June 16-The rest of the day

Today we had sessions that we had chosen ahead of time. The first one I attended was about women's status in Japan. The speaker was Mariko Bando, vice-president of Showa Women's University. Essentially, it seems that women face some of the same problems in Japan as in the U.S.--lower pay, whether or not to stay home with the children, child care, etc. They are, however, increasing in managerial, professional and technical fields.

After lunch, I went to an art session led by Hiroshi Yokoyama, a retired elementary teacher. He showed us some of the art done by his former students and showed us how to make a cool little booklet which has a "magical" twist!

Later in the afternoon, we met our group coordinator, Meg. She is very experienced with the JFMF program and she is great. She gave us a lot of info about Aizuwakamatsu, the city where our group will be going on Sunday. It's a castle town of about 130,000 residents. It's main industries are tourism (especially for the hot spring spas), agriculture (a lot of fruit), lacquerware and sake.

Tonight a group of us went for a walk around the area of the hotel. First, we went across the street to the New Otani Hotel and looked at their gorgeous Japanese garden. We found one of the famed 100 Yen stores (like a Dollar Tree, basically) and had dinner. I got a giant bowl of some kind of noodles--very good!