Let's Play With Water Guys!

Our meet up time for today was 9:15 am for breakfast. I had rice, two egg rolls, and mizo soup. At 10 am, we were given a lab tour at the Tricea building for Civil Engineering. The students started out by showing us the water they irrigated on their own through rocks to help water grass and plants. When we went inside the building, they showed us different rooms where each room had their own experiment being worked on. It was really cool because the building was literally built for experiments and research. I find that a great way to learn, especially as an undergraduate school. Our last stop was in a lab where a couple graduate students conducted an experiment for us. This was to compare water quality between Lake Biwa and the water they were irrigating by the campus building. The Lake Biwa water set the standard which showed a pink color. The irrigated water showed the same color which meant both samples were at safe levels. While they were demonstrating this to us, one of the students passed around a microscope that was small enough to be carried around. It was like one of those old school Kodak film cameras you would use to look through the lens. Seeing this device completely excited me since I’ve worked in labs three years of my college career and it was neat to see something that I had never seen before. I took so many pictures with it! Along with this, it was also very neat to see a laboratory have all of the same equipment and chemicals as our lab back at Illinois College. But it was really cool to see that everything was labeled in Japanese and not in English.

Me trying the cool microscope

Ritsumeikan students working on water quality test

Results of water quality test

Graduate students giving the group a tour

Water irrigation system by the science department

After the tour was done, we went to lunch in the cafeteria on campus. I had a bowl of rice, mizo soup, and some fried chicken with tartar sauce. Then, we were able to have free time for a couple hours before our interviews with the Ritsumeikan professors. For my interview, I went as a group with Julia and Leo because we are sharing the same paper regarding the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Disaster. Our professor was from the College of Economics and his name was Professor Koji Shimada. Our conversation lasted for nearly an hour and a half where he discussed the social issues regarding the Fukushima disaster. I really enjoyed the conversation because I didn’t really consider the social aspect where culture was a factor. For example, the government wants to lease out land from families to use for a disposal site for waste for the next 30 years. However, this is an issue because many families have kept their land for many years and generations and they would not want to do that to their land. Overall, this was a very good conversation because I was able to learn something new. After the interview, I went to dinner in the cafeteria with the group and had a break before we went to our next event.

Our next event was to meet graduate students to do a project with them. The student I paired up with was named Sakura. Her project was on the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physicology or Medicine. It was “for their discovery of RNA interference – gene silencing by double-stranded RNA” from the C. elegans microbe. We set up a plan for who would work on what and set up a time to meet up the next day. Once this was finished, I went back to my room and fell asleep for the night. 

Collaboration of Illinois College students and Ritsumeikan Graduate Students