Japanese traditions at Kazan University

On September 8, Professor Miyuki Takahashi from Aichi University delivered a lecture on Japanese culture at KFU.

Miyuki Takahashi, a professor of English at the Aichi University, introduces ancient Japanese  traditions to foreigners. Her lectures are based on immersive learning. Thus, Japanese cuisine is introduced through detailed study of the food ingredients, whereas Japanese architecture is presented along with the reasons of constructing a building of a certain shape.  

?Such lectures are aimed to enable cultural exchange between nations. It is essential for successful international cooperation as we can learn to understand each other only if we know the history and culture of the world nations?, believes the professor.

At the end of her lecture, Miyuki Takahashi traditionally teaches her students origami skills telling them a traditional Japanese legend. It promises that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish by a crane. It is also an act for peace as everybody remembers Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who was two years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945, near her home next to the Misasa Bridge in Hiroshima, Japan. At the age of 11, she was diagnosed leukemia and spent her last days folding paper cranes and hoping for the future.  Sadako is to this day a symbol of innocent victims of war.