Yoroshiku / IPPACHI

• Kenshi Yamahashi (2nd year, Department of Imaging Arts and Sciences)
• Cho Oh (2nd year, Department of Imaging Arts and Sciences)
• Aoko Kunishima (2nd year, Department of Imaging Arts and Sciences)
• Joyo Lo (2nd year, Department of Visual Communication Design)
• Yo Yo (2nd year, Department of Industrial, Interior and Craft Design)

Here, we paint a picture of everyday life for an overseas student in Japan. In our story, the central character didn’t understand the meaning of the word “yoroshiku”, something that the other Japanese students used all the time, so he looked it up on his dictionary. So, the next time the group met, he was confident enough to say “yoroshiku” along with everyone else. This video shows how Japanese can be difficult in ways that Japanese people do not appreciate, and the happiness and growth that an overseas student can experience by looking up a word and then using it correctly.

The highlights of this video are the actions of the overseas student and his expressions. The student at the center of the video is thinking back to when he first actually started studying Japanese and expresses the confusion he feels when the others used some Japanese that he didn’t understand. Our aim here was to produce a promotional video that people could watch over and over again and still enjoy. In the scene after he looked up the meaning of “yoroshiku”, we used surreal images and voices to quickly portray both the reality and his internal experience of confusion due to the many meanings of the word. This makes the video interesting in ways that the other groups’ videos are not.