From Kobe to Broadway

It's a little bit depressing that we don't have any Performance Production majors to truly appreciate this! Not that everyone else can't appreciate it, but you know what I mean.

I had no idea that the set designers were responsible for the actual building of the sets. It makes sense now, I mean, it would be hard to design a set without having a vast knowledge of how to make the components work in the physical world.

It's incredible that she was able to persevere through the language barrier. My best friend's family moved here from Hong Kong when she was three, and her parents both speak halting, heavily accented English. When she would talk about how her parents wanted whoever she married to be Chinese, I thought they were being overly traditional and a little racist. But one day I started talking about how sometimes it was awkward for me to be with her family, because her parents always spoke Chinese unless they were speaking directly to me. After talking for a while, I realized that it wasn't necessarily that her parents wanted her future husband to be Chinese, just to speak Chinese so that they could be comfortable and themselves around him, and not have to be self-conscious about their English or worry about understanding his. I guess my point is, it's hard enough to move from far away, especially a foreign country, and throw yourself into college, but when you throw in the language barrier, it seems impossible. Mikiko's achievements are huge by any standards, but what she had to go through to get where she is today makes them so much more astounding.