Pre-Departure

   In 14 hours I will be leaving campus with eighteen classmates and three professors. We will be on our way to Dulles airport and then getting on a direct flight (15 hours, ouch!) straight to Tokyo, Japan.
   For those of you who don't know, I'm taking two classes for January term that will be traveling together throughout Tokyo and Kyoto for two weeks. The classes I'm taking are Japanese Mathematics and Religions in Japanese History.
   We have learned a lot in the last week in both of my classes. In Japanese Mathematics we have learned how to approach some old Japanese math problems called wasan. During the period between approximately 1600 and 1868 Japan closed off all incoming and outgoing traffic from their country. They did this because there were too many people from Spain and Portugal and some Dutch merchants coming into Japan and converting people to Christianity. Some really important math findings were occurring right as Japan cut off communication with the rest of the world, thus Japan missed out on some major discoveries. There was a popular type of math problem, called wasan, that were solved and put on wooden tablets and given as thanks to the Buddhist gods for giving them such wonderful math. These wooden tablets are called sangaku which literally translates to "math tablet". So while I'm in Japan with my classes we will be spending time looking for some of these math tablets. Here's an example of one of the problems we've been working on this week.

 

   In my Religions in Japanese History class we have learned a very summarized time line of ruling powers, wars, locations of capitals, and many different types of religion (mainly Buddhism) in Japan from 10,000 B.C. to present day. I'm not sure how we managed to learn that much in four days but it happened. 

    I will try to post something everyday that we are in Japan but if not I will be sure to sum up everything we've done that I missed.

   More tomorrow! (FROM JAPAN!)

   P.s. Nihon is Japanese for Japan. It literally means "sun origin". Our professor told us that when Japan would write letters to China they would address it as Nihon which (quoting my professor) they meant as the sun people or the people where the sun comes from since the suns rays hit Japan before they hit China.