For the past few days, we have been working a project where we need to present a creation that has to have some kind of a relationship with child labor. The following is the progression I have made so far. Please read!!!

What is your project?
My project for this assignment is going to be a video. I am mainly going to discuss about what child labor is and how child labor has affected the world in a bad way, by using cases in the past. I will call out for awareness and help throughout this video.

Why did you choose it?
I chose this project because making video might not be considered as a sort of action but will definitely be an effective way to keep people aware of child labor and its cruelty. And taking action in a real sense for serious global problems like this will be extremely hard. I think you will need to donate some money in order to say that you took action.

What stage are you at? What do you still need to do?
I am at the stage right finish planning the structure of the video and now at the stage of making the video. I consider planning harder than actually making the video, so in a sense I am done about 70%

Anything difficult about your project?
The thing difficult for me about my project is finding witnesses. There should be many who have experienced child labor but there are limited amount of comments on the Internet made by those who have experienced.

Do you think your project will be effective?
Yes, I think so because making a video will successfully convey the important message, and I think there will be less misunderstanding of the main point as other ways.

We made a slide show about one person who affected the world during the Industrial Revolution period.

This is the slide that I was responsible with:

Reflecting upon the slides on the whole slideshow, I think I have found an answer to the question, ‘how can one person change the world?’. I think probably accomplishing something extraordinary, that people have not done before, and which of course supports people’s lives, will make that person famous and affect the world. For example, Thomas Newcomen improved steam engines from the one which people used to use, so that they can be used to drain water in mines to earn money. I think that without him, industries of the world would be not as developed as now because this event allowed machines, such as steam engines, to be used for a profitable purpose for the first time, which of course was the origin of modern industries.

Interesting topic isn’t it? Industrial Revolution was actually one of the things I was excitedly waiting for to study in humanities class. I am looking forward to learn more about it later on.

During the last few weeks we have been working with a project about the relation between an empire and a colonized country. Our group (with Mia, Jake, and Kento) chose the British empire as a colonizer and India as a colony. Below is our presentation we made. There are no words on it since we talked all of the information in the actual presentation, but I hope you can have a look.

Humanities Empire Project

What happens when one country controls another?

When one country takes over another country, the ‘another country’ (colony) will have some changes in their government, culture, basically everything. The colonizer wants the colony to follow the same style with its government (for example laws and rules). Language, religion, dress, and other things that are thought to be parts of culture are also influenced by colonizer’s.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of being an empire?

The advantages of being an empire is that if it succeeds in fights, it can take over more lands that might have natural resources underground (having wealth in its own country is basically the main objective of an empire). On the other hand, the disadvantages of being an empire is the riskiness of being so. It can easily lose its own land. As a result it may be a reason for causing trouble within the nation; a food shortage, limited space to place a house, etc.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of being a colony?

The advantages of being a colony is that, it sometimes could end as a good result for poor countries, may have a better government system. On the other hand, being a colony is as same as losing its own land immediately, which may have important natural resources underground.

Images that may describe ‘Empire’:

Hey everyone! I hope you are safe (if you are in Japan). As you may know we had an enormous earthquake, which is the biggest one, in Japan. So I wanted to tell you (actually I’m assigned to do the task), in the situation everyone was panicking and saying lots of rumors that weren’t true, what we (actually myself and my family) did to get information that was always quite right. Also if you are delicate, doesn’t want to know about the earthquake, you better not read this blog post.

So first of all, our most welcomed information source was our television!! Without doubt, we (our family) were all day front of the television, staring at it, for few days after the earthquake. We used it for everything, for example to look for the seismic intensity of aftershocks, details about the rolling blackouts, and more. In fact, we found out that we (in Nakaku) weren’t belonging to any of the group of the rolling blackouts, and weren’t involved to it. The good thing about information gathering using television is that you can actually see live interviews of the person in the high position (curator), so we can make sure that the information is not a rumor. But on the other hand, the bad thing that emerges is that, there are different people having different ideas going on television, so sometimes we were getting swayed with other people’s various opinions. Also after a few weeks, we’ve noticed that the news only report about one big main thing and doesn’t report other things happening. For example, during the first few days after the earthquake, the news only told about the aftershocks occurring all around Japan, but once the nuclear leak happened, the news then only told about the nuclear plant. I think that news reports only make us stressed out, don’t you think so?! I think there should be more funny variety shows instead of news reports, to bring us smiles and hope. Newspaper is also a good source. We mainly used it for knowing the details about the nuclear plant. From this source, we were able to know the transition of sieverts near the nuclear plant. The good thing about using newspaper is that there are less opinions insisted and only facts are written on it. On the other hand, the bad thing about it is that the facts are not as sure; maybe there could be a rumor. Also, I’ve been looking around different articles in newspapers, but I’ve noticed that there are various types of articles written on newspapers, not only about the earthquake. And I think this is an important thing. This made me forget about the stress I had with the earthquake. Lastly, internet is a quite good source too. We used it mainly when we had an aftershock, to know theseismic intensity around Yokohama. Actually, we knew that the greatest aftershock we had around here (in Yokohama) registered three on the Japanese seismic scale. The good thing about using the internet is that the information goes around really quick, even faster than a news flash. In Twitter, every second, there would be a new update. On the other hand, the bad thing I saw is that there are bunch and bunch of rumors and wrong information. One I saw is that the rumor, the Pokemon creator died because of the earthquake. Out of three sources I showed you, I think TV is the most convenient way to get information because of its accurateness, right information is the best.

Also I’m required to explain an example of information that turned out to be false. Yes, as I wrote before, there was a completely wrong information that the Pokemon creator died because of the earthquake, which I saw at some kind of a website. Other than that, I saw a newspaper that says, thousands of sieverts detected around the turbine building in the Fukushima nuclear plant. That turned out as a wrong information. It was a miss made by a worker. Although, before it turned out wrong, everyone already knew that was a wrong information. By this false information, I got a bit nervous thinking about what’s going to happen to me. From now on, to make sure we don’t have a wrong false information, I think we need to try to get most of our information from television, and I’ll say this again, I think that way (using television) is the best way to gain information.

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This would be a new section, different from the last section. Right now I’m assigned to write a pretend letter to my imaginary pen pal coming to our school, telling about what happening at here in Yokohama. So here is m letter to my imaginary pen pal:

Hello Bob,

How are you doing? This is Kazuki in Japan. As may guess from my name, I’m Japanese. I’m born at September 7th, 1999, so I’m currently 11 years old. My family is all Japanese, but my sister and I were born at America and acquire citizenship of America.

You might already know that Japan is in big trouble right now, and I would like you to know what’s happening here in Yokohama. First of all, the earthquake happened at March 11th, 2011, 14:46:23, and the duration was 6 minutes. The center of the earthquake is located at 38ºN 142ºE and the depth was 32 km. Also the magnitude of this earthquake was 9.0M and it was the strongest earthquake in Japan. Not only earthquake attacked Japan, also tsunami attacked Japan, 8.5 m with the highest. By this earthquake and tsunami, lots of people have died got lost.

What are the effects? By the earthquake and the tsunami, the town is now a mountain of rubble. Also, by this, the Fukushima nuclear plant is going wrong, so The Tokyo Electric Power Company can’t provide enough electricity to every town. What they are doing is that they are implementing rolling blackouts to make sure they have enough electricity. Also with the nuclear plant, sadly the nuclear leak had happened. So, everyone living close to there needed to evacuate. Plus, radioactive materials were found from tap water, so people in Kanto region are now scared of the nuclear plant even if they live far away from there. That’s basically it with what’s happening in Yokohama. Lots of other things are happening at other places, like liquefaction.

Don’t worry, you will like Yokohama, I hope so… And one more, don’t forget to bring us laughter, OK? Let us recover from the shock we had at the earthquake.

Yeah, this is it. Thank you and see you at school!

Kazuki

I used http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tōhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami as my source. I chose this as my source because, this website was really detailed with easy graphs and I was able to understand what it said easily. Otherwise I used my knowledge in my brain.

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Yes, this is it, finally. I finished the assigned task. OK… (ha… I’m really tired) Oh sorry, I just noticed that this blog post became really long again, as usual. Next time I’ll try to make it shorter!!! Bye and see you again, my friends!!!