University senior Tomoaki “Tony” Hirose came to the United States from Tokyo three years ago. As president of the Japanese Student Organization, he wants to share his culture with American students here in Oregon.
Sunday night in the EMU Ballroom, JSO will present Japan Night 2008, for which tickets are available at the EMU Ticket Office.
“Japan Night is the event that introduces what Japan is, what kind of food Japanese eat,” said Hirose, an accounting major. “We are also going to introduce Japanese traditional music, culture and sports.”

Food will include Japanese meat loaf and three-colored rice, which is covered in brown (meat), yellow (egg) and green (peas).
In addition, there will be a kimono fashion show, though Hirose said most Japanese people don’t typically wear kimonos in their day-to-day lives. Today, people mostly wear kimonos for special events such as weddings and tea ceremonies.
Japan Night will also include a stage show with music, dancing and skits, as well as a Japanese-style haunted house.
“If you’ve seen any of the Japanese horror films, like ‘The Ring’ or ‘The Grudge,’ it’s in that style of scariness,” said University senior Kellen Wertz, the JSO’s public relations officer. “Basically a Japanese idea of what’s scary as opposed to a more American haunted house with skeletons and mummies and vampires and things like that.”
Wertz, who is majoring in Japanese and Asian studies, said Japan Night is a good opportunity for University students to learn about Japanese culture.
“It’s definitely a good place to get an idea of what is sort of really going on in Japan right now, as opposed to what the media shows us,” he said. “It’s not ‘The Last Samurai’ over there.”
Sophomore Nan Shan, a computer and information science major, went to Japan Night 2007 shortly after arriving at the University from China.
“That was the very first huge event for me and that’s pretty amazing,” he said. “The whole atmosphere, the organization.”
He was most impressed by the kung fu demonstration and the food.
“It wasn’t really traditional Japanese food,” Shan said. “But it was very tasty.”
Last year, about 450 people attended Japan Night. This year, JSO hopes for more than 500.
“Our hope is that people will come, they’ll have fun and maybe they’ll lose some of their stereotypes and misconceptions along the way,” Wertz said.
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