I am Chiharu Morimoto from Akita International University (AIU), which is an international liberal arts college. The reason why I decided to come to Korea is that I wanted to know about one of our
neighbor countries. Through spending two semesters in the university, I learned a lot of sociocultural things. However, since my university has many teachers from Western countries and majority of the international students are from Western countries, I could not know much about the neighbors such as Korea and China. I thought that I should take action to understand those countries because Japan cannot avoid having relations with those countries. I didn’t think that reading books or getting information from the Internet is no enough, but I should visit and see the countries by myself. Therefore, I am here. At ACOPIA, I have tried many tasks such as promotion on SNS, making websites, having events, talking with customers and replying e-mails.
What is the most difficult for me was designing our housing webpage. It was the first time for me to
design webpage and I struggled with it. No matter how hard I worked on the task, the bosses were
never satisfied with it. I did not completely understand the criteria of the bosses. This may be because what they said was too vague to fully grasp what they meant but I didn’t ask them to tell me more specific. For example, if they said to me, “make it more fashionable” and the definition of “fashionable” is different from each other, my work will never satisfy the bosses. From this experience, I realized that communication between colleagues is so important that we work smoothly. What is the most pleasure was meeting many Korean customers. Before I came here, I have not talked with Korean people that much and to tell the truth, I did not have so positive images toward Korea. However, I have met a lot of kind Korean customer here and I have been able to hold much more positive views of Korean people. This may be because in international exchanges, people may think that those who they meet represents their countries, which means I may unconsciously think that our kind customers are representatives of Korean people for me. I think that it can be the
opposite way, which means if Japanese people behave well here, Korean people may have better
image toward Japan. If I could be such a person for our customers, I would be really happy.
My experience in Korea was really fruitful for me. I met various people from all over the world and I
learned a lot from my work.