When the Cherry Blossoms Bloom
In 1990, I came back to Japan from the UK in an attempt to enter a university in Tokyo. Back in those days, high school qualifications from schools abroad were not readily accepted by Japanese universities. Even if you had completed A-levels or taken the SAT, you still had to sit a university entrance examination. Only a limited number of universities had special admission schemes for students who had studied abroad, so we were left with very few choices. I failed my first university entrance examination. I had not used Japanese for a while, and I was not familiar with writing essays in Japanese. It was quite stressful to write all those kanji characters by hand, hoping that I would not make too many mistakes—which, probably, I did. I took a summer course for students who had graduated from high schools abroad. It was designed to brush up our English and Japanese, as well as our essay-writing skills. After two months of intensive study, I became much more confident about writing i...