My Life in Japan

My name is Qiao Di. Currently, I’m a doctoral student at the Department of Civil Engineering of Nagoya University. It’s a great honor for me to get an opportunity from the JSCE Concrete Committee Newsletter to make the student’s voice. I’d like to give sincere thanks to the editors of the Newsletter for their kindness. Here I want to talk about my present experiences in Japan, the normal life and also my study in the concrete laboratory.

After some hesitations about my future career at the time when I was going to obtain my master’s degree in my home country, I made the decision to keep going on my study concerned about the durability of reinforced concrete, since I was quite curious about this topic which I thought was of significant importance for the ageing structures. To me, studying in Japan was a good option as Japan owned the state of art technology in the field of civil engineering and also placed an emphasis on the relevant research where I could learn a lot. In addition, I belong to the generation growing up accompanied by Japanese animation and I am especially fond of the robot series like Gundam. Luckily, I was accepted by the Forefront Studies Program of Nagoya University and commenced my new life in Japan since the October of 2012.

The initial problem for a fresh foreigner in Japan must be the language. On my side, I just learned some basic sentences and words from animations before I came to Japan. Hence you can imagine some awkward situations that I went outside buying some household items and just unfortunately forgot how to describe those I needed. At that time, the shop assistant always showed great kindness and patience that helped me a lot. The Japanese Language Class I took in Nagoya University and the daily talk with the members of concrete laboratory helps me gradually advance my ability of speaking Japanese. I also took part in the Home Stay twice, which is definitely valuable experience in my life. The host family treated me as a true member, prepared fancy food, talked with me about the local customs and practices, and showed me around. They took me to Gero and we enjoyed the famous hot spring. For the second time, we went together to Koga Ninja Village. I took some Ninja training games and got to know a lot of things about Ninja, an important component of Japanese traditional culture. The rich and colorful life I am experiencing here enables me in touch with so many kind Japanese people and makes me fall in love with this beautiful country.

In my laboratory, the members are more than schoolmates. We not only have some heated discussions about our research projects, but also make lots of nice conversations related with daily life, including some popular restaurants, presently released cinema and drama, and sports game, etc., which leads to a gorgeous atmosphere. Usually, students have their own research topics and I try to clarify the corrosion process of reinforcement from the aspects of corrosive current and develop more sophisticated methods to evaluate the influences of reinforcement corrosion on structure, such as tensile performance degradation of corroded rebars and concrete cover spalling. We hold group meetings on Saturdays in every two weeks, when we present our research progress. The comments or questions came up during the meetings inspire us to dig into our study thoroughly and comprehensively. Meantime, some foreign doctoral students from Australia, USA and Denmark continually come to our lab for joint research, which provides us with great chances to talk with them about the different culture and certainly the different research methods employed in their labs. Apart from the research work, there are some parties for successful submitting the paper or the completion of job hunting. We also make a Gundam mortar for the festival of Nagoya University and climb the Mount of Fuji during the lab’s vocation. I extremely enjoy working in this lab, although the research work is a bit intense. As a finish, I would like to introduce part of my ongoing research with an extended abstract.