Getting a BA

By May I will have a college diploma. While my transcript will say that I have a BA in Asian Studies with a concentration on Japan, I don't know the first thing about Japan. It's an island country, with cheap books and games, nice people, an excellent transportation system, and delicious ramen. That's about all I know about Japan. Oh, and I can speak like a ten year old child in the language.

Perhaps someone is wondering, "If you have a BA in Asian studies with a concentration in Japan, why the hell do you know nothing about Japan?!"

Good question.

To get my BA I needed a total of 124 credit hours. 34 of those credits are set aside as diversification. (Biology, Ethnic studies, Hawaiian)

Ok, that's 90 credits left. I have nine AS core requirements that serve as surveys for the entirety of Asia from the dawn of time to right now this very instant. You're supposed to take these your freshman year, but somehow I ended up taking 6 credits worth as a senior. Oops.

Now we're down to 81 credits. 24 of those went into foreign language study. This can sort of kind of be considered part of my major since I studied Japanese, so we'll set those credits aside for now.

57 now. Here things get a little complicated. I went to Japan for a year. While there I learned nothing in the academic sense. Got a lot of life experience, would have learned more outside of school. But I still was credited with most of my Japan Focus credits while over there. A total of 27 credits received. None of them were really worth anything, but that's where my "Japan Focus" comes from.

Ironically, the one thing that I did do that was worth while, translate a book cover to cover, was not credited to me because it was an independent project.

That leaves 30 credits. 9 are from Linguistic classes that I took for fun. Had I the time I'd double major in linguistics, but time is money, and I don't have money. 3 more are from an honors class I took my first semester. Another waste of time, but it was my first semester. I didn't know any better. One baby credit comes from a Tai Chi class I took. It was only four days, but it took five hours out of those days. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

And finally, I have 17 credits waiting for me in my last semester. None of them are 'free'. I either take particular classes or I don't graduate, and none of them have anything to do with Japan.

So out of the 124 credits I need to graduate a shaky 27 had anything to do with my major, and 21 were more directly related because I was studying a language (but I'm not majoring in the Japanese language, and in fact only needed 16 credits in Japanese to graduate). So far I've taken not a single class dealing with Japan while in Hawaii aside from a class on Japanese Linguistics (which was not good) and the occasional mention of Japan in survey class.

But I'm graduating with a BA in Asian Studies.

Sometimes I feel like I'm really getting a BA in subtraction.