杉並アニメーションミュージアム (Suginami Animation Museum)

Placement Description:The most famous animation-related museum in Mitaka is the Ghibli Museum, however, the Suginami Animation Museum is a small but wonderful Japanese anime museum with a much broader scope. Check out their website here.

Location:

Level of Japanese Required: Intermediate Japanese

Typical Day: Interns greet visitors at the front desk, and explain the museum's rules of no eating, drinking, or smoking. Interns also take care of many miscellaneous tasks such as keeping track of museum attendance and putting away strollers in the back room (many families with children visit the museum). At the end of the day, they'll help with various cleaning tasks such as wiping down displays.

Schedule: The 24 hours required for this internship can be completed over 3, 8-hour work days, working from 10 am to .6 pm.

What Former Interns Say: "I had the opportunity to talk to various native Japanese speakers that required different levels of formality (casual form with my coworkers to keigo with customers) and was able to practice and learn many new Japanese expressions that I wouldn't have necessarily learned in the classroom. The atmosphere of the museum itself was very lively and informal as many visitors were families with children, kids who had just gotten out of school, or adult anime fans. I also had more opportunities to speak English than I thought since there were many foreign tourists as well, and I helped the museum staff a bit by correcting some English translations of things and translating various spoken expressions, so it was a nice balance of working hard to keep up with a conversation in Japanese and taking a break by explaining in English how the audio guides worked to British couple.You should brush up on keigo and teneigo as you'll be using them a lot to talk to customers."

-Midori Yang, Fall 2017

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