My country’s Japanesse embasy gives scholarships each year for people who want to study in Japan or want to learn japanese while studying, paying all living expenses.
I love japanese pop music and orchestral videogame music from japanese composers and I also would love to learn japanese. I know there are other masters program around the world where I could develop my skills further but they don’t entice me as much as living in another country, learning their language, studying orchestration and composition techniques with living expenses covered while working on other projects.
I want something new and exciting in my life, is this it?
5 comments
Sure, go for it
Don’t do it unless you plan on staying in japan for the rest of your life and you won’t know that unless you’ve lived there for a couple of years.
I think a masters in your country or maybe the US, Canada, UK…might serve you better than one in Japan.
You can learn Japanese on your own during that time and later look for work in Japan if you still feel the same way about the country.
The reasons for doing it doesn’t really matter, as long as it makes sense to you. If you want to do a Masters in Japan because you like Takoyaki, I don’t care, it’s not my place to decide if your reason is good enough. I’m not interested in judging your reasons.
The most important in order for me to judge if it’s a good or bad idea, is what degree you’re planning at, the university, and what you’re planning to do afterwards.
Even though if it might be a bad degree, if it’s free and you want to do it, then just go for it.
I did a study-abroad-yolo-noregrets program when I was in my early twenties. Didn’t do anything useful besides drinking some beer and getting some chicks. I loved it.
I enjoyed it so much that after I finished university I saved some money to do it again. This time I felt terrible. I was the oldest in my group and my mind kept telling me “bro, get a job, find a wife, be useful”. Adulthood had hit me hard.
So it is all personal and depends on what moment you are in your life.
At the stage I am now, I would never go for something that has no utility to my career in the long term.
But if you are in your “having fun” stage, go for it. Living abroad as a student will always give you awesome memories.
OP, do you want to study music? Is that your intended course of study?
If so, I wouldn’t base choosing Japan on it’s pop music and video game music. That’s *probably* not what Masters/PhD level programs teach here from a compositional level. If you want to do a PhD to study something like, I dunno, Musicology or Cultural Studies and make Japanese video game music a major aspect of your research, then that might make sense (but know there’s not much to do with this besides academia). But if you want to compose for video games, there could be universities in other countries that are better for this.
I think you need to do a bit more research into programs in Japan and see what/how they teach, reach out to some professors (because this will be expected for graduate-level work) and see if your academic interests align with any school’s focus here first.