Vietnam - Japan Cultural Exchange Event | Viet-Jap Connection

One of the most interesting parts to be a student of The Japanese Department is that we can meet "real" Japanese, apply our Japanese lessons in "real" conversation with "real" Japanese. Through this communication process, we learn not only the language itself but also the cultures in their daily activities, habits, mindset, perspective, and personalities.

Hence, this program is set to let Vietnamese students experience authentic culture and enhance their language skills.

In this project, I helped:

Seek for target participants based on requirements with my own network, mouth-to-mouth, and social media (Instagram story)

Design activities schedule with other core members.

Prepare materials for the event (the gifts, drinks)

Instruct and make sure everyone understand the project (the schedule)

Make sure the number of participants is correct because of the event's purpose.

Be the photographer as well (just because I liked to go around and take photos :D )

Monitor and report any abnormal, unexpected things that happen to other core members and find ways to solve them.

Carefully oversee participants and be available to respond to any queries or troubles from the participants.

Get feedback from the participants by surveys

Meet up with other teammates to have a self-reflection

Discuss and share the feedbacks with supervisors, professors

Setting up a Viet-Japan cultural exchange event was quite difficult since not every participant was good at speaking Japanese and was able to communicate smoothly. This language barrier could affect the event's atmosphere, hence ruin the meaning of this exchange program.

Thus, we were supposed to design the activities that did not require to speak so much Japanese but still let participants have daily conversations, body language to explore each other's cultures such as gift exchange (it's always easier to talk about the things that we prepared before), together decorate a paper fan in Japanese style, Kanji writing teaching (The Japanese mate could teach Vietnamese mate by doing samples and seeing the results from these activities would definitely light them up), the music show (of course :D) and guiding around the city eating food and drinking milk tea together.

Memorable meetings

Towards the project:

Event scale: about 100 participants (50 Japanese - 50 Vietnamese)

Feedbacks were all positive.

Repeated participants number had increased after every event.

Friendship among Viet-Jap participants was still maintained.

Towards personal growth:

Intensive collaboration with other mates was crucial so my teamwork skill was able to enhance.

Communication skill was essential in leading, managing and organizing the event.

Leadership was also practiced and improved.

Broaden my network with Japanese friends, still contact even when I came to Japan.