What's New at Kyoto NHK ESS?

Dear Kyoto NHK ESS members,

Hello, everyone.
This is Motoko Tabata and let me inform you my practice on March 7th.

★ Genre: Discussion

★ Title: THE LOWERING THE LEGAL AGE OF ADULTHOOD FROM 20 TO 18 IN JAPAN

The voting age for national elections will be lowered to from 20 to
18 starting with the next Upper House election in summer 2016.
And also they are still considering to revise the Civil Code and
Juvenile Act.
This trend will affect the age at which people can legally drink
alcohol or smoke and so on.
Nowadays most countries set the age of majority at 18.
We know all adults have both rights(freedom) and responsibility.
“Do you think it's too young in Japan?”
Let's discuss “Should Japan lower the age of adulthood 20 to 18 ?”.

　
★ Procedures:
1. Make 5～6 groups.
2. Exchange your comments in your group on the questions below.
3. Introduce what your group discussed to other groups (from around
18:25).
　
Questions:
(1) Do you agree to grant the people aged 18 and 19 the right to vote at
national/local elections and referenda?
And why?

(2) Do you agree to grant full legal capacity to make commercial/civil
contracts including marriage (without parental consents)?
And why?

(3) Do you agree to limiting the application of the Juvenile Act to
juveniles under 18?
And why?

　(4) What do you think on other related legal subjects such as lowering
the smoking/ drinking age?

(5) Talk freely about related topics (ex. car driver’s license, playing
pachinko, late-night work, R-18(restricted)) .

　　　　　　　
I hope you will enjoy it !
See you on next Saturday!

M. Tabata

Greetings to all Kyoto NHK ESS members,

I am Akira Hashimoto who is in charge for practice at 14th of March, 2015.
This e-mail describes how the practice will be held. This is about my
recent personal interest.

Genre: Discussion
Title: Difficulty of keeping “Male line” emperor (男系天皇) in Japan.

Instructions are as follows:
1: Make 6 groups as usual
2: Handout will be distributed to give background knowledge
3: Discuss different opinions
4: Select one member to introduce some opinions from your group to
rest of the groups.

I know this is kind of tricky as well as very political matter. I hope
the practice will be held nice and peacefully.

Best regards,

Akira Hashimoto

To all
In the next practice, I'd like you to try some works of translation out of both Haruki Murakami's original text and Jay Rubin's English version published in the wold,using material from this NHK radio program https://cgi2.nhk.or.jp/gogaku/english/yomu/
Hope you will be able to get as many idiomatic expressions out of the work as possible.
　
Date;March 21st
Time;17:40-18:45
Content: Translate literature
Procedure:
1.make groups
2.dictate Murakami's text ”Tony Takitani”
3.translate some parts of it
4.share each translation (&corrections or impression etc..) in your group
5.choose the best one of the group & present it in front of all of us
6.listen to some model answers by the NHK radio program.

thanks for your corporation in advance.
Miyazawa

Dear Kyoto NHK ESS members

This is the announcement of the practice on March 28th.

Date：March 28th, 2015
Genre：”Time” Reading and Discussion
In this practice I’d like you to read some articles from TIME magazine, and
talk about one article you get interested in with others. Each article is
too long to read through in a short time, so I’ll pick up several
paragraphs from each one.

Description:
1. Read articles.
2. Choose one article you want to talk about with others.
3. Make groups based on the chosen articles.
4. Have discussion in the group.

I hope you enjoy this practice and get a lot more interested in TIME
magazine’s articles.

Kiyoshi Tamura