IUC in Yokohama as an Advanced Student

People often ask me why I decided to attend IUC, the advanced Japanese program in Yokohama, after I had already passed JLPT level 1. I also get asked whether or not I thought it was worth the money ($15,000 tuition). Good questions. Time to put it on paper so I never have to answer it again!

First, a quick blurb about IUC.

IUC is an academic institution run by Stanford that teaches advanced Japanese. Each year, approximately 40 students, mostly American and Candian, attend the center’s 10-month program to work on their Japanese. The majority of students who attend IUC could pass JLPT level 3 before they attend, and I would say that more than half could pass level 2. A small minority of the students each year are extremely advanced. They may have already passed JLPT level 1, or lived in Japan for more than a year while actively studying the language. Having said that, there a few people who attend each year who have only had a few years of Japanese at the university level. There were quite a few people coming off of the JET program, and some people in the middle of a career change like myself, but most of the students were in the middle of a Japan-related PhD or masters program. History, literature, religion, and business were common themes of study. The IUC course content is intense. Busy like you wouldn’t believe. IUC takes you through all of the jyoyo kanji, you listen to, read, and talk about news and current events, read literature, and at the end of the program have time to conduct a research project on your own and present it at the end of the program. For details on the content of the program, check the IUC website curriculum section.

Now, about me. Why go to IUC after passing JLPT level 1 and having work experience in Japan? Afterall, it’s not cheap (15,000 USD), you get no academic credit or degree, and did I mention it’s not cheap? (That’s, fifteen-thousand dollars… For 10 months… 15 grand.)

I’ll address the money question first. To put if frankly, if I had to pay tuition myself I wouldn’t have attended.

I was actually searching for scholarships that would allow me to go to China and study Chinese for a year when I discovered IUC. During the China scholarship hunt, I found the Blakemore Fellowship, a super-elite-pay-you-to-go-to-school deal that I wish I could have received. I applied to Blakemore with the intent to use it to pay for IUC. Got rejected. I was accepted to IUC however, which has a separate admissions process. I told IUC that I wasn’t going to enroll because I couldn’t afford the tuition. A few weeks later, IUC got back to me and said they would like to award me scholarships to cover tuition. I had to pay for living expenses myself (not cheap), but I figured if tuition was free, and the school was good, I might as well spend some time there. Throughout the school year I learned that more than 75 percent of the students had tuition covered by some type of scholarship.

Before attending IUC I went to Yokohama to check out the center to be sure it would be worth my time (read: money). While I was there, I met another student who had already passed JLPT level 1 before entering and spoke fluent Japanese. I asked him what he was doing studying there, and within a few minutes of talking with him and looking at the stuff he was studying I understood. If I remember correctly he was doing his research on some particular part of the Japanese consitution. The students research a wide variety of topics, with the guidance of the excellent staff. You can check the IUC webpage for a list of the topics that students have chosen to research in past years. If you can read through all those without breaking a sweat, maybe you don’t need to attend to the program.

Even the beginning of the program which did include some review was great for me. The class sizes are very small, about 6-8 students in the discussion sessions, so you can’t let things you don’t know just slide by. We spent a lot of time going over paticles and keigo which helped me out a lot. We also spent a lot of time going through Japanese news, the difficulty of which surprised me. I could listen to news and get the gist of it before attending the program, but being in the classroom and having to answer details about what was going on, and then talk about it… That was a real challenge. I quickly realized that I had the vocabulary of a junior high school kid, and my grammar was hopelessly informal. Later on in the program we were assigned writing and speaking assignments nearly every day. This was also extremely beneficial, we must have written close to 100 pages in Japanese.

The only part of the program that was a bit of a drag was the last quarter. During this quarter we had a lot of extra time to conduct research and collect information for our presentation at the end of the program. The graduate students all went and hit the libraries and were searching archives for ancient Japanese texts they could use for their research. Many students did research at IUC that directly tied into what they were doing back at university. For us mid-career types, and business majors and what not, the way we used that time was a bit different. Frankly, to prepare for a 5-7 minute presentation, one quarter (actually, about 3 weeks of full time preparation) was way to much time to spend. I ended up getting interviews with development consultants at JICA and other companies, and learned a lot about Japan’s international development activities. It was very interesting from a professional perspective to meet these people and learn about the industry, but it wasn’t “research”. Personally I would have rather continued doing classwork.

One last point. Because all 40 or so students in the program are studying Japanese, you will learn a lot about Japan and Japan-related topics from the other students as well as the teachers.

I guess that about covers it.

I don’t regret attending the program one bit. To save money I lived in a ratty apartment, ate spaghetti and curry, and rode my bike 45 minutes to school everyday for 10 months straight, but it was worth it.

(Okay okay, so occasionally I went out to eat, and I even rode the train on rainy days or when I was tired, but the point is I lived frugally.)

If anyone has any questions about the IUC thing, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you. IUC is a great program. Pricey, but if you can get it paid for it would be hard to find a better place to learn Japanese.

- Harvey