Crosscultural Understanding Project

Japan - Israel


This is the site of a crosscultural project between Israel (10th  grade at the Leo Baeck High School, Haifa) and Japan (11th grade at the Inagakuen Comprehensive Upper Secondary School). In the project we analyze some Haiku poems from the book "The Narrow Road to Oku" written by Basho Matsuo and the story "The Siren" by Etgar Keret. In our classes we discuss the story and the poems and then we exchange our impressions. At the beginning we exchanged letters in order to get acquainted and then we built a forum.

One of the highlights was of course the meeting with Etgar Keret himself which took place on December 19. Everybody enjoyed his lecture and the following discussion tremendously. We videotaped the meeting and sent the CD to Japan within the next days.

On the 23rd December, 2004 we visited the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art where we learned a lot about Japanese culture and tried to make some Origami.

On the 26th January, 2005 Mrs. Rita Sukahira gave us a very interesting lecture about the differences between the Israeli and the Japanese culture. She focused on behavioral codes in Japan and the students wanted to ask plenty of questions. As we ran out of time, Mrs. Sukahira promised to come again in order to provide us with more information and answer all the questions.

We hope that this project will enrich our knowledge about Israeli and Japanese cultures.

Here you can see pictures of our class, the letters we received and the meeting with Etgar Keret.

While speaking about the story "TheSiren" we divided the class in different groups. Each group focused on a different topic related to the story:

1)  Holocaust Remembrance Day

2) Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers

3) Is Mikey suitable for the Naval Commando?

 

3) List for sites relevant to Etgar Keret's story "The Siren"

4) Work pages for "The Siren"