Administration

**#1 Introductory Remarks:**
Topics covered in this message— 1) Who are your tour leaders? 2) What are the tour leaders prepared to do for you? 3) Working on your “tour project.” 4) Recommended reading

Hope you are getting excited about our coming adventure. I know you have many pressing things happening in your professional lives at the moment as the school year moves ever forward toward the summer. However, I want to begin discussing some issues related to our tour together. You might begin making a file of these messages, which will be coming to you from time to time. Travel study is extremely demanding physically, mentally and emotionally. Your “cup” is going to “run over.” The question is, __how soon__ will it run over? You enlarge your “cup” through reading and thinking PRIOR to the trip.


 * People who are working to make yours a great experience ** :

I, **Jim Leavell**, will serve as your tour leader and enrichment lecturer on a variety of Japanese subjects. At Furman I teach undergraduate courses in Japanese history, religion, and art history. Several of you have participated in the Greenville, SC based NCTA seminar and therefore know me rather well. Travel has been a passion of mine since my childhood. My father had a serious wanderlust and carried the family along. Since 1978 Furman has provided me with opportunities to lead a number of student groups to various places overseas. Japan has been my personal as well as academic interest since my first visit there as a Baptist missionary in 1963. I will accompany you to some of my most treasured places in the world. Kyoto is my soul-city. I am frustrated that we have so little time there. My wife and I once lived a year in Kyoto and tried very hard to see all of the city’s treasures. We failed. There is just too much to see, even in an extended period. I have arranged for us to see the very coolest places—the “must see” places. Kyoto is the center of Japan’s Buddhist culture. It is “the Rome” of the Japanese Buddhist world. I never tire of visiting its temples, gardens, and shrines. It will be a special pleasure for me to be there with you. Farley and I will be available to you throughout the tour. We will of course both make prepared as well as impromptu remarks from time to time. Our role as “enrichment lecturers” and “content consultants” will be influenced to some degree by the presence of local guides at some of our destinations. Cultural protocol and simple good manners dictate that you and we show respect to our local guides. You will show your respect by listening patiently when they speak. Farley and I will show our respect by trying not to interrupt or openly disagree with their interpretive comments. In my experience there are times when this courtesy requires serious discipline on all our parts. Trust us. We will not allow you to be left with misinformation, and we will present additional information where appropriate to enhance your understanding of what we are seeing. It is my understanding based on past experience that in Japan our group will have “a national guide” who will travel with us the entire time we are in the country. (It is possible that we will have two different national guides—on in Tokyo and another for the remainder of the trip. This is unclear at the moment.) The national guide is responsible for our logistics—where we leave our luggage, when we eat, where we eat, what we eat, what time we board the train or plane, where the bus will be parked, where we can get bottled water. Questions about such matters are best directed to this individual. Farley and I will be eager to help you with the educational content of your experience. Do not be shy. To get the most out of our presence, you need to be ready to ask questions.
 * Farley Richmond ** is my co-leader on this adventure. Several of you will have had prior experience studying with Farley. He serves as the director of NCTA in Georgia. Since the mid 60s Farley has been traveling periodically to India where he does research on various genres of Indian theatre and dance-drama. Currently, he teaches a class in Bollywood films, as well as his regular theatre classes. Farley has traveled briefly in Japan twice. He has a lifelong interest in Japanese noh, kabuki, and bunraku. He has taken groups of teachers, art collectors, and students on numerous tours of India, both north and south, as well as to Nepal. Many of the historical sites have included Buddhist caves and shrines in western and central India. As part of a research trip to Indonesia he visited a major Buddhist shrine in Java and various Buddhist shrines in Thailand. And through the auspices of NCTA he had the opportunity to travel to China and Korea for two weeks a few years ago. Farley’s extensive experience in the South and Southeast Asian Buddhist world is going to be a great help to all of us in comparing those “flavors” of Buddhism with what we will be encountering on our trip to Japan.


 * Your tour project ** :

The more you know before visiting a new place, the more you get out of the experience. With this in mind I will be assigning each of you a site on our itinerary to research. I want each of you to anticipate seeing at least one particular place due to having informed yourself in some detail about its history and contemporary significance. Through our group website you will inform other members of the group about what you are learning. You will become our expert on this location. I hope to engage in conversation with you about your Japanese site as your research progresses and you put material up on the website for others to study. You can access the full list of research project “pages” on our wikispaces “japanNCTA” site. After I assign you a project, you and I will develop your material on that page together.


 * General Reading: **

// Eyewitness Travel: Japan // (New York: Dorling Kindersley (DK) Publishing)  This is my favorite general guide because of its beautiful pictures and extremely useful diagrams of buildings, gardens, and towns. If you take a book along on the trip, this might be the one you will want to take for reference as we go along.

// Insight Guides: Japan // (Long Island City, NY: Langenscheidt Publishers) [|www.insighttravelguides.com] Similar to Eyewitness guides (same beautiful photos), but does not have the diagrams I find so useful. Information is excellent.

// National Geographic Traveler: Japan // (Washington, DC: National Geographic) Again, stunning photographs to stimulate your eye and help you develop your “shot list” for Japan.

Paul Norbury, //Culture Smart! Japan//. (Portland, OR: Graphic Arts Center Publishing Company). This is a great brief introduction to contemporary Japanese social customs.

John Hersey, //Hiroshima//. I suggest we all read or reread this in preparation for our visit to the A-bomb museum in Hiroshima.

If you live in or near Atlanta, let me suggest that you visit Kinokuniya Book Store which carries the most extensive stock of English-language books about Japan in the Southeastern U.S.. You might also want to contact the “Information Officer” at the Japanese Consulate General in Atlanta for maps, teaching materials, video programs, etc.

From Jim Leavell Monday 22 Feb. 2010 **(modified Sunday, 21 March, 2010)**

**Dear Fellow NCTA Travelers**,

My name is Jim Leavell, pronounced "level." Farley Richmond is my co-director on the NCTA Japan #1 Study Tour group.

I led my first educational tour group around Japan in 1973 while on the faculty of Seinan Gakuin University in Fukuoka. I took my most recent NCTA group in 2008. You have been given a rare opportunity to join this heavily subsidized trip. As director I feel a strong sense of obligation to make certain that your experience will be of a high educational quality. I am assuming that you are going with Farley and me to learn. We will work hard for you both before and during the time we are in Japan. We expect that you will also make an investment of your time and effort in preparing adequately, both mentally and physically, for the brief period we will spend abroad. You will all experience overload. It is natural. The question is how soon you will hit the wall and mentally shut down? The more you know before you go, the more you will be able to appreciate and absorb while you are traveling. I know that you are all very busy. However, failing to prepare adequately for this trip will significantly lower its value to you both when you are there and after you return to share it with your students and fellow teachers. I have assigned each of you a particular site or experience on our itinerary about which you will become "expert." (See the "Research Projects" page.) I anticipate that we will jointly develop a trip website (tied to our itinerary) that will help us all to prepare ourselves to better appreciate what we will see. Farley and I have one significant challenge regarding our trip planning. We have not been allowed funding for a face-to-face orientation program. That means we are going to depend completely on email communication and this wikispaces site to exchange vital information during the lead up to the trip. In other words it is critical that Farley and I have confidence in the email addresses we have been given and that we know you are looking at this wikispaces website on a regular basis for our updates. One concern I have is that many school districts block emails as spam. That is particularly true when there are a number of people on the address list and when there are attachments. For that reason, if you have a home (personal) email address, I suggest that you provide us with that and depend on that for our communications. My email is jim.leavell@furman.edu >. My home phone is (864) 233-1640. My cell phone [not always turned on] is (864) 414-2363. I have "mug shots" of the South Carolina gang. I would appreciate having a similar photo from each of you from Georgia. I will share these mug shots with Farley. Please send something like a passport photo rather than a family group picture. We want to be able to distinguish you from your daughters or sons. You may want to put up family photos on your personal page here on this site. This is your immediate task. Get a passport. It takes time. If you already have one be sure that it is valid through January, 2011. If it is not, you need to get a renewal. Japanese officials will not allow you into the country in July without a significant cushion of time on you passport. You will not need a visa for Japan. We are all going into the country as American tourists, not as students or educators. You will be asked on the entry permit form to identify your profession (teacher), but there is a special visa required of all people coming into the country either to teach or study. We do not want to get involved in that. When asked the purpose of your visit, you will indicate you are a tourist in Japan to spend money, help their economy, and appreciate their beautiful country. That is your "cover." In reality you are there to intensely study Japanese history, culture, religion, art and theater. You are not to reveal this to the Japanese, even under torture. You do not need shots for Japan. You can drink the water and eat the food without fear in Japan. A tetanus booster is recommended, but I assume that all of you (as teachers) are up to date on the basics. I have no idea what to recommend to you as an amount you should plan to take. Take all you can. However, keep in mind that we have not planned this as a shopping trip. What shopping you will be able to do in Japan will be snatched in moments, not hours. Further, Japan is not cheap. I plan to take you to one major shopping location while we are in Kyoto. On the positive side, you will have almost all of your meals provided (more specifics on that later). Cokes, coffee, snacks, ice cream, donuts, and the Big Mac you just have to have after a week in-country will be at your own expense.
 * Tour Project:**
 * Communication**:
 * Photographs**:
 * Passports**:
 * Japanese visa**:
 * Inoculations**:
 * Spending money**:

We are going to have a great time together! Jim