For my secondary culture class I took JAPN 305, Intro Japanese Culture/Civilization. This course introduces various aspects of Japanese culture, including history, geography, religion, government, politics, customs and traditions. After a broad historical overview beginning in prehistory, the course focuses on the Tokugawa period as the bedrock for understanding modern Japanese society as a mass society. I took this class in spring of 2012 so my memory of it isn’t as sharp as I would like it to be, and because of a computer loss, I do not have my research project that I would have enjoyed adding a link to at the bottom of this page. This course was a really fascinating course to take because I know very little about the Japanese culture, except for what is taught in 7th grade about samurai and shoguns and what have you. We examined how Japan used to be cut off completely to the western world for hundreds of year and then all of a sudden western culture was a huge part of Japan and the mix of the two conflicting cultures is what we see in modern day Japan. It was good to get a different taste of the other kinds of cultures that are out there in the world since most of my college education is focused on the Spanish speaking community. Our final project in the class was a cultural study of any modern Japanese interest. The topic I chose was the wedding ceremony, which was really interesting because I had never thought of how other cultures may have much stricter and different wedding ceremonies than we do here in the US. Although there is change and a mixture of the traditional Japanese wedding and the western wedding ceremony, they still have specific Japanese customs that are still integrated into their ceremonies. I was glad to be given the opportunity to look into and conduct a research project on a topic I would have never otherwise participated in.