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In addition to yesterday’s post, I found out today that the university nearby my dorm, Showa University, has closed until June 1st because of the measles outbreak. My university, Keio, on the other hand, is still open     Although, from what my friend tells me, they will most likely add an extra week of school on at the end of the semester. So perhaps it’s not really a “free” vacation, after all.

Whatever the case, no matter when the semester ends, the summer seems to be a bad time to fly between the United States and Japan. It seems like the prices for a one way plane ticket are about $800 to $1000 more expensive than they were during the fall and winter. This is a pretty amazing change.

It also means that the price of Japanese airlines is now above $2000 for a one way ticket. For some reason, the Japanese airlines, JAL and ANA, always seem to be $500 or more dollars expensive than the cheapest american airline’s flight. We actually talked about this price discrepancy briefly in one of my economic classes. I think the airlines receive some sort of protection or benefits from the Japanese government.

In addition to this high price, the one time I was placed on a Japanese airline’s flight (ANA, because when I travelled back to Tokyo with my family, we missed a connection and apparently ANA is partners with United Airlines), the plane was full of people. Admittedly, there weren’t many foreigners, mostly Japanese people. Also, the plane’s composition seemed to be different. There were fewer coach class seats and many more business and first class seats.

In any case, I’m unsure why people are willing to spend $500 or $600 more for a plane ticket when the same flight covered by a different airline is just as readily available. It could be because Japanese people are more comfortable flying on a Japanese airline since everyone will of course speak Japanese. I think that another reason might be that arranged trips by travel companies are very popular here in Japan, and of course, these companies always use Japanese airlines for their trips.

In any case, I’ll have to continue my hunt for a cheap flight back home to the United States.

I think writing in this blog everyday is improving my ability to write material quickly. Often before I write an entry, I really have no idea what I’m going to write about so I just grab whatever idea comes to me first, go with it and try to write something long enough to qualify as an entry (while also trying to say something significant lol).

Today, I did a homework assignment from my Japanese Economy class which was to read a report about the current state of the Japanese economy and then write one’s thoughts about it. I spent about half an hour reading the report and then wrote 3-4 pages expressing my opinion on the Japanese economy and where it should go in under an hour. I was pretty surprised since usually it takes me forever to write these things because it’s always such a slow, painful process.

Not this time, though. When I was writing it, it sort of felt like I was just writing another entry for my blog. So, perhaps writing in this blog has secret added benefits. I’m glad because I was worried that I would lose some of my ability to write material for school since I haven’t been required to write anything academic since a year or more ago.

So, because I finished the assignment so quickly and the weather is still not too hot, I went for a walk around Sangenjaya while studying my kanji (Japanese character) cards in preparation for my kanji test tomorrow. There are actually quite a few parks in the area when I walk in the opposite direction of the station and the large road. There’s actually a very, very small park hidden in between some houses and buildings right across the street from my dorm. I had no idea it was there because you really have to get in between the close buildings to see it. I discovered it when I was walking back from a walk with a friend some weeks ago and didn’t really know how to get back to the dorm.

I’ll have to enjoy the weather now while it’s not too hot because from what I hear, it will soon get so hot and humid that one won’t even want to leave one’s house. Or so say my friends.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 8:47 am and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.