Piano Lesson was Life Lesson

Playing the piano gave me a lot of things, such as good friends, good teachers, perfect pitch and it even taught me that practice really makes progress. I started taking piano lessons when I was three years old. I actually have been hated going to the lessons since learning how to play the piano was not my will. It was just one of something very boring which my super strict mother forced me to learn how to play the piano. I was always thinking how I can escape from the boring lessons every week. I once tried to say “I want to give up the piano lessons.” to my mother hoping she would understand my pain that I had to feel every time I go to the lessons, but she just gave me a cold glance at me and said “No”. She burst the bubble of my hope at once. Therefore, even though I made a nice brave try, I wasn't able to quit the piano lessons. However, now I actually appreciate my mom for not allowing me to quit it at that time and “let” me continue going to the lessons for more than 15 years in total, which is more than half of my life.

I had piano lessons twice a week. One was a group lesson and the other one was a private one. It made me feel worse because I had tons of homework from both of them. Sometimes I had to compose music by myself from nothing. What was worse, all the students in my piano school had to take a piano test which was called the “grading test” including improvisation, listen-and-copy, and arrangement. I especially didn't like the private lessons. That is because I had to show how bad I am at playing the piano to my teacher one on one. My teacher often said “Do practice more!!” Sometimes I had to cry and say “I am sorry, but I really don’t have talent to play it” in small voices. She said I shouldn’t give up without any trials. One day, one thing happened and it changed my mind and attitude toward practicing piano. Our teacher gave me and one of my group mates a music score which was made for four hands. It was for a big contest and it was very difficult. At first, we were almost giving up but that was the last contest for my partner because she was going to quit taking lessons after the contest.

It was really hard for me to push myself to sit down in front of my Piano at home at least for two hours. My partner and other group mates in my group lesson encouraged me all the time. Because my friends and my teacher believed me that I can do it even though I couldn't believe myself, I could hold on. We practiced a lot together, and we found that we improved a lot. Even though on the contest we couldn't get any prizes but we were satisfied with our performance because we did our best and of course we enjoyed playing a lot. After that I tried to practice the piano much more. Even though I was still a bad player, but I started to love to play it surprisingly. I learned that the more I do my best, the more I would be able to improve my piano playing skills. 

Now I’m in Taiwan and there are fewer opportunities to play the piano here but I still miss playing the piano. Through this experience, I learned that I should not give up things easily and shouldn't underestimate myself. Even though I had a hard time at first in Taiwan because I didn't understand Chinese at all, but I didn't give up. The perfect pitch which I got from the piano lessons actually helped a lot to learn Chinese. I really want to appreciate everyone who supported me at that time. That piano lesson was just like a life lesson for me.

 

Scientific Taiwan paper; Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing

Since we learned about solar power, bio-energy, and diesel energy in the class, I would like to talk about the Nuclear energy here. Nuclear power is a very controversial topic lately in Japan. It does not generate CO2 but once some accidents happened, it will kill a lot of people, and damage huge area.

Now, nuclear fuel reprocessing is under the research in Japan. They take out plutonium or uranium from the nuclear fuel which was already used in the Nuclear power generating station, and use it again as a fuel. There are two types of natural uranium, which does nuclear fission; Uranium 235 and which doesn’t fission; Uranium 238, and only 0.7% of them is the Uranium 235. However, Uranium 238 can be changed into plutonium 239 reacting neutron in the atomic pile. After that, they put it into fast breeder:FBR and burn it. At this point, if they put Uranium 238 around the Plutonium together, they would be able to change the Uranium 238 into new plutonium at the same time, and produce more plutonium.

Since this reprocessing would be able to reduce the radioactivity of the waste Japanese government is making efforts to promote the research. Furthermore, the political situation of the countries which have a lot of uranium are relatively stable, therefore the security risks are low. Yet, as I mentioned above, its advantage and risk are opposite side of the same coin. They have to consider about this plan very carefully.

Scientific Taiwan Paper; Research on Earthquake Engineering.

On May 4, we went to the NCREE, National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering. It was very interesting for me to know what kind of research they are doing, what kind of technology they use to reduce the damage by the earth quake. I think earth quake is one of the scariest natural disasters because we cannot predict exactly when it comes and also how big it will be.

When I saw the liquefaction phenomenon of the ground, I got goose bumps. It was obvious that if they didn’t use the special construction for buildings, or if they didn’t think about the shape or structure of buildings, it would be easier to be destroyed by the earth quake.

My country, Japan also has had a lot of earth quakes. Some of them were huge and killed many people in the past. Therefore, Japan also has invested a lot of time, energy and money for researching earth quakes. On June in 2008 which was right before I came to Taiwan, there was a big earth quake in Tohoku district which is my hometown. Actually the earth quake was almost same size as the one attacked Sichuan in main land China right before it happened in Japan. Even though the one in Japan was also huge, the damage was really small compare to Sichuan. The reason why there are such big differences is that Japan was well-prepared.

In Japan, “earthquake-proof construction” is regarded as a very important thing for all the buildings. Since earthquake shakes the ground not only horizontally, but also vertically too. Therefore those structures should be able to stand both shocks. There are even laws to punish if they didn’t follow the regulations.

According to the Earthquake Disaster Prevention Research Group, Earthquake Engineering Research Team in Japan, they are researching like estimation method for seismic damage using advanced sensor, Urgent repair methods for bridges that damaged during earthquake, High earthquake resistant structure system, Impact study and disaster mitigation on large-scale earthquake and so forth. Thus, Japan putting their effort not only for predicting earthquake, but also taking precautions and how to fix stuff damaged by earthquakes. There are more and more damages by terrible earthquakes in the world. Even though I cannot do anything directly, but I hope that those researches would be able to help the world.