Typically, I have found that the final four months of the year are the busiest part of the year for me at Youyou. Lots of the English-language programs have their admissions periods around this time of the year, with quite a few of them having similar timelines and sometimes even similar requirements. What I want to talk about today, however, are some of the non-academic things that I think of during this time period.

One of the things that I associate with this time of the year is actually something that’s something rather simple; our office hours change during the summer and then return back to our typical times at the beginning of September. There are things to learn from such a schedule change, however, and it’s possible that you have encountered such a change before, even if you’ve never really thought about it. If your change your daily schedule, such as deciding to wake up at an earlier or later time than you typically do, your body will eventually get used to this new schedule. This is typically quite apparent when you find that you have to wake up considerably earlier than you usually do for some reason, such as having to wake up early to accomplish some task that you normally do not engage in. Your body might not like it if you do this, causing you to feel more tired than you normally do, but it’s entirely possible that you might encounter such a situation.

In the case of a student, this would be something like sleeping for a long time during the summer vacation and then having no choice but to wake up much earlier to go to school. In the United States, some schools do not start until September, so it’s possible that a student might spend all of July and August sleeping for a decent amount of time and then having to readjust to waking up earlier once it becomes September.

Another thing that I typically associate with this time of the year is of course Christmas, but also the various other events and holidays that happen in this time of the year. It’s still August right now, so it feels a bit strange to talk about Christmas so soon, but it is something that I’ve always found to be an interesting difference between Japan and the United States. One of the first things that I noticed after moving to Japan is that Japan, like the United States, has Halloween. Although this in itself isn’t totally unexpected, what I did not anticipate is that in stores in Japan, Christmas stuff, for lack of a more descriptive term, starts to appear very soon after Halloween. Typically, in the United States, we don’t start to actually see Christmas things in stores until it’s considerably closer to Christmas than it is to Halloween, so seeing horror-themed goods in stores replaced so soon by Christmas-themed items has always felt quite strange to me. This might be because the United States has another holiday in November, Thanksgiving, that we generally also have similarly themed decorations for, but since this is an American holiday and doesn’t apply to Japan, perhaps this is another aspect of culture shock, which I wrote about recently. I may write more about Christmas in Japan later, as I think that the differences between Christmas in the United States and Christmas in Japan are rather interesting.

In any case, the seasons will change soon, and I do typically enjoy the colder seasons a great deal more than summer, so I am looking forward to the changes.