE. Of course there are some programs like the home visit and speaking partner program that try to break this cycle. I actually did a group project in my other elective class where we developed an activity/program to combat this very situation.
Which leads to the next political topic. For this project, we had to get approval to host an activity and post posters. We first talked with the activities director in CIE to get approval. He told us that it was not his area but that we needed to get permission from student affairs. Once at student affairs, we were instructed talk to the registrar desk. At the registrar desk we talked to a man that had two things to say. The first was that the cafeteria where we wanted to host the activity was not under their “jurisdiction”. The second is that it is not a good idea to put up posters because it is dangerous since any non student can come on campus, see the poster and come to the activity.
In conclusion, to put it lightly, both the system of school regulations seems to want to be so politically correct that it is difficult for one person to speak up and answer a question. Additionally, the politics surrounding the publicity of the school tends to be caught up in a fake sort of euphoria with the thought that there are happy international students waiting to talk to Japanese students.


Student Affairs where "things get done"