After the cancellation of my exchange program I felt like I had lost an important occasion, not only academically speaking, but also regarding my language proficiency: I regard my self as a person who needs constant indirect exercise – such as applying the notions learnt in my everyday life and the impossibility to not spend a semester in Japan seemed to me like a condemn to the perennial impossibility to not achieve the hungered articulateness in Japanese that I had continuously noticed in my senpai and other people who had the chance of spending at least three months in Japan.

Basically, it was almost a condemn to the sempiternal ineptitude.

At first, when I heard about the ‘Virtual Exchange Project’ directed by professor Mariotti in collaboration with the Japan Foundation I was fairly scared to challenge myself in a project where in order to be admitted I should had undergo to an interview in Japanese but at same time I felt it was my chance to countervail my missed opportunity and really do what I need to do in order to define myself as a Japanese Language student.

The given topic was fairly hard to develop: how to speak everyday about environment without falling in the same common places or making us feel as a unavoidable menace is beetling up on us? How to conjugate the particular interest of some participants with the simple general knowledge of others? It was an industrious task.

Naturally, during the first meet we felt as lost as fishes in the wood, but gradually we started proposing week after week intuitively the 来週の小テーマ, shaping it according to the predispositions of each member, researching journalistic articles about the salient news or the singular initiatives aimed for protect our planet Earth and the all the living being all round the globe. Therefore, we proceeded to the concrete issues and initiatives – such as the anthropical disasters and the ocean related issues to the most abstract ad ideological ones – like conspiracy theories and political activism.

At the same all the members worked on a glossary for each week to allow everyone to express our opinions as the best as we could, encouraging everybody to participate into the discussion creating a relaxed ad friendly environment.

Regarding the 事由会話　lessons, they where the hardest parts: at first, due to an error of mine nobody had participate in my group. I felt all my fecklessness on my shoulders. But after this bitter episode, I was re-located in a related group where the situation become more and more challenging, since everybody had their own topic and opinions to expose, and many members were marvelously fluent, therefore it was a sort of indirect exercise. I think I will probably miss all the members of that group.

I think that my favorite part of the experience has been writing posts on the blog: writing a long article in Japanese had been a challenging task, one of which I’m very proud of and something that I hope to do again in the near future. It wasn’t only the article, obviously, but also the researching phase made in advance: thanks to this I’ve known many Japanese site which I can get more and more updates related to the Japanese actuality.

I would not be honest if I didn’t explicit also the negative parts: during this project I felt much anxiety for the lack of organizational directions that seemed to be decided at the moment. The other anxiety generator factor was the lack of a standardized method to keep track of my hour and a clear schedule of the activities in which I was expected to dedicate the major of my time or a sort of paradigm. Because of this I  felt insecure of my productiveness for all duration of the project.

But this was just a point of the whole picture, and beside this, I regard this experience as a pure benefit for my language, teamwork skills and even for my interpersonal relations: even though I didn’t create a big friends ’circle I had the chance to meet very inspirational people, both Japanese and Italian.

I would deeply thank every person who made this experience possible, form the Japan Foundation, to my professor M.M. Mariotti, to all the junior coordinators and to my reliable and patient責任者.