Cultural Lectures and Speeches in Japanese

I was accepted as a summer intern to work at the Ehime Prefectural International Center in Ehime, Japan for three months. During my three months working in Japan, one of the tasks I was given was to plan, host, and present many lectures and speeches in Japanese at several high schools, universities, events, and community centers.

On middle and high school visits my partner, Melody, and I would typically keep the topics generally simple such as introducing Hawaiian words and our recommended locations in Hawaii to visit. The earnest Japanese students were always very energetic. These school visits would range in nubmer of participants. Sometimes there were as little as 20 students in a school club, other times there were over a hundred students which consisted of several classes from multiple grade levels.

On visits to universities or community centers our topics were more challenging to match the audience. Several topics we talked about were Hawaii’s history and relations with Japan and sister cities/states, environmental issues in Hawaii, and food history. We also helped introduce a special festival that celebrated the sister city relationship between Hawaii and Uwajima by giving a speech in Japanese welcoming and thanking everyone for inviting us to the wonderful event.

Some locations where we were asked to host events/lectures asked us to create a flyer as well. We worked together as a pair to create the poster and writing the information in Japanese for attendees. We worked in close correspondence via zoom meetings and email with the clients and if something needed to be changed we worked swiftly in implementing them. Below is an example of one of the flyers we created for these lectures: