KOMOREBI

Have you ever thought that you want to do something good for our society? I am sure that most of the people have thought that way at least once. I was also no exception to this. However, whenever I wanted to do volunteer, I did not know where to start. Also, it is hard to make a big commitment to volunteer works while I was busy with school work and my life. I believe that there are a lot of people like me who want to reach out to people in need, but they do not what they could with their limited time. This is why we created this organization. Our mission is to engage more people in their community and make a positive change. They can start with something small to help the community like cleaning the street and beach so that more can join without worrying about sparing much time. We also do not force them to attend any community services and it's completely up to them to come to events. How our organization works is that we have our website where we post in...

When I thought about the quote for the first time, I was trying to come up with something that I can do for numbers of people living in developing country like what Novogratz did: investing money in companies or organization which try to help people in developing countries. But, I realized that the approach requires time and commitment, and it is not easy for me and others to take the approach even though it is ideal to do that. And then, I remembered our high school motto, "Love your neighbor as yourself" and thought this could be the first step to make a better world. I went to a Christian high school in Japan and I learned a number of great teachings of Christianity even though I am not a Christian. At our high school, we had short services twice a week. During the service, we read the bible and listened to a lecture given by minister or teachers. One of the parts of the bible they often talked about was "Love your neighbor as yourself". This is also our schoo...

As you might be realized by this point, there are few international students from Japan comparing to the number of students from other countries like China, South Korea, and India. Not only at USC, but in most universities, Japanese students represent a small part of the entire international student community. Although there are a lot of Japanese university students chose to study abroad, the majority study in other countries for less than one year. In other words, it is not common to receive a degree outside Japan. In this post, I want to share why I decided to come here to study while most university students remain in Japan. To be honest, I was not interested in studying abroad in America. After finishing an exchange program in Australia when I was in high school, I decided to go to university in Japan. The experience I had there was very meaningful and valuable, but at the same time, because I had struggled so much to accustom myself to the culture and lifestyle in Aust...

As a sociology major, I have taken a class covering a topic of inequality in the United States and tried to understand the issue from a sociological perspective. However, I did not have a lot of opportunities to learn about stories of individuals living in a society with huge disparities. This book not only see the issue from a view of the poor but also from the rich and it was eye-opening to me. What I have learned from this book is that both 1% and 99% of the population often misunderstand the each other. Some rich people believe that the reason poor people cannot get rid of the poverty is because they do not work hard, but in reality, it is very difficult to climb up the social ladder once they are on the bottom. It is because they do not have an access to higher education due to the financial difficulties, and in a result, they can only get a labor work. In sociology, this is called Culture of Poverty. If 1% is born on the third base, the poor are standing in the batter box wit...